Author | Wei Qiyang
Source | Insights New Research Institute
"Tesla will be worthless if it can't achieve self-driving."
This is Musk’s public statement in an interview with the media. The context of this statement is that Tesla is a solid supporter of autonomous driving and has been putting it into action.
However, Tesla's progressive single-vehicle smart route has not been able to realize the promise of "full self-driving" that it made a few years ago.
The many challenges faced by the intelligent bicycle route have led to disagreements and flexibility within the automotive industry.
At this critical point in the choice of the route, the domestic policy side has given an attitude and direction. At the regular policy briefing of the State Council on June 21, Xin Guobin, deputy minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said: "Support conditional automatic driving, which is about the commercial application of L3 and higher-level automatic driving functions." At the same time, it was emphasized that in the future, pilot projects for the access and on-road traffic of intelligent networked vehicles will be launched, and the city-level "vehicle-road-cloud integration" demonstration application will be organized.
Different from completely relying on vehicles, "vehicle-road-cloud integration" is a solution to realize autonomous driving by integrating the perception, computing and decision-making capabilities of the three ends of the vehicle, road and cloud. In contrast, this route has significant advantages in terms of comprehensive perception, computing power, heat dissipation, and cost.
Due to the construction of digital transportation infrastructure, China is considered to be the country most likely to practice "vehicle-road-cloud integration". And it can be found according to public reports.
Mushroom Cars is the first autonomous driving company in China to propose and always adhere to the route of "integration of vehicles, roads and clouds".
Perhaps because of this, Mushroom Cars is driving automatically.
Against the background of the overall downturn, many projects worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars have been won. In May of this year, Mogu Auto Alliance completed the C2 round of financing of 580 million yuan against the market, becoming the focus of attention in the industry.
1. From outside the spotlight to city-level landing
Before the "explosion" in 2022, the integration of vehicles, roads and clouds was not a concept that received much attention. For a long time in the past, Mushroom Cars did not stand on the center stage of autonomous driving, and its voice and attention in the industry were far behind star companies such as Pony.ai and WeRide.
The turning point came from the Hengyang project won in 2021. At that time, it was "the world's largest investment in the commercialization of autonomous driving" project, with a total investment of nearly 500 million yuan.
Although Hengyang is only a third-tier city, its status as a transportation hub is particularly prominent. Many important highways and railway lines converge in the territory. Traffic management in the city center has always been a difficult point. Coupled with the population flow brought about by traffic circulation, this has caused Hengyang has great enthusiasm and demand in urban security and traffic management, especially in the construction and exploration of new digital traffic.
The total mileage designed by MCU for the Hengyang vehicle-road-cloud integration project exceeds 200 kilometers, covering the main roads of the city, passing through the city center, and involving actual complex road conditions such as tunnels, overpasses, and rural roads without markings.
According to media reports, the Hengyang project has completed the first phase of construction, mainly including the intelligent network upgrade of Cailun Avenue, Hengzhou Avenue and the surrounding areas of Science City in Hengyang City, a total of 38 kilometers of trunk roads, and the smart traffic cloud platform for the above-mentioned road sections With the accumulation of data, the platform has the ability to analyze the causes of traffic congestion and support the rapid handling of accidents.
In terms of cars, Robotaxi provides smart travel services in high-traffic sections such as airports/high-speed rail stations—city centers and city center ring lines;
Robobus provides fixed-site connections for office workers and college freshmen, and night-time connection services for citizens visiting the night market;
Self-driving sanitation vehicles carry out regular cleaning operations in parks such as Hengshan Science City;
Self-driving patrol cars regularly patrol public places such as urban commercial complexes, railway stations, and scenic parks.
2. From Hengyang to the whole country, the same path in different cities
Mushroom Vehicle Association displayed a three-dimensional traffic picture in the Hengyang project, summarizing a set of "Hengyang model" that can be replicated on a large scale - the construction of new transportation infrastructure + self-driving urban public service fleets, multi-scenario, large-scale commercial operations + urban The transportation digital base runs through a set of standardized product packages for autonomous driving, MOGO Package, covering the complete ecology of vehicles, roads and clouds.
Specifically, on the vehicle side, Mushroom Vehicles has created a multi-category, multi-model standardized self-driving vehicle (MOGO Vehicle), including a self-driving taxi (Robotaxi), a self-driving bus (Robobus), a large self-driving sweeper (Robosweeper) ) and small self-driving functional vehicles, covering public travel, shuttles, sightseeing, sanitation, security, retail and other scenarios.
At the same time, Mushroom Cars also independently developed the brain of L4 autonomous driving vehicles, which supports the intelligent upgrade of intelligent networked vehicles at all levels, and provides technical support for large-scale autonomous vehicle operation and maintenance centers, data centers and other businesses.
On the road side , MOGO AI Station has developed the world's first AI digital road base station (MOGO AI Station) that supports L4 autonomous driving. Scheduling and control of global traffic.
In the cloud, MOGO AI Cloud has launched a smart transportation AI cloud platform (MOGO AI Cloud), covering products such as digital docks, cloud control platforms, traffic brains, and vehicle-mounted intelligent software. Providers provide multiple types of intelligent network data operation services.
With this set of standardized products, according to the different needs of the project, Mushroom Vehicle Alliance can freely combine these products and quickly implement them.
Prior to this, the various products of vehicles, roads and clouds in the industry were not separated, but at least they all had clear boundaries. The intercommunication of vehicles, roads and clouds has always been one of the technical difficulties in the construction of digital transportation in various places. Through the Hengyang project, it not only demonstrated its full-stack self-developed software and hardware capabilities, but also verified the feasibility of the Cheluyun integration project.
Dismantling the "Hengyang Model", it can be found that this is a typical deep integration project of autonomous driving and digital transportation. In addition to technology giants such as Baidu and Huawei, it is not surprising that Mushroom Automobile can enter the industry's field of vision.
With the endorsement of benchmark cases, Mogu Auto Union soon entered the fast take-out mode, from Dali, Yunnan to Chengdu, Sichuan, from Tongzhou, Beijing to Ezhou, Hubei...
We can find that although the names of projects in various places are different, and the project requirements are also different, their technical cores are very consistent. They all follow the "Hengyang model", road construction-commissioning-cloud construction, and build projects through standardized products. The overall framework, and then reflect the project differences through specific applications.
3. Find the same landing logic from different business opportunities
The above analysis mainly focuses on the technical capabilities of the city-level "vehicle-road-cloud integration" project, which is reflected in the project, which is the ability to meet needs and solve practical problems. However, to win the project, these alone are not enough.
Many people in the industry are skeptical about similar projects. A large reason is that the project investment is huge, and the economic and social benefits generated by the project are difficult to quantify.
The reason why the Hengyang project is listed as a benchmark and has been repeatedly analyzed by the industry is not only that the project has effectively solved some practical problems in urban security and traffic management, but Hengyang has also promoted the development of the local digital industry through this project.
Through the launch of self-driving vehicles, industries such as tourism, transportation, sanitation and even police management have taken on a new look. Digital economy industry chain.
Exactly the same as the Hengyang project, in the Dali project, Mushroom Car Association has deeply integrated autonomous driving with local characteristic and advantageous industrial tourism, driving greater commercial value.
So is Wuxi. According to media reports, Mushroom Car Association and Liangxi District of Wuxi City will operate self-driving online car-hailing vehicles, patrol vehicles, sanitation vehicles, shuttle vehicles, delivery vehicles, etc. on a large scale. Build an autonomous driving operation center to drive the intelligent networked automobile industry chain and high-end talents to gather and develop in Liangxi.
As for the implementation logic of MCU, Guo Xingrong, CTO of Mushroom, has made a relatively complete summary, "Through infrastructure construction, from the perspective of top-level design, we can help a city or region realize its future-oriented smart transportation and digital transportation upgrade. And further drive the local new industry format.”
In this business model, the upgrading and transformation of roadside facilities, the launch and operation of autonomous vehicles, and the mining of the value of data assets during the operation process are all sources of revenue.
In this way, referring to the composition of the mobile communication industry chain, we can also outline a complete closed loop of the digital transportation industry chain.
There are three protagonists at the center of the mobile communication industry chain, which are infrastructure providers providing base station products. Huawei and Nokia are representatives of them, followed by communication operators represented by China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom. Finally, there are Smart terminals with mobile phones as typical products provided by various mobile phone manufacturers.
Substituting these three roles into the digital transportation industry chain, we can also find the corresponding positions, namely AI digital transportation infrastructure provider providing digital road base station products, intelligent network data operator providing data operation products and providing automatic An autonomous vehicle and operations provider of driving vehicles and services.
4. Conclusion
At the moment when the "integration of vehicles, roads and clouds" is supported by policies, Mushroom IoV is undoubtedly the one that benefits the most in the autonomous driving industry. It has verified its technical capabilities through a series of projects and proposed a self-consistent business model. model.
With the determination of the direction of "vehicle-road-cloud integration", this segment of the track will obviously become more lively.
Before that, be a friend of time, carefully settle, actively explore, and wait for the flowers to bloom.