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By Wang Pan Leng Zelin
Source: Photon Planet (ID: TMTweb)
This year, the global automatic driving industry accelerated to land, and foreign laws and regulations were largely liberalized.
On April 28, the Beijing ICV Policy Pioneering Area officially released the "Unmanned Manned Test License", and Baidu became the first approved enterprise in China.
It is reported that Baidu's automatic driving travel service platform "Radish Run" will carry out unmanned automatic driving manned demonstration applications on open roads within 60 square kilometers of Beijing Economic Development Zone. Photon Planet has learned that the operation time of the unmanned automatic driving travel service is 10:00-16:00. Baidu will invest 10 vehicles in the first batch, and plans to add 30 more unmanned vehicles in the future.
Beijing took the lead in loosening the policy on driverless driving, which is of great significance to the industry. The Robotaxi platform, represented by Rape Turnip, has been operating regularly all over the country for a long time, and relevant enterprises have already accumulated mature technology and operation experience.
At present, the accumulation of technology and operation experience has been quite sufficient, and everything is ready, but it is not good enough. This opening may mean that relevant policies and supporting regulations will be introduced more quickly.
People are the biggest potential safety hazard
The "Unmanned Manned Test Permit" did not completely invite the safety officer out of the car, but only "no one behind the steering wheel". The safety officer will still sit in the co driver.
As we all know, every iteration in the automotive industry must conform to safety. Based on this, we can understand why Robin Li mentioned safety issues in his circle of friends after Baidu got the test license on April 28. As can be seen from the screenshot of the circle of friends, when he reprinted a report on the open permit, he wrote: "Unmanned driving will definitely cause accidents, even fatal accidents, but this probability is much lower than that of manned driving.".
Self driving is certainly not 100% safe, but it may not be as dangerous as people think. The White Paper on Traffic Safety of Autonomous Vehicles released by China Automotive Technology Research Center Co., Ltd. in conjunction with the industry on December 16 last year pointed out that talent is the most uncertain factor in traffic safety.
More detailed data is from CIDAS (China Traffic Accident Investigation) database.
According to the data, among 5664 accidents involving passenger vehicles in the past 10 years, the driver's human factors accounted for 81.5%. Among them, 79.9% of accidents were caused by drivers' subjective errors because drivers could not identify and perceive the danger in advance. Accidents caused by failing to give way as required accounted for 43.4%, followed by too fast speed, illegal use of lanes, drunk driving, violation of traffic lights and fatigue driving.
People can only rely on their own experience to judge, but each person's driving hours, scenes and driving skills are different, which makes people the biggest variable in traffic safety.
Zhang Yaqin, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, chair professor of intelligent science at Tsinghua University, and president of the Institute of Intelligent Industry, said in an interview: "Based on the general consensus of the industry, the safety requirements for automatic driving should be at least one order of magnitude higher than human driving, reaching the level of 99.9999%. In order to achieve such safety goals, we need in-depth learning and vehicle road coordination, supported by these two major directional technologies. "
Through the continuous "feeding" of the database and the evolution of AI itself, as well as the continuous iteration of hardware such as vehicle road collaboration, automatic driving will be a powerful tool to solve the uncertainty of "people". Under Li Yanhong's circle of friends, Zhang Yaqin also reiterated that the accident probability of driverless driving is "at least an order of magnitude lower".
Technology ahead, policy behind
Automatic driving started late in China. Even Baidu, the oldest, has been driving for only 9 years.
In 2015, Baidu set up its driverless business department. At that time, a blind man was sitting in a car without human intervention control and safety officers in the United States, and passed through downtown Austin with dignity. This is a new "three nots" (no steering wheel, no brake, no accelerator) pure electric fully automatic driving car launched by Google.
Two years later, Waymo's test mileage on the actual road has reached 1368 km. What's more, the team introduced the actual road test results into the simulation environment, so that the unmanned driving system can continue to practice in the software. On the other side of the ocean, Li Yanhong got the first ticket in the industry by sitting on the Wuhuan Road in an unmanned vehicle. Beijing will open the manned and cargo test until the end of 2019.
Now, as Baidu, Didi, Xiaoma Zhixing, Wenyuan Zhixing and other enterprises have continued to invest heavily in this field in the past few years, one after another companies have moved from start-up to maturity, and China has even overtaken the United States in many aspects, one of the characteristics of which is "no price increase for more".
Taking the fifth generation Robotaxi as an example, Baidu has reduced the cost to 480000 yuan, about 1/3 of Waymo's, under the condition of further integrated design and substantial improvement of operational stability. Photon Planet has learned that the next generation Robotaxiwill also be released this year.
Moreover, as we all know, due to the difference in population density and urban planning and construction, the challenges faced by domestic driverless enterprises are much more severe than those faced by foreign counterparts. If Waymo's test environment is ordinary, Apollo has not only been tested in the hell difficulty for a long time, but also has maintained a zero accident rate so far. Under the tempering of complex environment, domestic enterprises have more solid technology accumulation.
The Chinese and American enterprises are the poles of driverless technology. The competition between domestic enterprises and foreign enterprises is not only a purely technical competition, but also a multi-dimensional competition covering capital investment, fleet operation scale, and even macro level laws and regulations.
At present, the United States has not yet allowed Waymo, Cruise and other enterprises to charge for driverless orders, while commercial operation has been started in China. From the perspective of commercialization alone, China has also completed overtaking at curves.
Some giants have taken the lead in launching driverless travel services in Beijing, such as Radish Express in nine cities including Beijing, Changsha, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Yangquan and Wuzhen. Among them, Beijing, Chongqing and Yangquan have operated the commercial charging operation service for a long time. According to Baidu's 2021 annual report, as of December 31 last year, the number of manned orders had reached 213000.
In fact, Waymo has been allowed to test self driving cars on public roads since 2012. Today, its manned operation area is only California and Arizona. The peak number of orders in a single quarter is 52000, only a quarter of that of Baidu.
If technology is the first half of automatic driving, then commercialization and scale operation are the second half of the industry, and the prerequisite for entering the second half is to give a "green light" on policy and law formulation.
Although many American enterprises temporarily lag behind domestic enterprises in terms of cost control, commercial order receiving, technology input, etc., they have always been ahead of technology in terms of laws and regulations.
On March 10, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a 155 page "final rule", canceling many conventional control requirements for vehicles equipped with automatic driving systems and driverless vehicles.
Forty eight days later, 12 US lawmakers sent a letter to Pete Buttigeg, the US Secretary of Transportation, urging him to develop a comprehensive federal framework for autonomous vehicles. It is worth mentioning that the letter specifically mentioned China's significant technological development, which is a great benchmark.
In addition to the United States, Germany became the first country in the world this year to allow driverless vehicles to participate in daily traffic and apply them nationwide; The UK amended the Road Law to allow car owners to watch movies in the car under automatic driving mode.
Although domestic driverless technology is running at a fast pace, the policy is not relaxed obviously and is extremely cautious. Zhu Xichan, a professor of the Automobile School of Tongji University, said that the laws, regulations and standards could not keep up with the development of technology.
Deng Zhidong, a professor and doctoral supervisor in the computer department of Tsinghua University, and an expert in artificial intelligence, recently called for: "We look forward to our policy planning and deployment, not only to keep up with the rapid development of automatic driving in the United States and Europe, but also to be more conducive to the early realization of all unmanned vehicles on the road and the commercialization of automatic driving industry."
Unmanned driving will drive industry and consumption
Industrial development depends on technology, but development progress is closely related to scale and policy.
In fact, cooperation and integration have long been the norm in the new energy industry. The rapid development of domestic new energy vehicles is largely due to policy support. Therefore, we have reason to believe that intelligence can replicate the path of electrification and bring new momentum to the automobile and other industrial chains.
From the above figure, we can see that the complete industrial chain of Robotaxi industry, involving IT services, cloud computing capabilities, road infrastructure companies, vehicle manufacturers, perception devices, chips, network suppliers, and technology companies providing algorithms, has initially formed a long, sophisticated industrial chain of autonomous driving capabilities.
The liberalization of automatic driving policy may produce "butterfly effect". Under the wave of new infrastructure construction, smart transportation can not only play a role in stimulating domestic demand, but also help to improve the traffic problems in big cities and reduce the traffic accident rate.
Li Yanhong has previously said that if intelligent transportation is realized, the congestion problem will be basically solved within 10 years by improving the traffic efficiency; The intelligent transportation system constructed by new technology, new concept and new mode will probably reduce traffic safety accidents by 90%.
Every new technology birth will create new business models and new jobs, and automatic driving is no exception. New forms such as Robotaxiwill create new types of work such as safety officer, cloud driver, technician and tester, which will contribute to the transformation of labor structure.
If we use our imagination to continue to expand, the complete display of automatic driving ability will not only liberate the driver, but also release the vitality of the entire vehicle and machine ecology, especially the pull of social consumption.
According to the data released by the Development Research Center of the State Council, the effective expansion of automobile consumption needs to focus on three growth points, the size of the automobile commodity market exceeds 4 trillion yuan, accounting for 10% of the total retail sales of consumer goods. The intellectualization represented by driverless driving not only stimulates the new demand for car replacement, but also may give birth to a scene that neither PC nor mobile terminals have ever seen before in the limited space of cars.
The latest delivery model ET7 of Weilai Auto will support passengers to wear AR/VR glasses in the car to enjoy the video and audio entertainment function. The entertainment system of the next model L9 of the ideal car will support the connection and projection of game consoles such as Switch. At the press conference of Model S Play, Musk also showed a Cyberpunk 2077 on the car. In addition, Musk also disclosed on social media that Tesla hopes to move the entire Steam library to Tesla instead of transplanting games one by one.
Obviously, when the driver is "killed", there will not only be a Focus Media in the interior space of the car, but also the best connection and extension between mobile and PC terminals.
Unmanned driving not only frees the driver's hands, but also brings about the iteration of consumption scenarios - such as delivery to the car, cockpit entertainment, etc. There is no doubt that in the AI era, cars will still be an important engine to drive consumption.
Now, everything is ready, and only the policy is needed.
(Statement: This article only represents the author's view, not Sina.com's position.)
