Since the invention of the automobile more than 100 years ago, the most important means of transportation in human history has been moving towards "automation".
From the earliest rocker start to the electric start, from the manual gear to the current automatic gear, from the manual control of the functions in the car to the current voice control, every technological innovation of the car is optimizing the difficulty of driving, and the emergence of automatic driving hopes to fundamentally remove the binding of the car that must be operated by people.
The concept of autonomous driving is generally believed to have emerged in 2013 and exploded in the following 10 years. At first, everyone was very optimistic about this new technology. A considerable number of car companies had announced that they would achieve L3 automatic driving by 2020, and even L4 automatic driving by 2025. For a while, everyone was looking forward to the large-scale landing application of automatic driving, and everything seemed to be developing in a better direction.
But in fact, until this year, The market has never seen the full automatic driving originally imagined 。 Not only that, in the past few years, a considerable number of technology companies and car companies have announced that they have abandoned or reduced their related businesses. This makes people wonder: where is the future of autonomous cars?
As early as In 2014, Apple launched a plan called Titan , invested a lot of resources and formed a team composed of top talents from Google, Mercedes Benz, Tesla, Ford and other companies. However, in February this year, Apple announced that it would stop the electric vehicle project, including the high-level automatic driving technology facing challenges.
Interestingly, the development cost of Apple's autonomous car project has not been clearly stated in the expenditure. However, when the project was closed, Apple's share price rose by 1% directly. Obviously, giving up a career that has lasted for ten years and has no hope of landing can help the stock market performance in an instant.
After all, according to your initial guess, the market of driverless private passenger cars may reach 400 billion dollars by 2035. But so far, according to McKinsey's forecast data, the collective efforts of this industry have already spent more than 160 billion dollars, but the income is insignificant. It is conceivable that Apple's shareholders have long lost patience with automated driving projects that cannot be commercialized.
Moreover, this is not only a problem facing Apple, Samsung, its old rival, recently announced that it would give up the research and development of automatic driving technology 。 It is reported that Samsung has suspended the research on automatic driving and turned its R&D personnel to AI robots. The reason is also that the commercialization is not as expected.
In addition to these technology giants, automobile manufacturers are also facing practical challenges. Cruise, GM's autonomous driving subsidiary, effectively stopped operations due to a series of accidents. GM also cut its investment in Cruise by $1 billion this year. Ford, another American car company, completely abandoned its pursuit of L4 automatic driving.
Even Tesla, whose core selling point is automatic driving, has been investigated by relevant American departments for many times in recent years. Federal prosecutors conduct investigations in the name of "telecommunications fraud" and "securities fraud". "telecommunications fraud" is applicable to misleading consumers, while "securities fraud" is applicable to cheating securities investors.
From technology giants to automobile giants, It seems that everyone is difficult to overcome the commercialization problem of automatic driving technology. Does this mean there is no future for automatic driving? It is not so absolute, but indicates that the development of automatic driving technology will enter a new stage.
For example, for technology companies such as Apple and Samsung, shifting the focus of capital investment and R&D personnel from automatic driving to the next popular AI field may be mainly a strategic adjustment, trying to find new growth points in other hot money and technology fields that are expected to disrupt the world again. After all, the development of science and technology is always full of uncertainty, but it is these challenges and adjustments that promote the continuous progress and innovation of technology.
For car companies and relevant policies, it may be necessary to re evaluate the R&D strategy and business model of automatic driving.
The current automobile market has formed a relatively mature and detailed L2 ADAS market environment. Under the superposition of "passenger cars" and "public road driving", the development trend of automatic driving has shifted from the early fantasy of comprehensive L4 and L5 to the transition from L2+to L3. Recently, many L3 test licenses have been issued in China, which is to promote various types of players to actively implement L3 automatic driving functions within the policy scope, including solution providers such as Huawei, as well as foreign enterprises such as Tesla to implement FSD.
As for why to give up the L4 and L5 automatic driving envisioned in the early PPT, The reason is simple - too difficult to achieve 。 At present, both in terms of cost and performance, the software and hardware of automatic driving are difficult to improve qualitatively in the short term. For the automatic driving function that is completely out of hand, the views of the legal and industrial circles are more opposed.
But this may not be a bad thing for enterprises. Although the performance and cost have not reached the level of market satisfaction, the commercialization time of fully autonomous vehicles is much longer than previously thought, and may never be realized.
However, when we recognize the reality, we have a clear application scenario of automatic driving, which can better guide the development of technology, and we don't need to continue to burn money to pursue some functions and scenarios that may never be realized. Clarify the national standard of L3. In the scope of visible functions and use scenarios, car enterprises are more likely to provide a floor based experience.
Do you expect the landing of domestic L3 automatic driving? Welcome to leave a message and discuss with us.
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