TU-TESL

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Is 2019 the first year? This year, with the issuance of intelligent Internet connected road test licenses by local governments, a wave of trial operation of robotaxi (self driving taxi) has been set off in China. However, due to the technology is not yet mature, automatic driving car scale production still takes time, automatic driving distance L4, L5 level landing still has a long way to go. In December 2016, alphabet, the parent company, announced that waymo, an autonomous driving project, would be an independent subsidiary, raising the mystery of Google's autonomous driving project. Since then, waymo has made rapid progress. Last December, the company launched the world's first commercial unmanned taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona. In the DMV's 2018 autopilot takeover report, waymo has an average of 11000 miles off the road, a full two times more than cruise, who came second. The rise of waymo has stimulated the emergence of a number of automatic driving enterprises, especially after the entry of the main engine factory and travel company, the automatic driving industry has been favored by quite a lot of hot money. However, because the technology is not mature, the market expectation for the full implementation of automatic driving around 2020 has fallen, and the capital market has entered a "calm period". At the end of September, Morgan Stanley cut waymo's valuation from $175 billion to $105 billion, a 40% cut. Morgan Stanley analysts believe that the main reason for the lower value of waymo is that the development of the auto driving industry is slower than expected, and the continuous demand for safe drivers in its car sharing business, which is expected to continue to increase the loss of waymo. Zhang Bo, CEO of didi auto driving company, said in an interview that four "cards" are needed to succeed in the field of auto driving: shared travel network, first-class technology, first-class car building capacity and sufficient capital support. From this point of view, autonomous driving is an area with obvious head resource aggregation effect. "There is no gene for cars, but the autopilot is still a car." Zhang Bo believes that it is not realistic for every car company to invest billions of dollars in automatic driving technology, but it is feasible for the whole industry to gather resources and realize technology sharing. Compared with the United States, the domestic self driving enterprises started late, and the financing scale is small. For example, cruise, an auto driving company owned by general motors, has received a total of $7.25 billion in financing in the past year, with a post investment valuation of $19 billion. This year, the highest amount of financing obtained by domestic auto driving enterprises is only $200 million, and the rest of financing activities are generally within $100 million. In addition, due to the high cost of key components such as lidar, sensors and so on, the mass production of autopilot is still a difficult problem. Although some relatively automatic driving enterprises propose solutions to achieve automatic driving with cameras alone, most people in the self driving industry still believe that parts such as lidar are indispensable components. Li Deyi, director of the Chinese Academy of engineering and chairman of the China Society of artificial intelligence, said that from 1984 ~2018, the self driving vehicle has gone through the 0~1 stage, that is, the scientific research period. But until 2025, automatic driving will be in the product incubation period, completing the process from 1 to 10, when the scale of the car is expected to reach 10000. It is predicted that by 2028, 10% of China's commercial vehicle ownership will reach automatic driving, and the new cars produced annually will be L4 grade self driving cars in 2035. Although the investment and financing activities of the auto driving industry have decreased this year, they have blossomed on the product landing. According to incomplete statistics from Beijing News, at least seven domestic auto driving enterprises have planned to launch robotaxi service since this year, including Baidu, Xiaoma Zhixing, etc. which have carried out trial operation. This benefits from the strong support of domestic governments for the technology landing of automatic driving enterprises. According to the statistics of the reporter, since this year, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Changsha, Wuhan, Cangzhou, Hebei and other cities have successively issued more automatic driving licenses, and expanded the scope of automatic driving road test. Take Beijing as an example. As of October this year, Beijing has opened 255.62 km of automatic driving test roads, 64 of which have been opened for testing. The safe driving mileage of vehicle road testing has exceeded 730000 km, and 76 vehicles from 12 enterprises have been issued with temporary number plates for automatic driving road testing. The second tier cities have a higher enthusiasm for automatic driving enterprises. For example, the first batch production of L4 level robot Axi jointly built by Baidu and China red flag has begun trial operation in Changsha. In order to support the local operation of automatic driving enterprises, Changsha municipal government issued a document clearly stipulating that in addition to the regular automatic driving test, the test vehicle can also carry out "manned test" and "high-speed test". In addition, at the end of September this year, the national intelligent network automobile (Wuhan) Test Demonstration Zone issued the world's first commercial license for automatic driving to Baidu, Hailiang technology and Shenlan technology, which means that automatic driving enterprises can not only conduct road test, but also try commercial operation. From local government to national level, autonomous driving has been affirmed. In September this year, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council issued the outline of building a powerful transportation country, which specifically mentioned that we should strengthen the research and development of intelligent Internet connected vehicles (intelligent vehicles, automatic driving, vehicle road coordination), and form an independent, controllable and complete industrial chain. New equipment and facilities such as intelligent high-speed railway, intelligent road, intelligent shipping, automatic wharf, digital pipe network, intelligent storage and sorting system are widely used to develop a new generation of intelligent transportation management system. It is worth mentioning that this is the first year of 5g commercial use in China. With the large-scale deployment of 5g base stations by the three major operators, 5g signal coverage will be helpful for the landing of automatic driving technology when it is mature. Taking "5g + AI" as the company's auto driving strategy, CIIC believes that with the gradual popularization of 5g, the hardware such as sensors on the unmanned vehicle can be properly simplified, and the calculation can be carried out in the way of cloud + edge. The cost of unmanned driving can be greatly reduced, while the performance can be improved. Zhang Zhenlin, vice president of CIIC technology, said: "if we connect cars with everything through 5g, when we decide to change lanes, we can know whether there is a car in the other lane and how much acceleration is through 5g, so as to better plan the driving path and make decisions." "Everyone is very concerned about the automatic driving. Now the new technology direction should be the coordinated development of vehicles and roads. It is no longer simply to turn the vehicle into a person like intelligent perception of everything around, so there are some requirements of intelligent road or digital road. The unmanned terminal has been put into operation, and the driverless truck on the highway will be put into operation soon in the future. " Cai Yuhe, secretary and chairman of the Party committee of China Communications News Agency and former deputy director of the comprehensive planning department of the Ministry of transport, said. In September this year, Fosun Ruizheng capital, a venture capital platform of Fosun Group, led the investment of nearly $50 million pre-A round of financing by Yuanrong Qihang, an L4 level automatic driving enterprise. Liu Siqi, CO executive president of Fosun Ruizheng capital, told reporters that in the cold winter of capital, driverless enterprises should control the speed of capital use, grasp the pace of business development, and can not prove their value and burn money blindly, which is difficult to maintain business development. She believes that the market value of driverless future is very large, so it attracts a lot of capital, but the quality of entrepreneurial projects in this field is also uneven. "Now the whole capital environment is getting colder, which also affects the investment in the field of driverless driving, and naturally accelerates the reshuffle of the industry. From the long-term healthy development of the industry, short-term adjustment is a good thing. "