Why sharing cars is the best business scenario for autonomous driving

Posted 2020-08-28 00:26:32 +0000 UTC

In human history, the rise of any industry has gone through three processes: technology leading, product keeping up, business closed-loop, and finally forming a force to promote social progress. Today, no one doubts the subversion of technology to society. However, when the "technology pilot" link of automatic driving is completed, the business path of this technology is also split, and its landing scene is at least classified into three types: private car, commercial car and shared car. At this stage, "sharing" is the best application scenario of automatic driving, which seems to be the industry consensus (the reasons will be explained later). When booking on app, a car will come automatically, take you to a designated place, you get off the car, and it will automatically pick up the next order - this kind of imaginary scene, it's estimated that you have been told the same thing. And the improvement of social efficiency by "self driving + shared car" has become a common sense: at this moment, most of the cars in the world are idle (95% of the time of private cars are parked), the rise of Uber and didi has made the public see the huge potential of shared cars in alleviating traffic congestion and environmental pollution, while the 24-hour non-stop new energy self driving In addition, this potential will undoubtedly double. Further expand the thinking, the single point innovation of "automatic driving + shared car" can make people rethink urban space. Liu Qing, President of didi travel, once imagined: "cars that don't run at night can be parked in the suburbs, and the parking lot in the city center will be replaced by green space, schools and hospitals." Ancient Chinese literature search also shows that American scholars believe that the sharing of self driving cars will accelerate urbanization as the highways built after World War II. "Before the intercity highway was generated, people would travel at 30mph speed, and the city expansion rate at that time was completely below that of today." Taking into account that the global city population may reach 4 billion 600 million in 2025, this will lead to the emergence of mega cities, and the popularity of sharing the automatic driving vehicle may obscure the boundaries between "suburbs" and "city centers". This vision seems remote, but in fact, its landing speed is far more than you think: in foreign countries, Uber has been allowed to carry out driverless road tests in Pittsburgh and California, and Waymo, an autopilot car company, also plans to launch an automatic driving car service. In the future, it can call an autopilot through Lyft. In China, baidu Apollo platform has also cooperated with Shouqi car Hailing. In 2018, it will carry out auto driving network car Hailing experience in some urban areas. Of course, the industrial logic of sharing cars is not only about online car Hailing. For example, many insiders predict that the low-key market of time-sharing leasing will also usher in an explosion under the background of the continuous influx of new energy vehicles into the market. PricewaterhouseCoopers expects that the car rental market will grow by more than 50% in the next five years; Roland Berger has calculated a sum of money: in 2025, there will be about 6 million rental cars, 3-4 per car per day, about 20 million orders per day, and the customer unit price is 40 yuan, which is already a hundred billion dollar market. This also means that in the wave of sharing economy, time sharing lease is also one of the most important grafting scenarios of automatic driving technology. Recently, Baidu, automobile and new energy sharing vehicle platform announced that it would jointly develop the time sharing rental service for self driving cars and explore the commercial landing space of automatic driving sharing. The combination of autonomous driving and time sharing is not surprising. In the past and now, time-sharing rental is a car to person service, and online car Hailing is a person to person service. However, if you admit that "sharing cars + autonomous driving" is the general trend of human travel in the future, then online car hailing and time-sharing leasing will surely come to the same end. Industry insiders have long predicted that around 2025, services such as special cars, taxis, car rental and time-sharing rental will be fully integrated with automatic driving technology to provide a unified travel service mode and realize real car sharing. 1、 The general trend of "auto driving + sharing car" before this scenario comes, it is necessary to answer a question: at this stage, why is sharing the best landing scenario of auto driving technology compared with other business models? One reason may be the "education market". At the beginning of this disruptive technology, cooperation with the mature shared car market is the best choice to popularize and expand automatic driving. You know, apart from the "early tasters", it is the habit of more users to fear the unknown, and then instinctively reject it. Especially for the revolutionary technology of automatic driving, which is related to safety, how fast they accept it Fast, depends on how familiar the application scenario is. Google waymo, for example, has chosen a taxi service as the initial path for the commercialization of autonomous driving. Over the past few years, they have partnered with mobile travel providers such as LYFT, Avis and AutoNation to build a large, unmanned fleet. Waymo CEO Krafcik explains: "sharing travel service has great potential. People will take the lead in experiencing Waymo fully automatic driving technology in this way, and it will be of great value for more people to experience the fully automatic driving vehicle earlier." In China, Didi has also set up an artificial intelligence laboratory in Silicon Valley, which regards autonomous driving as the company's most important vision strategy. Indeed, when more people can experience an automatic driving more easily, it is bound to greatly reduce the acceptance of new technology, which is also the basic element of making the whole automatic driving market a "pie". Sharing is the best landing scene of automatic driving, the second reason is data. As you know, autopilot technology needs to be improved all the time. At present, the only way to collect data is to run one kilometer per kilometer. With the help of the sharing platform, more vehicles can run and collect data, which can provide a perfect road test platform for automatic driving. In fact, an important reason for waymo to work with LYFT is data support. An important content of cooperation between Shouqi car hailing and Baidu is data cooperation: Shouqi's data support enables Baidu to further improve the map accuracy and upgrade the automatic driving technology system iteratively; Shouqi TAD intelligent operation system can also analyze the urban traffic hot spots through big data, and when it is integrated with automatic driving, it can also better solve the travel problems in the passenger concentration period and region. What is easy to be ignored is that the first part of the time rental platform, such as Wanda, also has a variety of massive data, including the user's driving behavior, the vehicle's running track, and the equipment status, which can also help the automatic driving technology to improve. What's worth mentioning is that whether Shouqi contract car owns the exclusive license plate number of Beijing B or the time-sharing leasing company like Wanda, their common point is that they have the ownership of their own cars and have better control over the vehicles, which means that compared with didi and Uber, they are the most perfect test field for the iteration of automatic driving technology. Of course, the third reason why the industry takes a fancy to "sharing cars + automatic driving" is actually some platitude: even car manufacturers cannot deny that the so-called "driving pleasure" is declining among young people. PricewaterhouseCoopers even predicted that the use of self driving will reduce the number of cars in the United States from 245 million now to 2.4 million. Well, the paradox of the industrial age is that people need a hole, but they can only buy one. The same is true for cars. Most of the time, what people want is not cars, but convenient and fast travel. Especially in China, we have said goodbye to our fathers' pride in owning a car. When sharing the platform is so developed, the young people's travel concept is more inclined to use than to own a car, even if it is a cool self driving car, when it only uses one or two hours a day, it is also a burden to many people. So to sum up, five years later, "automatic driving + sharing car" will usher in blowout. 2、 Looking at the power of value network from the perspective of time-sharing lease, the most underestimated link in the whole shared car market is the time-sharing lease, especially in China, whose market potential is far from being released - for the simple reason that China's car travel demand is far from being met. Although it is a big auto country, China's auto supply is seriously insufficient. According to the analysis of Yang Runxin, an investor of Xianfeng Changqing, "the number of daily motor vehicle trips of Chinese residents is far less than that of developed countries Taking Beijing as an example, excluding walking, cycling, public transportation, subway and other modes of travel, the daily travel demand of small buses in Beijing is 24.2 million person times, of which 15 million person times are private cars, 4 million times are taxi + black cars, and the remaining 5 million times are forced to take subway and public transportation because there is no private car or no car to reach. " In addition, the severe phenomenon of urban congestion and tail gas pollution makes Beijing and other cities adopt non market economic behaviors such as lottery and number restriction, which also makes the supply of private cars unable to achieve extensive growth - but as an alternative, due to various reasons, the number of taxis and online cars is also close to the upper limit. In addition, more importantly, as Yang Runxin said, "didi only solves 0-10km travel, while the travel demand of 10-100km, which accounts for 45%, does not have a corresponding supply at all. It is a travel service vacuum market With the active promotion of policies, the decrease of vehicle cost, the increase of driving mileage and the gradual coverage of charging piles, time-sharing car rental enterprises have achieved the break even of single vehicle in the regional market, and the market is close to the singularity. " However, before the "singularity", the "pain point" of timeshare leasing is also obvious. Compared with Didi's and Uber's light assets, time-sharing leasing has some problems, such as scheduling difficulties, high operating costs (parking spaces, charging piles, maintenance, etc.). It's not hard to understand why the time-sharing rental platform is open to automatic driving technology. The strong intervention of automatic driving technology can solve all the above problems and greatly reduce the difficulty of vehicle scheduling and operating costs. Take the cooperation of Baidu, Lifan and panda as an example: Apollo open platform will fully empower sail vehicles in the fields of high-precision map and automatic driving; Lifan is responsible for vehicle manufacturing, coordinating the test vehicles and market operation vehicles of panda vehicles; panda provides landing application scenarios. The three parties will also achieve complementary advantages of technology and scenario. Especially for Baidu, which is ambitious in automatic driving, this cooperation marks another new landing scene for Apollo's open platform. As you know, Apollo has gathered more than 70 players in the whole industry chain of automatic driving. When they are integrated, various cooperation possibilities will emerge through resource reorganization. This alliance advantage will fully release the strongest items of each partner, and Apollo can also arrange and combine various solutions according to the needs of different partners to establish a complete and orderly cooperation chain of autonomous driving. It is the construction of this value network that makes Baidu unique in the market competition of automatic driving. As mentioned at the beginning, the rise of any industry in human history has gone through three processes: technology leading, product catching up, and business closed-loop. At present, baidu Apollo is ready to develop in these three processes. It has developed in technology, mass production products, landing cities and operation scenarios, which may be the essential reason why this plan is worth expecting. From the perspective of an ordinary passenger, this may mean that when booking on the app, a car will automatically drive in, take you to a designated place, and you get off, it will automatically pick up the next order -

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