Car stuff

Written by | Bear

2019 is the year of industry sinking, when the population dividend and land dividend of the first-tier cities are exploited, a lot of industries embarked on the road of sinking to the third and fourth-tier cities. The e-commerce industry is sinking, social media is sinking, and even the autopilot industry is on the path of sinking.

In fact, the trend of the automatic driving industry sinking has long been reflected, a domestic automatic driving startup moved its headquarters away from the first-tier cities had bluntly said: "Outside of the first-tier cities, the automatic driving industry has a wide range of development space, which includes more suitable road testing conditions, more favorable license policy... "

This statement exposes the excessive land price and harsh landing rules in first-tier cities, which are binding the vitality of the development of the autonomous driving industry.

To break this situation, in April 2018, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the Ministry of Transportation jointly issued the "Management Specification for Road Testing of Intelligent Networked Vehicles (for Trial Implementation)," which encourages provinces and cities across the country to build demonstration zones for intelligent networked/autonomous driving vehicles.

Two years later, nearly 30 demonstration zones for smart grid-connected vehicles have begun to land in cities across the country, excluding first-tier and new first-tier cities, and small cities such as Cangzhou, Baoding, Wuxi, Xiangyang and other cities (this article refers to cities outside the first-tier and quasi-first-tier cities) have begun to keep up with the trend of self-driving cars.

There are 13 small cities in China where autonomous driving has been laid out

According to the incomplete statistics of the automotive industry, there are 13 small cities where autonomous driving has been laid out like this. These cities offer more favorable policies, cheaper self-driving road test licenses and more efficient application processes, which have attracted many players in the self-driving industry.

So far, five types of players, including ICT companies, Internet companies, self-driving startups, OEMs and logistics companies, have flocked to the self-driving test zones in small cities.

Autonomous driving in small towns has already formed the momentum of a prairie fire, and the support of urban policies and the enthusiasm of enterprises will push the autonomous driving industry to spread from first-tier cities, where the industry's strengths are concentrated, to the fringe cities, and come out of the road of "surrounded by cities in the countryside".

One, the automatic driving industry sinking?13 small cities opened intelligent networked car demonstration area

April 2018, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Transportation jointly issued the "Intelligent networked automobile road test management specification (for trial use)" policy, the policy pointed out that the relevant authorities of each province and municipal government can be based on the actual situation in the local area, based on the specification of the rules, the specific organization of road test management. Specifically organize the launch of intelligent networked automobile road test work.

Prior to this, only a few first-tier (quasi first-tier) cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen had launched demonstration zones for intelligent connected/autonomous driving vehicles and conducted small-scale road tests in the demonstration zones.

And the introduction of the above documents provides guiding opinions for more cities to develop the autonomous driving industry, and also enables the autonomous driving industry to have the opportunity to migrate outward from the first-tier cities, and enjoy more favorable landing conditions in the second-tier cities, or even the third-tier cities.

Shortly after the document was issued, some cities took the lead in embracing this wave of autonomous driving because of their excellent industrial foundation.

The most typical of them are Baoding, Pingtan, Xiangyang, Cangzhou and other cities that have both a developed automobile manufacturing industry and a certain artificial intelligence industry foundation.

It is understood that Baoding is not only the headquarters of Great Wall Motor, but also an important wing of Xiong'an New Area, where hundreds of AI-related companies have landed.

▲Baoding and Baidu signed a contract

Meanwhile, in February 2019, Baoding also signed a contract with Baidu, in which the two sides plan to **** together to promote the construction of intelligent transportation in Baoding, and Baidu also landed an artificial intelligence cloud computing center in Baoding.

On one side is Great Wall Motor, which has an urgent need for self-driving tests, and on the other side is Baidu, which wants to land its own self-driving solutions in Baoding. The two sides hit it off, and at the end of November 2018, the Baoding Automatic Driving Road Test Service Center Mancheng Workstation was officially unveiled and established in the Hebei Mancheng Economic Development Zone.

The construction project of the test area was undertaken by Huaxia Zhixing Technology Service Company, and at the same time, the development zone management committee in Mancheng provided a service site and took charge of the construction of the communication base station.

And in Cangzhou, where the automotive industry bases of Beijing Hyundai and BAIC Group (North China) are located, Cangzhou Yuntu Technology is also an important partner of Baidu Apollo, which is enough to see that Cangzhou also owns the industrial foundation of the automotive manufacturing industry and artificial intelligence industry.

At the end of September 2019, the Cangzhou Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Transportation and the Ministry of Public Security jointly issued the "Cangzhou City Intelligent Networked Vehicle Road Test Management Measures (for Trial Implementation)", and Cangzhou City has officially become a city with an Intelligent Networked Vehicle Demonstration Zone.

It is reported that Cangzhou has opened a total of 114 kilometers of self-driving test road network in the Cangzhou Economic Development Zone, and at the same time issued the first batch of 30 self-driving test licenses to Baidu, and at the end of October 2019, released Baidu's self-driving test cars for testing.

▲Baidu's L4-class unmanned taxis

But not all cities building demonstration zones for smart internet-connected cars have a dual industrial base of automobile manufacturing and artificial intelligence industries. The Liuzhou Smart Internet Demonstration Zone, which is situated in China's southwestern region and is relatively well known, is being built by OEM SAIC-GM-Wuling in cooperation with the local government.

In July 2019, SAIC-GM-Wuling's application was officially passed by the Liuzhou government, and the Liuzhou City Intelligent Networked Vehicle Road Test Management Joint Working Group Office convened a meeting to set up a road test committee and adopted the document "Liuzhou City Intelligent Networked Vehicle Road Test Expert Committee Charter (Trial)".

So far, Liuzhou has built a demonstration zone for smart internet-connected vehicles integrating 5G communication technology, V2X, unmanned driving and remote driving technology, with SAIC-GM-Wuling taking the first test license for the demonstration zone.

▲Liuzhou intelligent networked car test road

It is worth mentioning that there are even cities that have laid out autonomous driving as an important urban planning, for example, Deqing opened up more than 900 kilometers of urban and rural roads throughout the county and issued autonomous driving road test licenses to a number of OEMs and autonomous driving start-ups, such as Geely, Azure, Zero Running, China Car Times, and Pony Smart.

Deqing County plans to use autonomous driving as the underlying capability of urban intelligent transportation, and build a city-level autonomous driving in intelligent travel demonstration area in 2020, which means self-driving cars will be able to take to the road in the entire area of Deqing County.

In addition to Baoding, Cangzhou, Liuzhou and Deqing, nine other cities, including Xiangyang, Zhaoqing, Changzhou and Wuxi, have also relied on their local industrial bases to build self-driving test zones, providing conditions for the self-driving industry to land in small towns.

From the point of view of the enthusiasm of each "small city" in building demonstration zones for intelligent networked vehicles, the fire of autonomous driving has finally started in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and is gradually spreading across the country. Widespread landing of the autonomous driving industry is not only conducive to the commercialization of the industry itself, but will also play a role in promoting the city's smart transportation and smart city strategies.

Two, the main automatic driving test area? The two advantages of small towns initially appeared

According to the car things on the current 13 small cities automatic driving layout observation, these cities due to the lack of automatic driving supporting industrial clusters, usually do not have a strong local automatic driving enterprises and academic teams specializing in automatic driving technology, the overall lack of research and development capabilities for automatic driving technology.

But these cities have accurately grasped the differences between themselves and the first-tier cities, and have maximized the advantages of road testing and technology integration by taking the lead in policy and quickly following up with test zones, focusing on self-driving test zones.

Taking Deqing, for example, where the automatic driving industry is quite hot, in June 2019, the county released a demonstration application implementation plan for "city-level automatic driving and intelligent travel throughout the entire region" and issued open road test licenses to cooperative companies such as Geely, Azure, Pony Intelligence, and Cool Wow Robotics.

In October 2019, the region's self-driving test area will be completed and officially opened for use, with 152 main urban roads, about 152.37 kilometers long; 77 other urban roads, 65.4 kilometers long; and 380 rural roads, totaling 731.51 kilometers long.

▲Electronic map of Deqing's self-driving open test roads

It's no exaggeration to say that Deqing County's self-driving public **** road test area is the largest in scope in China at present.

Even in Beijing, where the domestic automated driving industry is developing faster, the number of open automated driving test roads is 151, with a total mileage of 503.68 kilometers, which is not as high as Deqing's total mileage of test roads alone.

Of course, Deqing is only a special case, and most small cities have tens to hundreds of kilometers of self-driving test roads. But if the "Deqing model" is successful, there will be many more "Deqings" popping up around the country to follow suit. By then, the mileage of self-driving road tests in small cities is likely to exceed that of big cities.

And the longer total mileage of public **** test roads is a richer set of self-driving test scenarios and more diverse self-driving road test data for self-driving cars.

In such an environment, self-driving algorithms will be able to obtain richer data sets, discover and optimize "extreme environments" that don't normally occur, and thus become more mature.

Not only that, but in terms of the level of technological integration on self-driving test roads, there's also a clear difference between self-driving test areas in small towns and those in big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

Beijing and other big cities' self-driving test zones are built in batches, with different levels of technological maturity at different times, and there are obvious differences in what can be tested in each test zone.

For example, the Yizhuang and Haidian bases, which are part of the National Intelligent Vehicle and Intelligent Transportation (Beijing-Hebei) Demonstration Zone, focus on V2X and intelligent transportation on one side, while on the other side there is a closed test area for autonomous driving.

And the Fangshan 5G autonomous driving demonstration zone, which cooperates with communications companies, focuses more on the application of 5G communications technology to intelligent driving.

In this way, if a company wants to test the performance of self-driving cars in terms of V2X, 5G communications and self-driving algorithms, it will need to bounce between different test zones.

Smaller cities such as Changzhou, Xiangyang and Liuzhou are more inclined to integrate 5G communication, V2X technology and self-driving algorithm testing in the construction of self-driving test zones, so that a single self-driving test zone can meet the needs of a variety of smart car tests.

It is understood that Liuzhou has reached a cooperation with SAIC Group to complete the full coverage of 5G communication and vehicle-circuit coordination functions on the Liuzhou intelligent networked (driverless) vehicle test road, and will cover a larger area in 2020.

▲Liuzhou autonomous driving test road

In these road ranges, the 5G communication-enabled vehicle-circuit coordination can help vehicles realize unmanned pedestrian detection and obstacle avoidance, abnormal vehicle alerts, fast approaching rear vehicles, road event alerts, over-vision distance warnings, traffic light information push, intersection collision warnings, lane-change warnings, speed-limit signage, accident-prone road reminders, and emergency braking of vehicles in front of them. The company also provides a wide range of real-world scenarios such as road alerts, emergency braking for vehicles ahead, and motorcycle infestation, which help vehicles realize a variety of "extreme scenarios" for autonomous driving functions.

These "newcomers" obviously place more emphasis on the degree of technology integration in the test area, and such integration can provide great convenience for autonomous driving companies.

Imagine a first-tier city where it takes 2-3 hours to get to a test area and where you have to keep bouncing between test zones, and a small town where you can test "downstairs" and where infrastructure support is relatively complete. From the point of view of self-driving testing alone, the latter is indeed more attractive to self-driving companies.

This is a unique advantage for small towns to develop autonomous driving.

Three, five types of companies influx?20 companies rooted in small towns to engage in unmanned vehicles

Policy first, the test area is open, the automated driving industry chain of companies also fish in.

According to incomplete statistics, there are at least 20 autonomous driving industry chain companies in five categories, which have launched autonomous driving road tests in small cities outside the first-tier cities.

▲20 automatic driving industry chain companies landing in small towns

From the above table, these five categories of companies belong to ICT, Internet, automatic driving enterprises, vehicle manufacturers and logistics enterprises in five major fields, which correspond to different automatic driving layout playing method.

It is understood that Huawei is currently the only ICT company to sink to the small town layout of the automatic driving business, of course, according to Huawei's current progress in the automotive business, the deployment of the inevitable can not be self-driving test car.

Huawei is actually dabbling in the infrastructure construction of the self-driving test area, and has already entered into cooperation with Dongfeng Motor Company and Xiangyang Municipal Government to utilize its technological strengths in cloud computing, big data, Internet of Things, 5G, AI, and other aspects to empower the self-driving test section of the Xiangyang road.

▲Dongfeng Motor, Huawei and Xiangyang signed a contract

In another way of thinking, autonomous driving is just one part of its layout, and Huawei is aiming at smart city projects including autonomous driving.

Baidu, a giant from the Internet industry, has a different approach. Baidu, which owns the Apollo program, is focusing more on autonomous driving while laying out a smart city. It not only drove its own self-driving test car into the test area of the small city, but also provided technical solutions for other partners to enable them to test together on the ground.

It's not hard to understand why Baidu's self-driving cars are limited in number, so if it can have OEM vehicles to help it test its own solutions, it will be able to improve its self-driving solutions more quickly.

Plus Baidu is likely to supply its own self-driving solutions to the outside world in the form of cooperation or sale afterward, which will undoubtedly enable it to accumulate business experience in advance by supporting self-driving solutions for its current partners.

There are actually fewer self-driving startups that have really sunk into small towns, with only two, AutoX and WoDo Technology, at present.

The company is testing in a closed test area on the Wuxi Expressway

This phenomenon is quite understandable, as the self-driving companies are still in a state of lack of self-sufficiency, and they need a strong capital to continue to provide them with blood transfusions. These capitals are often investment banks, or local funds that attach great importance to the autonomous driving industry, and these capitals are concentrated in first- and second-tier cities, where the investment model determines that it is extremely difficult for these capitals to sink.

As a result, there are very few self-driving startups that have taken root in small towns, and even AutoX and Wodo, which are mentioned in the table, do not have their headquarters and business centers in Zhaoqing or Wuxi.

The same can't be said for OEMs, which, as mentioned in the first part of the article, have a base in automotive manufacturing in some of these small towns.

The need to develop autonomous driving in small towns is also largely spawned by local car companies, such as Baoding, where the need for an autonomous driving industry was spawned by the Great Wall, and Liuzhou, where it was due to the initiative of SAIC-GM-Wuling.

Car companies are choosing to embrace autonomous driving under the wave of automotive intelligence, but their traditional manufacturing model makes it difficult for their autonomous driving business to break away from OEMs and grow in first-tier cities.

Therefore, car companies developing autonomous driving have chosen to conduct road tests of self-driving cars locally or nearby, which not only saves costs, but also allows them to rely on their own experience in vehicle manufacturing and make timely adjustments to their vehicles.

Logistics companies Deppon Logistics and Zhongtong Express have both chosen to cooperate with self-driving creators, with Deppon Express entering into a partnership with Feibu Technology, and Zhongtong Express entering into a partnership with AutoX, to push forward with trunk-line logistics and unmanned delivery services in the most adequate kilometers.

The complex road conditions in small towns will help logistics companies to conduct the closest to the actual situation of the city's trunk line, feeder logistics and the "last kilometer" of unmanned delivery scenarios, laying a solid foundation for the provision of unmanned delivery services later.

The five companies in the category have different approaches, but ultimately, they all have a need for self-driving tests in small cities.

ICT company Huawei is looking to validate the viability of its ICT solutions in the transportation sector through small-city pilots that it can later roll out.

Internet company Baidu is looking to further expand the scale of its self-driving business and work more closely with partners outside of first-tier cities.

OEMs, on the other hand, are adopting the principle of proximity to save costs and improve efficiency.

Autonomous driving creators and logistics companies are looking to test in small towns to get more and different road test data and improve the ability of autonomous driving solutions to operate in extreme environments.

Four, nearly 300 domestic self-driving test licenses? Small towns are in the starting stage

The first and second-tier cities are leading the way, driving the development of the automated driving industry, and the "small towns" are keeping up with the trend, so that automated driving is gradually becoming more popular in China.

At this stage, the domestic automated driving industry is in full bloom, and nearly 30 cities up and down the country have issued about 300 automated driving road test licenses.

However, most of these 300 or so self-driving road test licenses still belong to developed first-tier cities. According to data from the Beijing Municipal Transportation Commission, 77 self-driving road test licenses have been issued in the city of Beijing alone, accounting for about 1/4 of the nation's self-driving road test licenses.

▲Beijing Municipal Commission of Transportation information

And Shanghai and Guangzhou also divided about 30 or so automatic driving road test licenses, quasi first-tier cities in the automated driving industry in the rising star, Chongqing, Wuhan, Hangzhou, Suzhou also released more than a dozen automatic driving road test licenses each ......

In this way it can be seen, more than 300 licenses, really issued by the small city of automatic driving license only a few dozen.

Among them, the Cangzhou Autonomous Driving Test Area, a flank of Xiongan New Area, took the lead in issuing 30 autopilot test licenses to Baidu, and the models involved in the road test were mainly the L4-class unmanned cabs that Baidu has partnered with Red Flag.

Moving quite a lot of Deqing currently issued seven self-driving road test license and two intelligent networked car test license, seven licenses were issued to Geely, Azure, Zero Run, China Car Times, Pony Intelligence, WoKun Intelligence and Cool Wow Robotics, mainly L4 level self-driving passenger car road test.

Two smart online vehicle test licenses were awarded to Deppon Logistics and China Express, which have partnered with Feibu Technology and AutoX, respectively, to develop L3/L4-level self-driving logistics vehicles.

Pingtan test area was issued to Baidu and Jinlong Bus *** total of six self-driving road test license, Baidu involved in the test of three vehicles for self-driving passenger cars, Jinlong Bus is a driverless bus. It is worth mentioning that Golden Dragon Bus uses Baidu's self-driving solution as well.

The self-driving tests in Changzhou and Xiangyang focused on commercial vehicle self-driving programs, with Dongfeng Commercial Vehicle and Yutong Bus landing in Xiangyang's self-driving test area, while Golden Dragon Wagon and Zhiga Technology's driverless trucks landed in Changzhou's self-driving test area.

The autonomous driving test zones in the cities of Wuxi and Liuzhou, on the other hand, mainly serve OEMs, with Wuxi awarding autonomous driving road test licenses to SAIC and Audi, and Liuzhou awarding an undisclosed number of autonomous driving road test licenses to SAIC-GM-Wuling.

In detail, the 13 small towns that have laid out their self-driving industry have issued less than 100 self-driving road test licenses, and have yet to form a large-scale landing situation, the self-driving industry in small towns is still in the starting stage.

Fifth, automatic driving "rural surrounded by cities"?

The four layers of meaning behind the layout of small towns

When the wind of automatic driving was just blowing from the first-tier cities to the small towns, some people questioned whether the cities that lacked relevant talents and capital were suitable for the development of automatic driving.

The current situation has clearly answered that question, with a number of small cities starting to participate in the autonomous driving industry in their own ways.

Since there is a lack of talent and capital, we should start from the lowest level of self-driving test area, supplemented by policies that provide the most suitable landing conditions for self-driving companies to attract talent and capital to land.

And this way of playing, the effect is remarkable, 13 small towns have built automatic driving test area, Baidu, Huawei and other big players in the automatic driving industry and AutoX, WoDo technology, such as the field of automated driving innovation power began to small towns landing.

While the automated driving industry in small towns is still in the starting stage at the moment, there are already a thousand boats racing in the starting stage. Therefore, there is reason to believe that the small town automatic driving industry will usher in a bright future.

Lengthening the timeline, the autonomous driving industry emerging from small towns will play an important role in the four levels of enterprises, industries, cities and countries.

From the enterprise level, the more complex and diverse road conditions and road information in small cities will enable enterprises to continually adapt their autonomous driving solutions to extreme conditions during testing.

From an industry perspective, it's better to have a multi-dimensional approach than to slowly grow outward from the first-tier cities. If the automated driving industry in smaller cities can also make good progress, then smaller cities can form a cascade effect with first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, helping to popularize automated driving more quickly.

From the city level, automatic driving is undoubtedly a key part of the future of the smart city, giving priority to the opening of the public **** road test, is conducive to the subsequent landing of automatic driving in the city roads, is also conducive to the intelligent transformation of city streets, these are to accelerate the transformation of the smart city process.

From the national level, the development of automatic driving in small cities is conducive to pulling talent and capital flow, and reducing the gap between small cities and first-tier cities. At the same time, the transformation of the road network applicable to automatic driving is also a strategic direction for national development.

Conclusion: the layout of automatic driving in small cities has ignited a "spark"

Thirteen small cities have built intelligent networked automobile test zones, and Baidu, Huawei, AutoX and other companies have been introduced to carry out automated driving road tests, and this series of actions behind the layout of automated driving in small cities has ignited a "spark"

The layout of automated driving in small cities has ignited a "spark". "Star fire", and gradually toward the "prairie fire" trend of evolution.

This phenomenon shows that this round of technological dividends brought by automatic driving, first-tier cities will no longer be able to enjoy exclusively, and small cities also have the ability to get a piece of the pie. Although there are differences in the trends of their respective layouts, it can be said that they are all involved in the changes brought by autonomous driving.

The development of automated driving in small cities brings new opportunities for the industry, not only in terms of more favorable policies and easier testing, but also in terms of the new industrial clusters that will soon be established around automated driving in small cities. The New Era Securities Research Institute predicts that the size of the automatic driving market will reach 20 billion yuan between 2020 and 2021, and will climb to 100 billion yuan in 2025. Such a 100-billion-dollar market will give birth to new industrial giants.

But behind the dividend, the industry needs to remain calm, the current domestic development of automatic driving in the city, the policy and infrastructure to promote the deployment of the industry still can not catch up with the expectations of the industry. Government departments in the specific management, the division of powers and responsibilities is not clear enough, the road infrastructure maturity also needs to be verified, only when these conditions are ripe, self-driving cars have the conditions of large-scale road, a city of self-driving industry can really go to maturity.

This article was written by the author of AutoZone, and does not represent the viewpoint of AutoZone.