As the global automotive industry accelerates its transformation towards intelligence, autonomous driving technology has become the core driving force of this change. China and the United States, the two leading countries in the field of autonomous driving, have spawned three representative companies - Waymo, Tesla, and China's Carousel. Entering October, the three companies have made heavy moves, seemingly warming up for the new round of industry competition that is about to start.
On October 10, Tesla will hold the long-delayed Robotaxi launch conference at Warner Bros. Studios in Los Angeles, USA, with the theme of "We, Robots". The theme is obviously a tribute to the classic work "I, Robot" by American science fiction writer Asimov. CEO Elon Musk hinted on social media that this conference will "go down in history". The promise of autonomous driving he made ten years ago may finally be fulfilled this week.
At the same time, Waymo is also "making friends" around the world. After announcing in August this year that it would cooperate with the Chinese brand Zeekr to develop the sixth generation of driverless taxis, Waymo announced during the "National Day" period that it had reached a cooperation with the Korean auto giant Hyundai to equip Hyundai's electric vehicle fleet with its autonomous driving technology. By the end of 2025, Waymo's driverless taxi fleet will also join Hyundai's electric models.
Carrot Run is also accelerating its internationalization. According to market news on October 9, Carrot Run is actively making global layouts recently, has had in-depth communication with many international companies, and plans to enter overseas markets. At the same time, Apollo's autonomous driving open platform 10.0 is about to be released, which will be equipped with Baidu's latest autonomous driving large model ADFM (Autonomous Driving Foundation Model). This upgrade will greatly improve the safety, intelligence and ease of use of the autonomous driving open platform.
"Jia Zi Guang Nian" observed that as autonomous driving technology continues to usher in breakthroughs, the safety advantages of driverless taxi business are highlighted, and the cost reduction path is clear. This global competition is accelerating into a white-hot stage. In the pattern of the three major driverless driving companies, China and the United States, as leaders, have developed different technical routes and policy environments. Although the United States has taken the lead thanks to its accumulation in semiconductors and artificial intelligence, China may also be able to quickly overtake in this competition for the future by relying on its unique advantages.
1. Pathfinders and Disruptors: Two American Heroes Competing for Hegemony
As the cradle of technological innovation, the United States has naturally become the forefront of autonomous driving technology research and development.
Waymo, founded in 2009, was one of the first companies to enter the field of autonomous driving. It takes "bicycle intelligence" as its development direction, and its technology covers many aspects such as perception, positioning, planning and control. The perception module is the basis of autonomous driving technology. Waymo adopts a multi-faceted fusion solution of cameras, lidar and millimeter wave radar to achieve all-round and high-precision perception of the surrounding environment. Among them, self-developed lidar technology is particularly critical. It not only significantly reduces costs, but also significantly improves detection accuracy and range, becoming the core of Waymo's technical barriers.
Due to a serious accident in October 2023, Cruise, owned by General Motors, was suspended indefinitely by California regulators. As a result, Waymo is currently the only company operating driverless taxis on a large scale in the United States. Its services have now entered San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles and other places provide more than 100,000 rides every week.
In addition to the above-mentioned cooperation with Jike and Hyundai, Waymo also reached a cooperation with the travel giant Uber in September 2024, and will jointly launch self-driving cars in the two major cities of Austin and Atlanta in early 2025. This cooperation means that Waymo's service scope and fleet size have once again expanded, and it has released a signal for collaboration between autonomous driving companies and travel service platforms.
In June 2024, new research published in "Nature Communications" paves the way for the promotion of autonomous driving. The study found that self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars and are less likely to cause accidents. Researchers at the University of Central Florida came to this conclusion after analyzing data from 2,100 autonomous vehicles and 35,133 manned vehicles between 2016 and 2022. Research shows that state-of-the-art autonomous driving systems can reduce the likelihood of rear-end, frontal and side collisions, and run-offs by 20% to 50%.
Unlike Waymo, Tesla has chosen a more radical end-to-end solution on its autonomous driving technology route. Jiazi Guangnian Think Tank believes that the full launch of Tesla's fully autonomous driving (FSD) system V12 marks that the application of end-to-end autonomous driving technology in mass-produced models has become a reality. This system uses a deep learning model to directly extract information from raw sensor data to achieve a seamless connection from perception to control, greatly improving the efficiency and safety of autonomous driving.
Due to its lossless transmission, data-driven, and global optimization characteristics, end-to-end technology shows its application potential and relative advantages over modular autonomous driving. However, this solution also faces many challenges, including the demand for computing power and data, as well as the security and explainability of the system.
In August this year, Musk said at Tesla's 2024 second quarter earnings conference: "Our solution is a general solution. Waymo has a very localized solution that requires high-precision mapping. It is quite fragile. I think their expansion capabilities are limited."
Speaking of regulation, Musk also pointed out: "Once we prove that something is safe enough or much safer than humans, we will find that regulators support the deployment of this capability." According to the latest schedule announced by Tesla in September 2024, FSD will enter China and Europe as early as the first quarter of 2025.
After the official release of Robotaxi, it is expected that FSD and Robotaxi will also form a linkage: on the one hand, Robotaxi's data will improve FSD's road collection database and help the iteration of the current FSD algorithm; on the other hand, with Tesla's current technical accumulation and a lot of verification in the field of FSD, Tesla is expected to drive a new wave in the field of Robotaxi.
However, Tesla's repeated failures to deliver Robotaxi are also making investors lose confidence in Tesla. On the eve of the October 10 launch, Deepwater Portfolio Research Analyst Brian Baker and Managing Partner Gene Munster admitted that the actual launch of Robotaxi may be a long way off, and the car is still in the early stages of the design phase - the public should not expect to see any production plans ready at the launch.
Whether it is Waymo or Tesla, the success behind them is inseparable from the United States' first-mover advantage in the research and development of autonomous driving technology. The United States has the world's leading integrated circuit technology and high-end chip design capabilities, which provides a solid foundation for the development of high-performance automotive chips and ensures the real-time and stability of autonomous driving systems. This may have prompted Musk to claim at the earnings conference that autonomous driving functions deployed outside North America are far behind North America.
But judging from the number of companies with cutting-edge or near-cutting-edge technologies, China is not far behind and has made great progress.
2. China's speed of autonomous driving
In China, the development of the Robotaxi industry is advancing at an unprecedented speed, forming a competitive landscape dominated by autonomous driving technology companies, traditional automakers and travel service providers. In this field, technology companies represented by Luobo Kuaipao, WeRide, and Pony.ai have made significant progress with advanced technology and active market strategies.
According to statistics from the New York Times, at least 16 cities in China allow companies to test autonomous vehicles on public roads, and at least 19 Chinese automakers and their suppliers are competing to establish global leadership in this field. No country is taking such active actions.
Since entering the field of autonomous driving in 2013, Baidu has rapidly risen in this cutting-edge field with its deep AI accumulation. By launching the Apollo open platform and incubating Luobo Kuaipao, a platform focusing on autonomous driving travel services, relying on the support of powerful artificial intelligence algorithms, Luobo Kuaipao can quickly accumulate a large amount of actual driving data for model training and performance optimization, thereby significantly accelerating the pace of landing applications.
In May this year, Baidu released the sixth generation of driverless taxis, with the price significantly reduced by 60% to RMB 204,600, opening a new door for the popularization of autonomous driving technology. The continuous expansion of operation scale and coverage area has also laid the foundation for the rapid growth of order volume. The latest data shows that in the second quarter of this year, Luobo Kuaipao's autonomous driving orders were about 899,000, a year-on-year increase of 26%. As of July 28, 2024, Luobo Kuaipao has provided more than 7 million autonomous driving travel services to the public.
On the technical level, compared with the United States, which prefers to rely on advanced sensor equipment and complex algorithm logic to ensure safety, China's autonomous driving companies are more focused on exploring how to use existing infrastructure resources, such as 5G communication networks, combined with emerging technologies such as cloud computing to improve overall efficiency.
For example, Carrot Run is actively promoting the "single-vehicle intelligence + vehicle-road collaboration" solution. Through Baidu's open source Apollo vehicle-road collaboration solution, it has achieved the mutual collaboration of "smart cars" and "smart roads", and comprehensively built an intelligent road network with full-domain data perception of "people-vehicle-road-cloud".
Not only that, the latest Carrot Run sixth-generation unmanned vehicle fully applies the "Baidu Apollo ADFM large model + hardware products + security architecture" solution. The solution ensures the stability and reliability of the vehicle through 10-fold safety redundancy solutions and 6-fold MRC safety strategies, and the safety level is close to that of the domestic large aircraft C919. Carrot Run believes that the ultimate safety of unmanned vehicles should be "never downtime, never inaccurate, and always online".
However, application implementation is still a challenge facing every autonomous driving company. Jiazi Guangnian Think Tank proposed that unmanned taxis need to overcome a series of challenges to achieve large-scale application, including technical improvement, policy and regulatory adaptation, cost-effectiveness optimization, and market demand cultivation.
Specifically, the technical level needs to ensure the stability and safety of the autonomous driving system, and the policy and regulatory aspects need to work closely with regulators to ensure compliance and promote the formulation of norms that are conducive to the development of the industry; in terms of cost control, it is necessary to reduce costs and improve efficiency through technological innovation and large-scale operations; in terms of market acceptance, it is necessary to enhance consumers' trust and preference for Robotaxi through active market education and high-quality riding experience.
So far, Carrot Run has made steady progress in the above areas. Its Robotaxi has safely traveled more than 100 million kilometers without a major casualty accident, and the accident rate is only 1/14 of that of human driving.
According to the forecast of consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, Robotaxi will be put into large-scale operation around 2026, and it is expected that Robotaxi will be widely adopted worldwide by 2030, when the penetration rate of Robotaxi in China's smart travel will reach 31.8%, and 69.3% in 2035. And the timely decision of Carrot Run to expand its services abroad will undoubtedly continue to enhance China's influence in the field of global autonomous driving.
3. Front and back attack: Intensified competition between China and the United States
As one of the world's largest automobile consumer markets, China has a unique advantage in developing autonomous driving.
For ordinary consumers, the safety of autonomous driving is gradually gaining popularity. A survey conducted by PwC last year showed that Chinese consumers who understand technology are more willing to give control of the vehicle to computers. 85% of Chinese consumers are satisfied with autonomous driving that does not require human intervention or supervision, while the proportion in the United States is only 39%.
I believe that in the near future, we will be able to witness the moment when Carrot Run is applied on a large scale and runs to the world, and continue to lead China's autonomous driving to compete with competitors on the international stage.
