One of the most important commercialization developments in the domestic autonomous driving industry in the past two days is from Pony.ai:
On April 24, Pony.ai announced that it has won the bid for the 2022 taxi capacity index in Nansha District, Guangzhou.
This is the first autonomous driving company to appear among the vehicle operation platforms that have obtained taxi operation licenses in China.
According to industry insiders, for the operation of ordinary taxis, qualified companies can apply for licenses in accordance with national and local regulations, but previously only ordinary vehicles that meet the technical requirements, and illegal modifications are not allowed.
The most special industry significance of Pony.ai’s acquisition of the rental business license this time is that it clearly stipulates that autonomous vehicles that meet technical standards can be put into the travel market as operating vehicles. And none of the previous licenses have been explicitly issued for autonomous vehicles .
In addition, this is also the operation of Robotaxi in China. For the first time, it has jumped out of the previous test management system and has been officially included in the scope of transportation operation and management of general vehicles. It is managed in accordance with the unified national taxi standards.
That is to say, no matter from the perspective of the operating platform, from the perspective of the vehicle body, or from the perspective of charging standards, this time Robotaxi will stand at the same starting point and compete fairly with ordinary taxis on the social road.
Get rid of the test car status, will put 100 Robotaxi
Let’s take a look at the start of the bidding of Pony.ai.
Because the legally operated taxi capacity indicators in Nansha District, Guangzhou have expired, on March 16 this year, the Guangzhou Nansha District Transportation Bureau issued a tender announcement, planning to re-launch 100 taxi capacity indicators. 5 years, and only one target is set.
On April 15th, with a comprehensive score of 85.67 points, Pony.ai defeated traditional taxi passenger transport companies such as Guangzhou Nansha Transportation Development Co., Ltd. and became the first candidate for this bidding project.
Since then, Pony.ai has become the first company in China to have commercialized Robotaxi services in Beijing and Guangzhou. The taxi operation license issued this time has also become the first one issued under the pilot policy of Guangzhou’s intelligent network-connected vehicle hybrid operation. A road transport operating license .
In the bid winning notice, the autonomous vehicle taxi operation license was also clearly given.
This means that this is the first time in China that the self-driving vehicle operation service and the ordinary vehicle operation service are given the same status from the policy level.
It has never been so clear before.
According to Mo Luyi, vice president of Pony.ai and head of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen R&D Center, during the bidding process, they mainly faced two major tests:
One is that its self-driving vehicles need to pass the Guangzhou Intelligent Connected Vehicle Safety Technology Standard, and the whole vehicle and parts are tested according to the national standard. The other is that Pony.ai’s vehicle operation is assessed based on the requirements for general taxi operators. Manage processes.
According to the introduction, the Guangzhou ICV safety technical standards include a number of national mandatory standards and recommended standards for the automotive industry, and these vehicles that passed the test are equipped with Pony Alpha X, the autonomous driving software and hardware system of Pony.ai.
Pony.ai said that thanks to the standardized system design and production process of Pony.ai, the representative behind Pony Alpha X, all vehicles meet high consistency and stability, and passed the test with high standards.
For example, among the batch of self-driving vehicles that passed the test of Pony.ai, in order to cope with the extreme weather in Guangzhou with the changeable rainstorm, it is necessary to pass the whole vehicle rain test to meet the automotive industry standard QC/T 476 “Rainproof and Sealing of Passenger Cars” Limits and test methods” requirements for vehicle rain.
Of course, before being put into service, these vehicles need to pass the Guangzhou Intelligent Connected Vehicle Technology Standard. It can be seen that this is essentially different from the online car-hailing license previously issued to Internet companies or taxi operators .
After winning the bid, according to the plan, from May onwards, PonyPilot+, the self-driving travel service of Pony.ai, will be mixed with other ordinary taxis, and will start charging operation in the entire 803 square kilometers of Nansha New Area. The charging standard is based on Guangzhou taxis. Unified pricing standard, the starting price is 12 yuan for the first 3 kilometers.
During the operation period, PonyPilot+ will launch corresponding preferential activities, can also issue electronic invoices, and support Alipay and WeChat payment in its APP.
In fact, Pony.ai has already tried the Robotaxi commercial charging pilot service in Beijing as early as the end of November 2021.
Another difference between Pony.ai’s charging operation in Guangzhou this time is that the operating license of this batch of self-driving vehicles has jumped out of the test category of ordinary self-driving vehicles in Guangzhou for the first time, and directly operates as a general operating vehicle. A taxi operating license was issued.
According to the “Guiding Opinions on Printing and Distributing the Work Related to Road Testing of Intelligent and Connected Vehicles” issued by Guangzhou, autonomous vehicles must meet a series of test application conditions before they go on the road.
For example, in a closed test site approved by the municipal authority, the vehicle must have been tested with no less than the specified mileage and the specified scene and be evaluated as qualified, or the vehicle that applies for the test for the first time can only carry out the test work on the first-level road section, etc.
“Last year, the commercial charging pilot license we obtained in Beijing was within the scope of test vehicles, and this taxi operation license is beyond the scope of ordinary test vehicles.” Mo Luyi said.
That is to say, Pony.ai’s batch of self-driving vehicles, which are about to be put into operation in Nansha, Guangzhou, did not go through the road test stage, but after passing a series of assessments, they can directly operate and charge.
It is expected that the initial revenue will reach one million yuan/year, and other travel platforms will be added.
“In the process of participating in the public bidding this time, we can more clearly understand which indicators are very important for the quality and stability of the entire Robotaxi commercial operation.”
Wang Haojun, COO of Pony.ai and head of Shanghai R&D Center, believes that although the entire Robotaxi industry is still in the early stage of commercialization, the industry consensus is that the large-scale deployment of Robotaxi nationwide will take three to five years. Arrive around.
According to Mo Luyi’s estimation, with the operation of these 100 autonomous vehicles in Guangzhou, Pony.ai is expected to generate millions of yuan/year in revenue in the initial stage.
“With the further expansion of the scale of self-driving travel services and the further improvement of technology, the growth rate of revenue scale will be very impressive in the next few years.”
As of mid-April this year, the PonyPilot+ service has served more than 700,000 orders.
However, at present, Pony.ai’s Robotaxi service does not yet support taxi-hailing services, but fixed pick-up and drop-off points and pick-up points for taxis, with security guards still in the car.
In this regard, in order to improve the user experience, according to the previous experience of charging and operating Robotaxi in Beijing, Pony.ai plans to strengthen the sign of the pick-up point first, and secondly, it will open more fixed stations.
On the whole, there are currently three business operation models for Robotaxi in China: one is to establish joint ventures between autonomous driving companies, investment institutions, and local governments; The company acts as a technology provider; the third is for autonomous driving companies to build fleets and platforms, and operate independently, such as Pony.ai.
Different modes have their own advantages. For example, autonomous operation facilitates the circulation and unified management of vehicle data, and it is also conducive to the rapid upgrade and iteration of autonomous driving algorithms.
However, according to Mo Luyi, in addition to its own APP platform, Pony.ai’s Robotaxi service will also be connected to other travel platforms.
“We chose a two-line parallel approach, hoping that in different modes, Pony.ai can accumulate enough experience to make corresponding preparations for large-scale commercial deployment in the future.”
In addition, the high cost of bicycles is also an important factor hindering the further mass production of Robotaxi.
To this end, in January this year, Pony.ai released the sixth-generation software and hardware system solution for mass production of autonomous driving, including the design of software and hardware systems, sensors and computing platforms.
According to reports, the system is designed for L4 vehicle-level mass production. At the same time, the first batch of models equipped with this system is Toyota S-AM (a hybrid electric platform based on 7-seat Senna), which will open the road in China this year. The test will be launched in the first half of 2023 and the daily operation of the self-driving travel service (Robotaxi) will be launched.
Wang Haojun believes that the new generation system can bring about lower overall cost and improve vehicle performance and reliability.
I’m happy to see more players join, one city, one policy problem to be solved
In addition to Pony.ai, there are Waymo, Cruise, Baidu Carrot Run, etc. that have obtained the Robotaxi fee-based operation license at home and abroad.
In addition, WeRide Zhixing established a joint venture “Wenyuan Yuehang” with Baiyun Taxi Group in 2018, and this company operates the Robotaxi service. The toll service of Wenyuan Yuexing Robotaxi started as early as November 2019.
At the same time, Xiaopeng Motors also newly established Guangzhou Pengxu Autonomous Driving Technology Co., Ltd. in February this year.
Xiaopeng Motors CEO He Xiaopeng has publicly stated that Xiaopeng Motors will launch the Robotaxi business in 2022 to accelerate the commercialization of Xiaopeng’s intelligent driving technology.
On the Robotaxi track, there are more and more new and old players in China, and the competition will intensify in the future.
In this regard, Wang Haojun believes that the participation of more players has a very positive significance for the entire autonomous driving industry, because it can promote the faster development of the industry chain, and also make the hardware cost and hardware performance drop and greatly improve. “We welcome the concerted efforts of the entire ecosystem to drive large-scale commercial deployment of autonomous driving technologies.”
This trend can be clearly seen from the rapid increase in the computing power of automotive-grade computing chips and the sharp drop in the cost of lidar in recent years. Therefore, all Robotaxi players have the confidence to quickly iterate their automatic driving solutions .
However, in order to further reduce the cost of Robotaxi, the most important part is to “remove people”, that is, to remove the manpower from the entire process of providing travel services, move it from the inside of the car to the outside of the car, and at the same time by the remote security officer Or the system is responsible for the normal operation of a large number of autonomous vehicles.
This is also the most obvious advantage of Robotaxi compared with traditional car-hailing.
As early as mid-2021, Pony.ai launched a batch of fully driverless vehicles in Jiaomen River, Pearl Bay, Nansha Bay, Qingsheng Hub and other areas with relatively complete transportation facilities in Nansha District, Guangzhou City. No more security guards.
As of press time, Pony.ai has accumulated nearly 200,000 kilometers of research and development mileage of fully unmanned autonomous driving, and has provided nearly 1,000 person-times of unmanned autonomous driving experience services.
In addition, Pony.ai has also obtained the first number of autonomous driving test licenses in Guangzhou, covering all test levels.
According to the three-party real-time data supervision statistics of Guangzhou Intelligent Connected Vehicles, by the end of 2021, Pony.ai’s test mileage in Guangzhou will be the first in the city, contributing more than half of the autonomous driving test mileage in Guangzhou. Among them, the autonomous driving mode accounted for 98% of the test mileage accumulated by Pony.ai, exceeding the industry average of 70.6%.
Mo Luyi believes that with the further opening of the policy, Pony.ai will add self-driving vehicles without safety officers to the commercial fleet in due course.
However, looking at the current domestic autonomous driving industry policy as a whole, due to the different emphasis and understanding of autonomous driving development in different regions, each region has different standards and requirements, showing the characteristics of “one city, one policy”.
Therefore, in terms of policy breakthroughs, Pony.ai has been actively communicating with local governments, hoping to jointly formulate relevant standards and requirements.
For example, in March 2021, the Supervision and Judicial Work Committee of the Standing Committee of the Shenzhen Municipal People’s Congress organized the drafting of the “Regulations on the Administration of Intelligent Connected Vehicles in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (Draft for Comment)”, which should be the first domestic policy legislation on autonomous driving. Zhixing also participated in the research.
Wang Haojun predicts that with the development of the industry, new policies will definitely be promulgated in the policy design of the autonomous driving industry at the national level.
Leifeng Network#Leifeng Network#Leifeng Network
This article is reproduced from: https://www.leiphone.com/category/transportation/Gzw2MmV9K0dLPKxC.html
This site is for inclusion only, and the copyright belongs to the original author.