In the past, the hottest industry in the past two years was not new energy vehicles, but artificial intelligence and autonomous driving. However, this year, self-driving companies that were once favored by capital have not had a good time. Many domestic and foreign companies are successively reducing expenses through layoffs, salary cuts for executives, asset sales, and reduction of benefits.
“When a major crisis comes, it is often the best opportunity for a company with the goal of landing, because it can attract more like-minded people to move forward together.”
Yu Enyuan commented so in an interview with Leifeng.com.
As the CEO of Neolithic, Yu Enyuan is an authentic serial entrepreneur. After graduating from Chongqing University majoring in automation in 1996, he had no experience of working for others except for one interview with Huawei. Founded in 2018 and completed its first operation in 2020, Neolithic is the second company founded by Yu Enyuan in the field of logistics.
In Neolithic, Yu Enyuan positions himself as a product manager. In his view, Neolithic is not a technology company, but a company that makes automated transportation.
As the infrastructure of a city, transportation capacity has different application scenarios. The application scenarios of Neolithic products also have three directions: the first is mobile retail, such as delivering breakfast to KFC and McDonald’s; the second is unmanned delivery. The first is to help SF Express, Yunda, and ZTO deliver express; the third direction is city services, that is, to provide some services related to the government and public welfare.
At present, Neolithic’s competitors are mainly foreign manufacturers, and Nuro is one of them. Yu believes that its products and service urban logistics are very similar to Neolithic’s thinking, but each has its own advantages.
“The difference between the autonomous driving routes in China and the United States is a bit like the Huashan school’s Jianzong and Qizong. American manufacturers are Qizong. They will practice their internal skills and make their algorithms extremely powerful. This is their excellent and worth learning. .And China’s autonomous driving industry, especially the unmanned delivery, is Jianzong, with a very broad market, high-density users, and open crowds. These two routes are completely different. For Chinese manufacturers, it is necessary to carry out as soon as possible It is the best way to practice and polish the reliability of algorithm products in actual application scenarios.”
How to implement unmanned vehicles in the city, Yu Enyuan introduced to Leifeng.com, the implementation of unmanned vehicles is nothing more than a syllogism: cap hats, write standards and implement policies.
Capping the hat means to see if the city is willing to develop a smart city, develop intelligent network connections, and develop smart logistics.
Writing standards means participating in the formulation of unmanned vehicle standards. “The city managers we met were not very clear about all their own needs. They issued licenses and needed to follow relevant laws and regulations. One of the questions they asked the most was whether our industry has standards.”
The last thing is to implement policies in the region, that is, first take out a demonstration, verify the management system and technical standards of the smart city, and then promote it to the whole city.
Among the three steps, writing standards is an important step in the implementation of unmanned vehicles, because this step can be replicated in other cities and even overseas markets if it is successfully used in one city.
In July last year, in order to promote the implementation of the L4 low-speed autonomous driving system, the ISO committee released the first international safety standard for the L4 autonomous driving system.
Based on this, TÜV Rheinland, an international third-party testing organization, launched the “Low-speed Automatic Driving System Performance Evaluation” certification service, filling the long-term gap in safety standards for advanced automatic driving.
Yu Enyuan introduced that Neolithic’s new generation of unmanned vehicle X3 Plus has obtained the first certification in China.
This is not the first collaboration between Neolithic and TÜV Rheinland. For the cooperation between the two parties, the biggest difficulty this year lies in the recurrence of the epidemic and the uncontrollability of the test environment, so that the two parties spent a lot of time on the entire project to communicate in a timely manner and adjust the test plan and schedule.
The impact of the epidemic on unmanned delivery vehicles is obvious.
From 2016 to 2017, JD.com, Meituan, Neolix, etc. have already started to join the competition of unmanned delivery vehicles, setting off an entrepreneurial boom on this track. However, the high cost of driverless devices, technical bottlenecks, legal restrictions and China’s complex transportation system have limited their large-scale use in places such as schools, communities, parks and hotels.
When the capacity became tight and the value of unmanned delivery vehicles was discovered, many companies began to deploy unmanned vehicles. For example, White Rhino, established in 2019, and Neolithic, established in 2018, used unmanned vehicles to deliver meals to doctors and patients and complete other emergency tasks during the Wuhan epidemic. In May 2021, Neolithic won the first batch of unmanned delivery vehicle vehicle codes issued by the Beijing High-level Autonomous Driving Demonstration Zone, and began to “work with a certificate”. At the same time, Meituan also launched unmanned delivery services in Shunyi, Beijing .
However, after the optimization of the epidemic policy, couriers return to work, will the demand for transportation capacity be re-satisfied by manpower, which will affect the market for unmanned vehicles?
Yu Enyuan told Leifeng.com, “The epidemic will always pass, and sick couriers will always come back. When the epidemic is released, the return of couriers does not mean that unmanned vehicles have lost their value. Any advanced production tool will We will not lose our market because of the epidemic. We have always insisted on providing free supply guarantee work for the community during the epidemic. For us, that is not a business model.”
For Neolithic, the real business model is whether it can make people work more efficiently as manpower becomes increasingly valuable.
As the aging population becomes more and more serious, the new intelligent basic measures composed of unmanned vehicles will play an increasingly important role in urban construction, and the prospect of this market is also very broad.
For example, the manpower consumption of urban logistics in Japan is between 3 and 4 million per year, including express delivery and urban distribution in the traditional sense. In 2021, China’s national express delivery will exceed 100 billion. The average number of courier deliveries per day is 200-300, while the number of matching couriers is only 10 million, and the average age is over 40 years old. Due to low income levels and other reasons, the turnover rate of first-line couriers will continue to rise in the next five years.
In Yu Enyuan’s view, the value of unmanned vehicles lies in improving the efficiency of distribution. “We have an internal assessment indicator, that is, when our unmanned vehicles can help a courier deliver more than 1,000 pieces a day, then we will The value of unmanned vehicles has been realized. In the next year, we hope to help Xiaoge improve the efficiency by more than three times in the area we operate.”
At present, Neolithic products have landed in 12 overseas countries including Germany, Spain, Japan, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates, including multiple scenarios such as unmanned delivery, unmanned retail, and urban services.
For Neolithic, the most important market at present is overseas, which is a fortress that the company must win after entering a new era, and Mount Everest that must be climbed.
“Neolithic’s plan for the next 2 to 3 years is to successfully enter the overseas market and make the income of the overseas market exceed that of the domestic market. This is one of our internal goals.”
As for the specific way of going overseas, Neolithic has its own channel partners in each country. Next year, it will give priority to selecting 5-6 countries among the 13 overseas countries to increase the amount appropriately. First increase the application scale, develop and cultivate local partners, and then promote the implementation of local laws and regulations, property rights standards and other aspects.
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