"The technological advancement of electric vehicles must fight on two fronts: one front is the battery, motor, electronic control and charging infrastructure. This foundation must be laid to ensure the good driving functions of electric vehicles. The other front is also the focus of future competition. It is networked, intelligent, and ultimately unmanned driving."
On August 22-23, the 3rd Global Smart Car Frontier Summit hosted by the China Electric Vehicle Hundreds Association was held. Chen Qingtai, chairman of the China Electric Vehicle Hundreds Association, pointed out in his speech that in the future, smart and connected electric vehicles will be energy sources. A leading core product of revolution, information revolution, transportation revolution and smart city construction. "Automobile companies should stretch out their hands for cooperation, and Internet, IT, and AI companies should insert their hands. Many parties work together to reconstruct the automotive industry chain and jointly build the industrial ecology of smart cars."
Focusing on the theme of "speeding up the intelligentization of cars and creating new engines for the industry", well-known experts and industry leaders participated in the discussion on the technological breakthroughs and product innovations of smart cars in the past two years, as well as the top-level design and implementation path of smart car business development. .
Collaborative innovation is a matter of success or failure. Intelligent parts are the foundation of industrial development
Smart cars are usually called smart connected cars, self-driving cars, etc. Feng Xingya, general manager of Guangzhou Automobile Group Co., Ltd., said that smart cars are an inevitable product of a smart society with all things connected, and it is a historic opportunity for Chinese companies to change the competitive landscape.
"The attributes and definitions of automobiles have changed. The industrial chain of smart cars is far beyond the scope of the traditional fuel vehicle industry chain. Automobiles have expanded from a typical mechanical product to electrical and electronic products; from a mobile machine to "Super mobile intelligent terminal" and software-defined Internet products, electronic information high-tech products." Chen Qingtai explained that informatization, networking, intelligence, big data, system software and other high-tech technologies have become the focus of competition. Faced with such a large-span high-tech cluster, it is difficult for auto companies to take it exclusively. Cross-border integration and collaborative innovation are the keys to success.
In Chen Qingtai's view, the development of smart cars requires strengthening the innovation and research and development of key technologies and key components. Prior to this, China's auto industry has not paid enough attention and investment in parts and components, which has made my country's auto industry suffer from the hollowing out of core parts. This phenomenon became more obvious when the new crown pneumonia epidemic broke out this year and the international situation changed.
"The technical barriers for intelligent parts have not yet been formed, and there are many options for technical routes. There is a huge room for innovation, which brings historic opportunities for the development of Chinese parts companies, especially high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises." Chen Qingtai emphasized , The foundation of the power of smart cars is the development of smart parts. Fortunately, the informatization, networking, artificial intelligence and other fields involved in the new industrial chain are all areas where my country has developed well in recent years. Related industries and enterprises should seize this opportunity and use high-quality intelligent parts and software to support the development of the intelligent automobile industry.
Development has entered a cooling-off period and still faces many difficulties in key technical areas
The speed of the integration of the new generation of technological revolution, digital revolution and automobile industry is beyond imagination. In the past few years, smart cars have attracted a large amount of capital investment, but last year everyone felt that the enthusiasm of smart car investment was declining.
"We believe that the development of smart cars has gradually entered a cooling-off period. This is a good thing, marking that the development of the industry has entered a key node." Feng Xingya said that smart cars have shifted from laboratory and demonstration operations to production, and many manufacturers have successively The introduction of L2 and above models, and some even infinitely close to L3, the introduction of new products to the market is also the process of new technology landing and acceptance of consumer testing. Companies, capital, and the public are no longer confused by concepts, but enter a cooling-off period. This is the law for the development and growth of new technologies and new things, and it is also the only way before industrialization begins.
However, smart cars still face many difficulties in key technical fields.
"The gap between autonomous driving assistance technology and driverless cars may be far deeper than most media reports. The high cost of a single vehicle and infrastructure investment are important factors restricting mass production. According to Gartner ) The company’s technological maturity curve, the mass production of L4 and L5 autonomous vehicles will take another 10 years.” Feng Xingya bluntly stated that in the short term, unmanned vehicles are expected to operate in a small range under strict constraints, such as driving at low speeds in restricted urban areas. Or driving on certain high-speed road sections; but in the long run, the responsibility for traffic accidents in the context of autonomous driving has not been clarified.
In addition, domestic standards and regulations for smart cars have yet to be improved.
In this regard, Zhong Zhihua, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, believes that there must be transitional laws, regulations and standards to help the demonstration operation of smart cars, such as solving the right of way, accident handling, and recall rules. However, we cannot prematurely legalize and standardize things that are not clear. This will hinder technological progress and harm industrial development.
The "China Plan" has great potential to become an industry consensus for the coordinated development of vehicles and roads
At the beginning of this year, 11 ministries and commissions including the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Science and Technology jointly issued the "Smart Car Innovation and Development Strategy", which clarified that by 2025, China's standard smart car technology innovation, industrial ecology, infrastructure, regulations and standards, product supervision and The network security system has basically taken shape. At the same time, smart cars that realize conditional autonomous driving can achieve mass production, and smart cars that realize highly autonomous driving can be marketed in specific environments.
This strategic vision of smart cars also affects the hearts of many automakers.
"The Chinese path of smart cars and Chinese solutions are promising. Autonomous driving is an inevitable trend. In view of the technical complexity and cost of the L4 and L5 autonomous driving levels, we are very supportive of the route of vehicle-road coordination." Feng Xingya believes that in addition to policy advantages In addition, we also have market advantages. The huge local market capacity, innovation in consumer Internet business models, and unique advantages in 5G systems, artificial intelligence, and software talents will surely give birth to smart cars based on China's ecological industry.
At present, there are three major categories of global solutions for autonomous driving: bicycle intelligence, intelligent networked vehicles and vehicle-road collaboration. The vehicle-road synergy has become the consensus of China's autonomous driving route and industry.
"Vehicle-road collaboration mainly considers roads and cars as a complete system, and uses smart roads to make up for the lack of intelligent networked cars, and improve its safety, reliability and related functions." Southeast University-University of Wisconsin Intelligent Networked Transportation Ran Bin, Dean of the Joint Research Institute, said that through vehicle-road coordination, the threshold for autonomous driving can be greatly reduced, and a single vehicle can save 50% to 90% of the cost. Not only that, the coordinated development of roads and cars will soon realize L3 level automatic driving, which can save about 10 years.
In Ran Bin's view, as far as the development direction of autonomous driving is concerned, it must be the coordinated development of vehicles, roads, networks, and clouds. L4 autonomous driving is the direction of future efforts.
Feng Xingya revealed that GAC Group is accelerating the development of intelligent connected technology, improving the five supporting platforms of intelligent connected terminals, and striving to master six core technologies such as AI artificial intelligence, 5G, software-defined vehicles, and big data. At the same time, it will optimize the planning of the core technology routes of smart cars, and strive to achieve regional demonstration operations of L4 autonomous driving in 2023.
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In the development of autonomous driving in cities, these "pits" must be watched
During the conference, the China Electric Vehicles Association released a research report on "Autonomous Driving Application Scenarios and Commercialization Paths (2020)", which summarized the pace of domestic autonomous driving scenarios and looked forward to new changes in autonomous driving in the future.
"Although many cities are active towards autonomous driving, they have different starting points and different ways of landing." Zhang Yongwei, secretary general and chief expert of the China Electric Vehicles Association of 100, said bluntly that some cities are very active, but because the industry is too new and too new. It's too big, it's blind in operation, and it takes a lot of detours. At the same time, there are also some cities that are relatively clear from top-level design to implementation steps. Although they are still being explored, they are worthy of praise.
Speaking of the environmental construction of autonomous driving cities, Zhang Yongwei analyzed five major challenges: First, focus on construction and light on operation. Even if the problem of investment and construction is solved, there is still no answer to who will operate and how to enter a benign operation model. Due to the unclear investment model and operation model, the innovation path is alienated and even questioned.
Second, the lack of application of heavy data. It took great effort to open up the data and built the data brain, but the application was sharply lacking.
Third, the lack of top-level design. How to make different subjects play a better role and form a benign and effective collaboration urgently requires top-level design, otherwise the top-level design driven by a single subject will cause the innovation model to be misinterpreted.
Fourth, it focuses too much on short-term gains and lacks strategic vision. At present, people still have a short-term pursuit of autonomous driving and lack long-term strategic investment. Therefore, some projects that should not be eager to make profits are treated as short-term commercial projects, which affects the investment of some strategic projects.
Fifth, the relationship between government and enterprise needs to be further straightened out.
Our reporter Liu Yin