How far is it from us to attract more than 40 billion yuan a year?

202 1, good news keeps coming from the autopilot track. At the capital level, giants and capital compete to bet. Last year, the total amount of financing disclosed by the whole industry reached 43.63 billion yuan. In terms of enterprises, Baidu Apollo has been stationed in many cities, such as Weilai/Tucki /R cars. It is planned to install lidar on the latest products ... More and more signs are showing to the outside world that autonomous driving is not far away from us.

On the other hand, Tesla is suspected of frequent auto-driving accidents, and the time for car companies to launch L4-class products has been delayed, and the progress bar of auto-driving mass production has been constantly restarted. Then, in the context of another round of capital fever, where has autonomous driving gone? Really the earliest place to land?

Ten years has attracted more than 200 billion capital.

Anyone who cares about the automobile industry knows that the new energy automobile market has been the darling of capital in recent years, and various financing, IPO and stock market myths have been staged one after another, but it is worth mentioning that the ability of autonomous driving to attract gold is not inferior at all.

The "Report on Investment and Financing of Autopilot Projects in the Past Ten Years" released by the Enterprise Research Institute of Big Data shows that in 2020, the total amount of financing disclosed in the autopilot market rose sharply, reaching 43.63 billion yuan; At the beginning of 202 1, the heat of the self-driving track continued unabated. In the first two months alone, there were 24 investment and financing incidents, and the total amount of investment and financing disclosed has reached 654.38+07.64 billion yuan. In the past ten years, there have been 376 publicly disclosed investment and financing incidents of autonomous driving projects, and the total amount of financing disclosed is close to 237.75 billion yuan.

As far as enterprises are concerned, only some enterprises that have obtained financing in the last 90 days are taken as examples. The field of semiconductor was born on the horizon of 20 15, and has obtained about 1066 billion financing since its establishment. Its latest round of C3 financing of $350 million, which was completed on February 9th this year, not only has the participation of top institutions, but also has the strategic blessing of many upstream and downstream star enterprises in the automobile industry chain, including well-known BYD and BYD.

In the field of Robotaxi (self-driving taxi), the L4-level self-driving travel company Wenyuan Zhixing WIRIDE announced the completion of the B2 and B3 rounds of financing led by Yutong Group at the beginning of 2002110,000 USD. Didi autopilot was established on 20 19, and has received more than 800 million US dollars of investment so far. After 5438+0 completed $300 million in financing in June this year, the research and development and mass production of L4-class self-driving cars have been listed as the current internal key projects.

Lincoln Lincoln MKZ (inquiry module, please do not edit it manually, if you need to delete it, please right-click the picture to delete the inquiry)

As the only company in the world that launched Robotaxi service in China and the United States at the same time, Pony.ai officially completed the C round of financing with a total amount of 367 million US dollars on February 8. Up to now, the total amount of financing has been publicly disclosed to exceed 1 1 billion dollars, and the leading investors include Toyota, Sequoia, Hongtai, Puhua and other car companies/star capital.

A number of high-powered cars came out one after another.

The change of capital market also reflects the development of the whole industry to some extent. Undoubtedly, behind the self-driving track with increasingly strong gold absorption ability, of course, it is the continuous technological breakthrough of the whole market.

For example, if the self-driving car is regarded as a driver, then the lidar is the eyes that TA uses to see the road, and the chip is its brain. Only the "eyes" can see clearly enough (the lidar supporting L3 autopilot should at least reach the resolution of 100 line), and the "brain" can react quickly enough (the hardware computing power of the leading Tesla Autopilot 3.0 system is currently recognized as 10).

At present, according to the Aika Automotive Industry Channel, in terms of high-level autonomous driving, the single-chip computing power of Xavier currently mass-produced by semiconductor giant NVIDIA has reached 30TOPS, and 202 1 Orin series chips to be mass-produced can reach 200TOPS；; The computing power of Journey 5 single-chip AI that Horizon will launch in the first half of this year is 96TOPS, and the computing power of Journey 6 chip artificial intelligence using the 7mm process of vehicle regulations exceeds 400TOPS. Innovution, which is favored by Weilai Capital, recently developed a solid-state lidar with a resolution equivalent to 300 lines and a maximum detection distance of 500 meters.

According to incomplete data, since 20021,more than five high-computing products equipped with lidar have released relevant plans. Among them, Weilai ET7, as a model of Weilai fully demonstrating its autonomous driving ambition, is equipped with 1550nm wavelength solid-state laser radar from Innovution, and an autonomous driving platform composed of quad-core NVIDIA driver chips provided by NVIDIA, and its computing power can reach10/6 tops. What is this concept? At present, Tesla's strongest computing power is only 144TOPS, and Weilai ET7 is more than seven times that.

Weilai ET7 (inquiry module, please don't edit it manually, if you need to delete it, please right-click the picture to delete the inquiry).

SAIC's "No.1 Project"-IM Zhiji's first intelligent pure electric vehicle, has chosen a redundancy scheme of software and hardware architecture compatible with laser radar, which can support the upgrade of NVIDIA Orion X (500 ~1000+TOPS) and three laser radars. The hardware scheme of ES33, the first product newly released by R-Tech by R-TECH's high-energy agent, has not been made public, but Aika Automobile has learned that this product will be equipped with Luminar lidar, which is known as the top in the industry, with a resolution of 300 lines and a ranging distance of 500 meters.

Earlier, on February 30th, 2020, 12, the Great Wall released the related intelligent technology-the coffee intelligent driving system. As the first L3-class autonomous driving with full vehicle redundancy in China, the all-solid-state laser radar carried by the coffee smart driver can identify potential safety hazards in the range of 130m. By matching the upgrade schemes of two standard large computing platforms, the computing power of the intelligent driving platform can reach 700+TOPS.

Commercial vehicles will land first.

If Tesla, which is recognized as the most powerful autonomous driving technology, is taken as a reference, it seems that both the Great Wall and Weilai can be "hanged" only from the configuration point of view. But it is worth noting that this does not mean that we will soon see these products that seem to come from the future. Both the Weilai ET7, which was born for autonomous driving, and the R-car ES33 equipped with Luminar lidar for the first time will not be fully mass-produced until 2022. In other words, these products are "futures".

R car R car ES33 (inquiry module, please don't edit it manually, if you need to delete it, please right-click the picture to delete the inquiry).

The reason for this phenomenon is that people in the industry generally believe that there are two main reasons. Among them, on the one hand, it stems from the "chip crisis" on a global scale. A person in charge from an automobile controller manufacturer told Aika Automobile that the manufacturing cycle of a chip is usually 3-6 months, but since the third quarter of last year, the delivery cycle has been continuously lengthened, and some categories even exceed one year, which means that orders are placed today, and it will take 500 days to get the goods.

More reasons are caused by the entire market environment of autonomous driving. According to "Approval and Publicity of Recommended National Standards", L3 level has required the car to be responsible for the driving process (the driver should be ready to take over at any time), and L4 level requires the system to take over completely. Although there are few enterprises promoting L3 and L4 at present, from the configuration of Weilai ET7, ES33 and other products, they are all sprinting to this range.

"It needs to be admitted that the hardware of these products is excellent, but whether they can show good results in the end is still two points. At present, the road conditions in China, especially the first-and second-tier cities with the highest acceptance of autonomous driving, are extremely complicated, and Tesla autonomous driving accidents abound. Recently, relevant US departments have begun to investigate 27 Tesla accidents. " A senior auto analyst told Aika that numerous accident cases mean that the current road conditions or technologies are far from meeting the requirements of high-level automatic driving, so the high-powered vehicles planned and released in the near future are more like beliefs, and they need a lot of time to polish their technologies. How to land them remains to be discussed. "In the context of OTA, these products are more likely to land in the ordinary driver assistance system first, and then upgrade with technological progress later."

However, compared with the high-computing passenger cars that will take at least two years to see, self-driving commercial vehicles may enter our lives faster. Different from the driving environment of passenger cars, the driving environment of commercial vehicles, especially heavy trucks in the logistics and transportation industry, is mostly high-speed, and the scene of car use is relatively simple, making it the most promising field to take the lead in realizing mass production and commercialization of autonomous driving.

According to public data, in 2020, half of the self-driving investment and financing events in China will be invested in start-ups in the field of commercial vehicles. Of the winning companies in 19, 8 have laid out trunk logistics scenes, and the average winning amount is much higher than other sub-tracks.

Winch technology, which runs fastest in this field, released the industry's first self-developed truck driving system directly facing mass production on March 10. According to the plan, two L3 heavy trucks jointly developed by Mache Technology, Dongfeng Commercial Vehicle and China Heavy Duty Truck will be equipped with the automatic driving system and delivered in mass production at the end of 20021. Last September, Zhijia Technology helped faw liberation and Zhitu Technology release the world's first self-driving super heavy truck J7 L3. It is planned that 202/KLOC-0 will be officially mass-produced in the first half of the year, which is only over two months away from us.

Written at the end: autonomous driving is actually a big topic, involving more than a few thousand words. However, only from the current public information, with a simpler car scene, the commercial vehicle field will take the lead in winning the title of the first application scene of autonomous driving. In daily use, ordinary consumers may have to wait more than two years to experience autonomous driving. More depends on whether the current policy is implemented and whether the autonomous driving environment is improved.