Recently, the US government indicated that it plans to reduce the number of domestic traffic accident deaths to zero during the year. The background of the plan is that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that the number of traffic accident deaths in the first half of 2016 increased by 10.4%. Autopilot is considered the cornerstone of this plan.
“When is this autonomous driving technology mature?†Talking about autonomous driving, this should be the most publicly asked question.
| The road to commercialization of automated driving: revolution or improvement?
In March of this year, at the SXSW interactive media event in Austin, Texas, Google’s unmanned driving technology chief, Emerson, said that “the real emergence of autonomous vehicles may be much later than the time predicted, and may take up to 30 years. ". In 2009, at the beginning of the Google Driverless Program, Umsen had an ambitious statement that he hoped to get Google's driverless car to market in 2019.
But Larry Page obviously has no such patience. On this year's TED show, Larry Page said that when he was driving, he said that he had such an idea in college and he The potential is very exciting. When asked when unmanned driving is realized, he said: "I think it will be very, very fast. I am very keen to launch the product as soon as possible." He further clarified his attitude: "We need revolutionary Change, not improvement."
Last year, Google found a veteran of the automobile industry. Kramercic, the former CEO of Hyundai Motor's US branch, was the head of the driverless project. The industry's general interpretation is that Google will separate the project from X lab and start its business. The road to change.
But where is the road? Is it a car build, a software product license, or a direct operation like Uber? This is a topic that the industry has repeatedly speculated. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek in July, Kraficic said frankly that Google has not yet determined the business model of driverless cars. The voice of the outside world is sharper. Speak With Me CEO AJ Juneja believes that Google does not have a clear commercial plan; the market consultancy Strategy AnalyTIcs bluntly said: Google needs a partner, a sales team and A market strategy.
At the beginning of August, Umsen left Google, and the behind-the-scenes bots of Carnegie Mellon University undoubtedly reflected Google’s huge gap in the vision and commercialization of autonomous driving.
Google has said in a number of public occasions that it has no intention of becoming a vehicle manufacturer, but to seek cooperation, but the reality is that we have seen Tesla and the strong ADAS technology supplier Mobileye high-profile breakup, seeing GM investing billions of dollars Acquisition of autopilot startup Cruise AutomaTIon, Ford's acquisition of Israeli machine learning and computer vision company SAIPS, and investment in at least three start-up companies related to autonomous driving, BMW and Toyota's joint investment in Silicon Valley startup Nauto Other automakers are also stepping up their talents. The mainstream automakers are setting off an auto-driving arms race, and they are ready to do it themselves.
Working with a car manufacturer is not an easy task, especially for the next generation of core technologies. If a company is not prepared to build a car and is too high-profile in auto-driving, it will often be counterproductive and become an obstacle to cooperation. After all, the car is one of the most recognized brands in the industry, and the car manufacturers do not want to be robbed by suppliers. The limelight.
"Autonomous driving will define the next decade. We predict that autonomous vehicles will have a huge impact on society, just like the assembly line that Ford invented more than a hundred years ago." Ford CEO John Fields said a word It tells the meaning of autonomous driving for the automotive industry. Perhaps because of this, Larry Page will persistently hope to achieve autonomous driving in the full sense.
| Self-driving trucks are suddenly emerging
But the reality is unexpected. At the beginning of this year, Google’s unmanned car team technical genius Anthony Levandowski and Google Maps original head Lior Ron left to set up the startup Otto. Just six months later, the mobile travel giant Uber was in July. Announced the acquisition of Otto at a high price of 680 million US dollars. Considering that the startup was only established for half a year, it can be concluded that they mainly rely on technology developed from Google. Now, the commercial value of this technology has been recognized by investors, and the commercialization prospects are very clear: providing autopilot operation services for cargo trucks.
Why is there such a huge gap in the commercialization of the same technology? The answer needs to go back to the current market situation to find out, let's first look at the current status of the US freight market:
The US truck transportation industry is worth 700 billion US dollars, which is big enough;
In 2015, there were 1.6 million truck drivers in the United States, accounting for 1% of the US workforce. The average age of truck drivers was 55 years old. This shows that the industry is not attractive enough for young people and it is difficult to recruit. There are currently 50,000 large truck drivers ( According to the American Truck Transport Association data, it has become a problem for logistics companies.
Due to labor shortages, revenue per mile is expected to rise from the current $0.3 to $0.7.
If you use autonomous driving, for the logistics company, the labor cost savings are unquestionable (although it will lead to more than 1% of the working population unemployed), service areas, motels, restaurants and other expenses are basically not needed, auto insurance costs Significantly reduced; in terms of production efficiency, autonomous vehicles can run 7x24 hours, even taking into account the time spent on vehicle maintenance and cargo handling, the driving time of 140 hours per week is more than three times that of manned driving. This means that the capital turnover rate is increasing simultaneously.
In terms of deployment costs, today's large trucks are priced at more than $150,000. Otto's current autopilot kit costs about $30,000. From the cost reduction space, it is very possible to reduce it to $10,000 in five years.
Technically, trucks run primarily on highways, and the autopilot technology in highway scenes is much simpler than city roads. Sensors can be mounted at a higher position from the ground and can therefore be detected farther. Therefore, autonomous driving in this field can achieve the maturity required for commercialization in a short period of time.
Although accurate cost calculations still require more data, the above data is already convincing that the cost of logistics based on autonomous driving will be reduced by more than 2 times, and the return on capital will probably increase by more than ten times.
According to Reuters news, Uber will provide freight services from next year. It must be said that Uber's vision is accurate. More companies are starting to catch up, and six major European truck manufacturers (including Volvo, Daimler, Duff, Iveco, Mann, Scania) have set up a 12-car unmanned truck fleet to test the road.
Automated driving trucks can profoundly change the logistics industry, giving birth to sites such as standardized loading and unloading stations, where human drivers will be responsible for the delivery of goods to the self-driving trucks that have just exited the highway, completing the last 100 kilometers. Transportation.
Looking back at Otto's success, it is actually a beautiful case of combining technology with the market. The development of a technology may initially face a very long-term goal, but after the technology reaches a certain level, it can produce commercial value in some scenarios. Therefore, by limiting the use of the scene, the technical difficulty can be reduced. In the case of highway freight, we can even further reduce the technical difficulty, for example, using a team leader's formation driving, in this mode, a human driver drives the first car. Followed by 5 to 10 unmanned vehicles at dense intervals, which means 5 to 10 times higher labor efficiency, and its commercial value can be seen.
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