Autonomous driving has always been recognized as one of the megatrends, and the development of autonomous driving technology is also one of the common goals of most automotive companies. But when will autonomous driving actually land and apply to real road scenarios, different people have different answers.
Faced with this problem, Han Xu, founder and CEO of WeRide, expressed his thoughts. He said that in the past 20 years, the development of autonomous driving is exciting, as for what will be done in the next ten years, this is very difficult, and there is one that can be ** is another ten years, "I believe that everyone basically does not have to drive themselves on the street." ”
Han Xu also believes that the reason why autonomous driving is the trend is because machines can be safer and cheaper than people. As time goes by, Moore's Law will still be in effect, so the hardware will become cheaper and cheaper, and the manual will become more and more expensive with the improvement of people's living standards, so relatively speaking, autonomous driving will become cheaper.
The "2023 Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Hard Technology Industry Conference" hosted by Guangzhou Development District Industry Investment Group, undertaken by China Venture Information and Guangzhou Development District Investment Management, and supported by Guangzhou Industrial Development Research Institute was held in Guangzhou Development District on December 8, 2023. Han Xu was invited as the chairman and delivered a speech on the theme of "Exploration and Practice of Commercialization of Autonomous Driving".
The following is the on-site record, edited and organized by ChinaVenture:
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning!
I'm Han Xu, CEO of WeRide, and I'm honored to have it today, because WeRide started my business in the hot land of Guangzhou Development Zone since the beginning of my business, so I'm very happy to have the opportunity to report to you about the development of autonomous driving in recent years, especially the development of WeRide.
In another ten years, you will basically not have to drive yourself
In 1999, when I was in my first year of graduate school, Mr. Kai-Fu Lee and Mr. Shen Xiangyang, who are now academicians, had just started brainstorming at Microsoft Research Asia, which was called Microsoft Research China at the time, and told us about the so-called speech recognition, Image recognition, from that time to now, it has been twenty-three or four years, when even a simple voice recognition was very difficult, to today we can see ChatGPT, see autonomous driving, so the development of more than 20 years is exciting.
In fact, what I'm looking forward to is what autonomous driving will look like in the next ten years, which is difficult, but there is one that can be done in another ten years, and I believe that everyone basically doesn't have to drive on the street.
Today, everyone believes that autonomous driving will bring great social significance, in fact, the core problem is that everyone thinks about autonomous driving every day, and only hears the sound of the stairs every day and does not see people coming downIf you are on the Bio Island, there are a few things that you can't see anywhere else in the country, the first is that if you want to go around the island, you can take the world's first L4 unmanned minibus, which WeRide did on the Bio Island.
Second, the streets of the biological island are very clean, but they are not swept by people, but by pure unmanned suction sweepers.
To sum up the advantages of autonomous driving, it is simple.
First, it's safer. Because machines don't make stupid mistakes like people, many traffic accidents are mainly caused by four letters starting with "D", the first is fatigue driving, the second is drunk driving, and the third is distracted driving. The last one is drug driving and drug addiction. Machines don't do these things, so machines can be safer and cheaper than people, and as time goes on, Moore's Law still works, hardware will get cheaper and cheaper, and manual labor will become more and more expensive as people's living standards improve. So relatively speaking, autonomous driving will be cheaper.
Second, it has a higher commuting efficiency and can also save labor. Many East Asian countries and Western Europe have basically entered the aging population, and the aging has brought a lot of social problems. The age of taxi drivers in the first-tier cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen is getting older year by year, and young people are no longer driving taxis, so we must use autonomous driving to solve this problem.
Third, it solves a lot of social problems. Taking the new crown epidemic as an example, when the quarantine policy was first implemented in 2021, 150,000 people were isolated in one area, and once they wanted to drive a truck to deliver daily necessities, a truck driver would become a red code. WeRide solved this problem by using a purely unmanned vehicle to transport it in Guangzhou.
To put it simply, autonomous driving does bring great social value, which is crucial.
In terms of commercial value, in four words, it is "rich and rivaled". According to Morgan Stanley, by 2030, the global mobility market will be 1The market share of 7 trillion is equivalent to the total national GDP of Spain and Italy, so if companies can occupy this market, they can produce at least two or three less companies that exceed BAT and bytes, which is why the world's major technology companies do not hesitate to invest heavily in autonomous driving.
Of course, autonomous driving is much more difficult than we expected, and I remember Elon Musk saying in 2017 that by the end of 2017 he was going to drive a self-driving car from a parking lot in New York to a parking lot in Los Angeles without any human takeover. In 2018, he continued, and in 2019, he continued to say that until 2023, he said that this is a scientific problem, not an engineering problem, and engineering cannot solve it. Of course, the main problem is that Tesla insists on using cameras, not lidar, and the good cars on the biological island robotaxi have lidar on them, and if we use lidar, we can effectively avoid the problems faced by Tesla.
WeRide's revenue is hundreds of millions, the highest among L4 autonomous driving companies in the world
I think autonomous driving technology will create a huge opportunity for the development of intelligent and connected cars, and what we need to do now is to make it a reality.
Let me briefly report on WeRide has been in the development zone for nearly 7 years, some of the achievements we have made, and how we have commercialized.
First, we got hundreds of millions of yuan in revenue, which is the highest among L4 autonomous driving companies in the world, which was selected by this year's American "Fortune" magazine, which selected 51 companies in the world that have changed the world, Tesla ranked first, Walmart and GM ranked first.
II. Third;But the only Chinese car company in the top 10 of Fortune magazine's Global Change of America is WeRide, which ranks No. 8.
At present, we have obtained test licenses in the United States, including California, Nevada, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore, and we have also obtained pure unmanned licenses in Beijing and Guangzhou in China.
At present, we have accumulated 25 million public autonomous driving miles, and we have more than 600 autonomous vehicles. We have self-driving taxis, self-driving minibuses, self-driving logistics vehicles, self-driving sanitation vehicles, and soon you will see a car produced by Chery called "New Era", which is equipped with the L3 autonomous driving assistance system produced by WeRide, and soon we will have a lot of production cars.
In terms of technology, we have been relatively perfect, and what we need to do is to commercialize it in a solid manner. Our Robotaxi is currently in Huangpu District, Guangzhou, and users can drive this car at any time as long as they have an appIn Yizhuang, Beijing, basically during rush hour, you can also call this car like a taxi. Provincial and ministerial leaders and diplomatic envoys from all over the country come to Bio Island or Beijing Yizhuang every day to test these cars. In the future, we expect that the skill of driving a car will be like riding a horse for modern people, horseback riding will become a person's hobby, or become a sport, but it is not a necessary skill, we hope that in the future, your car, as long as you need to take out your mobile phone, there is a car for you to drive at any time from point A to point B, and it is much cheaper than Didi, cheaper than you raise your own car, this is the future we can see.
Guangzhou Bio Island has an autonomous driving base, and users can enjoy the world's first L4 pure driverless minibus that has won the German Red Dot Design Award, with no steering wheel and no accelerator pedal from the beginning of the design. Basically, you can see that all the cars on the bio island are self-driving sanitation suction sweepers, which is the world's first commercial automatic suction sweeper that is actually operating in such a large area.
We have also cooperated with the Middle East and Jiangling logistics vehicles, and recently we have started to use pure unmanned vehicles to deliver parcels, and it is likely that in another two or three years, every package you receive will be delivered by purely unmanned vehicles. We have also reached an in-depth cooperation with Bosch, and soon you can see a new type of car - the new era of Chery, which will use the automatic driving assistance system jointly developed by Bosch and Wenyuan, which can realize the urban NOA function, high-speed point-to-point, basically you don't have to drive anymore in many places, and it will not be very expensive, more than 300,000 cars can be bought.
We have also cooperated with car companies in many countries, and we are deeply aware that autonomous driving should be made to the sea, to face a broader market, our strategy is to face the world, deeply cultivate the Middle East, we have a layout in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. We have shown the world China's strength, not long ago Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's first stop in China was Guangzhou, where his first stop was WeRide to test our self-driving minibus, which is also the first national head of state to sit in a purely unmanned minibus, which is a manifestation of our technological strength. If you don't have the technical strength, how dare you let the head of state go to a purely driverless minibus?Because we've gone through multiple rounds of testing.
Finally, I would like to conclude that WeRide's progress in the past few years is basically to master the core technology of autonomous driving, adhere to independent innovation, and lead the development of the industry with scientific and technological innovation. WeRide has also been recognized by the society and the world, and we have applied for more than 1,000 patents. WeRide will continue to do a good job in autonomous driving, and we plan to deploy fully unmanned self-driving taxis in more than 4 cities in China by the end of 2024, and minibuses will be deployed in more than 10 cities.
Although the autonomous driving market has now entered the so-called low tide, I want to give you some confidence: countless technologies have experienced peaks and valleys, and I think that in 2025, autonomous driving will usher in a first year of explosion, please wait and see.