By the end of 2023, all car companies are rolling up the number of NOA Kaicheng in the city. Xpeng announced that it will expand XNGP to 50 cities by the end of the yearIdeal announced that Ideal AD MAX will achieve the opening of urban NOA in 110 cities by the end of this year;NIO announced that its NOP+ has completed the verification of 250,000 kilometers of urban pilot routes, and opened 60,000 kilometers of routes in 200 citiesHuawei still adheres to the goal of enabling the NCA function in urban areas to be opened nationwide by the end of the year. Huawei, Ideal, and Weilai are very tight on the number of city openings, and Dayou urban areas will let car owners across the country open urban NOA at the end of the year.
Urban NOA is generally recognized as the last sector to complete L3 autonomous driving functions, and leading car companies focusing on intelligent driving are promoting their own urban NOA layout to strengthen their technical strength in the face of L3 autonomous driving. However, under the huge target slogan of car companies, the number of NOA openings in the cities of major brands is not high, and it is almost impossible to achieve exponential growth in half a month.
It seems that Huawei, which once shouted the loudest in the city's NOA, has now been overtaken by Weilai and Xiaopeng, and these two car companies have a high probability of successfully sniping Huawei.
Xpeng XNGP at the end of November OTA 44.25 cities have been opened in 0 push, and 27 new cities are being actively deployed. NIO has now completed 190,000 kilometers of verification routes, covering 134 cities across the country. The information released by Huawei only stayed in the six cities announced in August this year, and then Huawei's car companies such as Wenjie and AVATR did not disclose the number of cities. At this stage, the ideal has not announced the progress of the opening of the city NOA, but the completion of 110 cities in half a month really makes people sweat for the ideal R&D personnel.
Combined with the R&D speed of car companies, it may be a bit illogical to achieve their respective urban NOA goals in half a month.
From the data point of view, now Xpeng has announced specific open cities, and the rhythm of Xiaopeng's urban NOA opening is the first super-large city-second- and third-tier cities, which is more representative. Among the 25 cities in Xpeng Kaicheng, most of them are concentrated in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, except for Dongguan, and almost all cities outside Hangzhou are second-tier cities. Xpeng has opened 25 cities of NOA, and the key area is the Yangtze River Delta city circle, which is what we often call the "Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai Free Shipping Area".
NIO's NOP+ city opening strategy is based on the coverage standard of mileage roads, and the verification route can cover the city's first-level roads. On December 12, NIO completed 190,000 kilometers of verification routes in 134 cities across the country. NIO also officially announced the progress of the opening of NOA in the urban area and the road coverage of some cities, and the way for NIO to open the city is mainly to run through the main routes of the city.
However, the difference between NIO and Xpeng is that the proportion of county-level cities in the list of Kaicheng cities announced by NIO is higher, with 82 county-level cities, accounting for 61%. The first-tier cities have only opened up 9 cities, including Shanghai, Beijing, Xi'an, Nanjing and Tianjin. This means that NIO has adopted the practice of giving priority to county-level cities with lower difficulty in realizing the strategy of opening up the city in urban areas.
The number of first- to fifth-tier cities in the country is huge to 337, and NIO's current 134 cities account for only 39%. If the goal of covering cities across the country by the end of the year is reached, it will be necessary to complete twice the number of cities to open the city.
According to the current number of Kaicheng, the goal of Xpeng 50 cities is the best to achieve, because Xpeng chose to expand the city circle as the direction of Kaecheng, and did a good job of a geographical problem. Xiaopeng's 25 cities mainly revolve around the Yangtze River Delta Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai regions, and the new list of 27 cities began to be laid out in the Pearl River Delta region after the rich layout of the Yangtze River Delta city circle, and joined the Fujian city circle, which blossomed from point to surface.
Why do you say that it will be better to choose the right city circle and complete the city NOA goal?This goes back to a simple traffic geography problem, and the national traffic heat map in 2023 focuses on the Yangtze River Delta, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and the Chengdu-Chongqing urban agglomeration. These regions include a total of 63 prefecture-level cities and 79 county-level cities, and each city is closely connected.
Judging from the information we know so far, Xpeng's urban NOA opening goal is the least difficult to achieve, and it is the most likely car company to achieve the goal.
For car companies, the commercialization advantage of being the first to achieve the goal is to be able to have a greater say in terms of selling points, that is, to better grab customers. Nowadays, the penetration rate of intelligent driving models is increasing, which is also the main reason for car companies to be NOA in the rolling city.
The penetration rate of the M7 intelligent driving version has reached 60%, and the optional installation rate of intelligent driving in urban areas is as high as 75%.The Xpeng G9 intelligent driving version accounts for 80%, and the penetration rate of only assisted driving reaches 8974%。This clearly makes car companies find that urban NOA is valuable at the commercial level. On the other hand, Tesla's FSD installation rate in China is only about 15%, which indicates that users will not be interested in the "empty checks" of car companies.
At the commercial level, urban NOA is basically the only intelligent configuration that can appear as an option at this stage, and Huawei Wenjie needs to choose 15-1.80,000 yuan to achieve urban NOA. The ideal model needs to buy the AD Max version, which costs 40,000 yuan. If the previous boast is not realized, it will inevitably be crowned by users as "cutting leeks".
Another problem faced by car companies in Kaicheng is beginning to come to the fore, that is, the problem of low refinement after Kaicheng. Huawei's NCA in the Beijing area is clearly marked as covering the expressway within the 5th Ring Road and some urban roads outside the 5th Ring Road in Yizhuang, Haidian, and Shunyi.
Xiaopeng, which has achieved 25 cities in Kaecheng, still encounters problems such as large intersections and obvious hesitation of vehicle AI in Beijing and other cities, and many netizens have responded that it is still necessary to drive together to open XNGP. NIO owners have also reported that there will be breakpoints on the NOP+ pilot route and the low success rate of the right turn in the internal test version, which highlights that after the pursuit of Kaesong, the actual road section is not detailed enough, resulting in NOA driving in urban areas is still inseparable from manpower.
After the opening of the city, both NIO and Ideal adopted the early bird group as a priority experience method, which is essentially to enrich the road network information by benefiting the user's fleet. Both NIO and Ideal Experience Solutions are similar to fixed-point modes such as commuter NOA, which aim to supplement the heat map with user travel preferences and then open up the details of the urban road network. In the end, NIO and Ideal will realize the full rollout of urban NOA, but it still needs a large number of user shop data, and feed AI with driving data to enrich the large model of the road network.
There is a high probability that the best completion goal of urban NOA involution is Xiaopeng, but the refinement and richness of urban NOA in the later stage is a problem, and it is considered to open the city if you can't open a loop. In the end, the city NOA is far from being practically usable, and there is still a lot of distance to go.