Recently, Zhiji Auto announced that its vehicles equipped with L3 autonomous driving functions have officially obtained a high-speed autonomous driving test license in Shanghai. It is reported that the test model will carry out L3 high-speed automatic driving road test in the designated area of Shanghai to accelerate the development and implementation of high-end intelligent driving products.
Here, the author will take you to a brief understanding of what L3 autonomous driving is. Level 3 has long been considered a watershed moment between assisted driving and autonomous driving. For vehicles with L2 functions, the driving rights and vehicle control rights belong entirely to the human driver, and the L2 function is only "assisted", and the driver is still required to pay attention to the vehicle and road conditions at all times and supervise them in a timely manner. For vehicles with L3 functions, the driving system can take over the control of the vehicle from the driver under certain preset conditions, which also brings the problem of determining the responsibility for driving accidents: the vehicle is autonomous, so if there is an accident, is it considered a vehicle? Branded? Or is it a driver's?
At present, China's mass-produced models are generally in the L2 level assisted driving stage, even if some car brands will use "L2+", L299" and other words to advertise their products, but in essence, they are still Level 2 autonomous driving.
Not long ago, the four ministries and commissions jointly issued the "Notice on Carrying out the Pilot Work of Intelligent Networked Vehicle Access and Road Access", announcing that intelligent networked vehicles with mass production conditions and automatic driving functions can carry out road traffic pilots in limited areas after obtaining access permits. At the same time, it is clarified that the responsibility for accidents that occur when autonomous driving is turned on will be the responsibility of the operator. Zhiji Auto revealed that it is applying for the L3 announcement of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology for the access pilot, and is expected to be the first batch of models to enter the L3 autonomous driving access pilot.
Although many brands now mainly promote urban high-end intelligent driving, high-speed high-end intelligent driving and other functions, but the real autonomous vehicles still need to carry out a large number of first-class tests, test bench evaluations, test sites, closed road tests and public road tests before the real "road" verification, professional road testing is not only an important means to promote the maturity of autonomous driving technology, but also the basic and necessary link for autonomous vehicles to be put into commercial application. Today, more than 30 cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, have issued autonomous driving road test licenses.
In the near term, many car companies have obtained L3 test licenses, such as BMW and Mercedes-Benz have successively obtained licenses, plus the recent Zhiji, it can be seen from here that the country is planning to accelerate the implementation of L3 level autonomous driving, and the author believes that more car companies will obtain test licenses in the near future.
Wen Yanfu.