Musk also wants a “carrot.”
A rare "Western radish" versus "Chinese radish" battle has started recently.
On October 10th local time, Tesla will hold the "Robotaxi Day," an event that Elon Musk has described as "historic" in its importance.
According to previous media reports, the upcoming Tesla Robotaxi model that will soon reveal the true face of Lushan is expected to eliminate the steering wheel and pedals, relying entirely on Tesla's FSD (Full Self-Driving) operation. The car will be equipped with a large screen inside to provide entertainment functions.
Just on the eve of Tesla's "Robotaxi Day," the leading Chinese autonomous driving company Baidu Apollo also made a major announcement, reportedly planning to enter the global market. It is rumored that they will test and deploy unmanned taxi services in locations such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Middle East.
At the same time, Apollo Autonomous Driving Open Platform 10.0 is also about to be released, which will be equipped with Baidu's latest autonomous driving large model ADFM (Autonomous Driving Foundation Model). This version is not limited to mainland China, as it is designed for global users.
Robotaxi's another key player, Waymo under Alphabet, has been busy as well. In early October, Waymo not only announced that its autonomous ride-hailing service in Austin, Texas is about to open to the public, but also partnered with South Korean Hyundai. Following collaborations with Jaguar Land Rover in India and a Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer, Waymo is once again introducing a new automotive company into its autonomous taxi fleet.
By now, the global landscape of the "big three" in autonomous driving, formed around Tesla, Waymo, and Pony.ai, is beginning to take shape. Their increasing investments in Robotaxi services are driven by the tempting prospects of the trillion-dollar potential market for autonomous driving.
In a recent interview, Cathy Wood, founder and CEO of Ark Invest, directly predicted that the Robotaxi business will be a $4-5 trillion revenue opportunity in the next five to ten years. She stated, "This is a SaaS model with a gross profit margin of over 80%." For comparison, current profitable new energy vehicle companies, including BYD, Tesla, and NIO, have not yet achieved a gross profit margin exceeding 30%.
Data from a third-party organization further supports the optimistic predictions of Miss Wooden on the Robotaxi. According to Frost & Sullivan's forecast, with technological advancements, favorable policies, and cost reductions, Robotaxi is expected to be implemented on a large scale around 2026. It is estimated that by 2030, Robotaxi will be widely adopted globally, and the global market size of Robotaxis is expected to exceed 3 trillion yuan.
With Waymo and DiDi Chuxing successively crossing the service deployment threshold, for the Robotaxi industry, the arrival of autonomous driving is no longer a question of "will it happen" but a question of "when."
Under the technological opportunities brought about by large-scale models, the once dormant autonomous driving industry is experiencing a new surge.
As the global leader in autonomous driving, Waymo's valuation reached $175 billion in 2018, making it the world's third-largest private company behind ByteDance and SpaceX. However, due to challenges in commercialization and difficulties in monetization, Waymo's focus on L4 and higher-level autonomous driving models is no longer favored by the market, leading to a significant drop in its valuation.
By 2020, after initiating a new round of $2.25 billion financing, Waymo's valuation was only $30 billion, a drop of more than 80%.
Former Waymo CEO John Krafcik said in a media interview, "Self-driving cars are really tough... It's harder than launching a rocket into orbit, because we have to constantly conduct repeated tests for safety before we can feel at ease."
Fortunately, the large-scale models have opened up a new path to L4 and above advanced autonomous driving modes for the industry, injecting confidence into the market.
In 2024, Alphabet, the parent company of Waymo, decided to invest 5 billion dollars to support Waymo in expanding its fleet and business scope.
As the only U.S. autonomous taxi company operating on a commercial basis, Waymo currently has a fleet of around 700 vehicles and has opened its self-driving taxi service to all consumers in San Francisco this year. In August, Waymo announced that its paid ride count had reached 100,000 trips per week.
Similar to Waymo's ambition, Tesla also aims to promote its Robotaxi service in various cities. However, Elon Musk has not yet launched exclusive autonomous vehicles or developed its ride-hailing software. All these uncertainties await answers from the "Robotaxi Day".
However, Musk has long been a fan of autonomous driving. As early as 2022, Musk convened a group of Tesla executives for a brainstorming session on Robotaxi. At that time, they decided to build Robotaxi into a vehicle that is smaller, cheaper, and slower than the Model 3.
As a major player in China aiming to compete with Waymo, "Luobo Kuai Pao" has also achieved many accomplishments. The sixth generation of Luobo Kuai Pao's unmanned vehicle has begun large-scale fully autonomous road testing. The sixth generation unmanned vehicle of Luobo Kuai Pao is equipped with Baidu Apollo's sixth-generation autonomous driving system solution, and the cost has decreased by 60% compared to the fifth generation unmanned vehicle.
Baidu's financial report shows that nationwide, Luobo Kuai Pao provided approximately 899,000 ride-hailing services to the public in the second quarter, representing a 26% year-on-year growth. As of July, the accumulated ride-hailing services provided by Luobo Kuai Pao to the public have exceeded 7 million times.
Since its official launch on an app in 2021, Carrot Run has successively opened to the public in 11 cities in mainland China, and has been approved to provide fully unmanned car-hailing services to the public in four cities, including Beijing, Shenzhen, Wuhan, and Chongqing.
Although the "big three" are all aiming for the ultimate goal of unmanned automation, they have different specific route choices and development strategies.
Tesla and Waymo have chosen the "single-vehicle intelligence" route, while Baidu has embarked on a new path of "single-vehicle intelligence + vehicle-road collaboration."
In the "smart bicycle" genre, Tesla and Waymo also have some differences.
Backed by Google's Waymo, it belongs to the radical faction of the "solo bike intelligence" route, and is guided by scientific thinking from the beginning, choosing a leapfrog development strategy, leveraging multiple sensors such as cameras and LiDAR for route assistance, heading straight for level 4 and above advanced autonomous driving modes.
In 2013, when developing the Autopilot function, Tesla also honestly followed the path paved by predecessors such as Waymo, using sensors like lidar, cameras, etc., to collect data. After manually labeling the data, engineers then wrote driving rule codes to determine how the car should drive.
Transformation arrives in 2021. In order to save costs and to speed up the popularization of autonomous driving functions, the business-oriented Musk decided to abandon lidar and high-definition maps, opting for a purely visual solution. Tesla has also chosen a progressive development strategy different from Waymo's, under Musk's engineering-driven guidance, emphasizing gradual progress, starting from L2 and moving step by step to L4 and higher levels of advanced autonomous driving modes.
Baidu has found a new balance by integrating the strategy of "downgrading technology and feeding back data" in the leapfrog development strategy of Waymo and the incremental development strategy of Tesla, advancing more quickly towards the commercialization of L4 autonomous driving on a larger scale.
Meanwhile, unlike Tesla and Waymo, which mainly rely on sensors such as the vehicle's own vision, millimeter-wave radar, and LiDAR for environmental perception, decision-making, and control execution through "single-vehicle intelligence," RoboSense, which follows the path of "single-vehicle intelligence + vehicle-road collaboration," believes more in the future of autonomous driving also needing to rely on upgrading intelligence at the roadside. By connecting human-vehicle-road-cloud elements through the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), it can ultimately provide comprehensive support services for autonomous vehicles.
If intelligent bicycles allow the vehicles on the road to be driven by experienced old drivers, then vehicle-road cooperation is like giving each vehicle an "eye in the sky," providing a God's eye view to help vehicles avoid all obstacles.
The purpose of doing this is to solve the long-tail problem of autonomous driving. In the field of autonomous driving, there is the 90/10 theory, which means that the final 10% of long-tail problems may require 90% or even more effort to solve. Vehicle-infrastructure cooperation starts from single vehicles and addresses the final 10% long-tail issues by integrating the roadside and cloud systems.
In addition to increasing multiple safety redundancies, vehicle-road coordination can further help reduce the overall manufacturing costs of unmanned vehicles.
Compared to the fifth-generation unmanned vehicle Apollo Moon launched in 2021, the sixth-generation unmanned vehicle being mass-tested on roads by Radish Run now has a production price of less than $30,000, a 60% cost reduction year-on-year.
The advancement in technology is also driving down the operating costs of unmanned vehicle operations in another aspect.
After the arrival of the big model technology trend, Luobo Kuai Pao became the world's first autonomous driving company to apply the Automatic Driven by Full Model (ADFM) technology. ADFM, supporting Level 4 autonomous driving, can achieve a safety level more than 10 times higher than human drivers.
Under the efforts of the various factors mentioned above, compared to the second quarter of last year, the cost per vehicle of "Carrot Run" has been reduced by more than half in the second quarter of this year. These factors together constitute a key milestone for "Carrot Run" to achieve financial balance in its target cities.
In the global landscape of automated driving, which includes Tesla, Waymo, and Neolix, only Neolix has taken the path of "intelligent bicycles + vehicle-road coordination" among the three major players. This choice is closely related to Neolix's firsthand experiences with China's complex road conditions and its adaptability to local conditions.
Coordinated transportation routes are more suitable for China's national conditions, and this cannot be achieved without the support of China's well-established infrastructure. From the central to local governments, all are actively promoting the construction of smart transportation systems.
In February 2020, the National Development and Reform Commission mentioned in the issued "Intelligent Vehicle Innovation and Development Strategy" that by 2025, it is planned to achieve regional coverage of vehicular wireless communication networks (such as LTE-V2X), and gradually implement applications of the new generation vehicular wireless communication network (5G-V2X) in some cities and highways. Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication is a core component of the V2X automotive network.
In addition to the large-scale infrastructure construction, several cities in China have successively introduced or accelerated the legislative process related to autonomous driving. As of now, the State Council Office has initiated the revision of the Road Traffic Safety Law and the Road Transport Regulations. More than 10 cities across the country are promoting local legislation on autonomous driving. Among them, Shenzhen, Pudong in Shanghai, Yangquan, Wuxi, Suzhou, and Hangzhou have already issued legislative documents. Wuhan, Beijing, Hefei, and Guangzhou are speeding up the legislative process.
With the reputation of being the world's largest market for new energy vehicles, China has also provided ample exploration scenarios for the implementation of autonomous driving applications. Leveraging the significant economies of scale brought by the vast market, it is bound to facilitate the pioneering large-scale application of autonomous driving in certain fields.
One of the manifestations mentioned above is the emerging new forces of car companies catching up in the new energy era. They have changed their previous image of trading market for technology and started to switch roles, becoming new technology exporters. For example, Volkswagen partnering with XPeng, Audi teaming up with SAIC...
But it should be noted that, although Chinese car companies have a trend of catching up in the market and technology, the expansion of their presence in the field of autonomous driving will still be a gradual process.
Competition in technology remains a top priority for many players. "Sister Wood" is outspoken, describing the Robotaxi project as a "winner-takes-all" project. She said, "The company that can transport people from point A to point B the fastest and safest, while reducing waiting time as much as possible, will win the majority of market share."
After RoboSense obtained a testing permit for autonomous driving in California, USA, to compete with Waymo, in the Chinese market, RoboSense is also about to have the opportunity to compete on the same stage with Tesla.
In September, Tesla previewed through social media that once regulatory approval is obtained, it will launch FSD in China and Europe in the first quarter of 2025.
By then, it will be time to see whether the Radish Run route prevails or if Tesla is stronger.
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