After the advent of the autonomous driving era, the Internet industry has been the hardest hit.
AI is becoming a new battle force. Unmanned delivery vehicles, delivery robots, medical robots, logistics robots, and epidemic prevention robots have entered the battlefield one after another. This is the fifth article in the “unmanned” series of reports launched by Super Viewpoint. The epidemic will also continue to pay attention to the ups and downs of the unmanned industry after the end of the window period.
Oral | Special Observer Zhang Dezhao
Interview, editor | Barry
The need for autonomous driving has emerged
Wizards was established in 2015 and should be the first self-driving startup in China. When it was first established, I went to finance and went to Zhongguancun Roadshow. I was despised by a bunch of people. Everyone felt that autonomous driving was impossible. By the end of 2015, Baidu’s self-driving cars were on the fifth ring, and everyone slowly realized that there was no driver.
Our startup team is driverless throughout the graduate and doctoral periods, and we are particularly optimistic about its future. In the past 100 years, in fact, the development of science and technology has been based on human laziness. I think that the trend of people becoming more and more lazy will definitely not change. In the future, the general trend in the field of intelligence will basically rely on machines to replace or assist people.
The company’s overall thinking is to empower various industries with autonomous driving technology, including not only low-speed travel areas, but also high-speed travel related areas. However, subject to relevant conditions such as technology, laws and regulations, and social infrastructure, technology in low-speed areas will land faster. The high-speed scene is also in progress. For example, we are cooperating with special fleets, depots, etc., but there are not many applications in the high-speed field at present, and the speed to market will be relatively slow.
At first, everyone had high expectations for new things. At least 2018, autonomous driving attracted much attention. In 2019, it will gradually go down. If it attracts attention again, I think it may be in a certain scenario. It has been applied on a large scale and found that autonomous driving is valuable from a commercial perspective. But I really did not expect it was because of the outbreak.
I didn’t think much about the epidemic during the two days of the New Year, and I think it will soon pass. On the second day of watching CCTV news reports, no other people were seen on Wuhan Street, only sanitation workers. At that time I thought of the right and wrong of sanitation workers exposed to such an environment.Often dangerous, wearing masks and protective clothing at the same time also consumes already very tight medical supplies.
We happen to have unmanned sanitation vehicles. During discussions, we discovered that there are more and more application scenarios that can be generated by unmanned vehicles during the epidemic, and it is found that the epidemic is not as quickly controlled as imagined. At that time, we just received the demand from the cooperation unit to develop a self-driving diagnosis and treatment vehicle for the hospital. We started to organize the personnel in Beijing to come back and do the corresponding development.
When making a product, it must be done in order to solve the problem for the customer, whether it is to improve efficiency or reduce costs. To make it just needed, autonomous driving has no way to improve the customer experience. The emergence of the epidemic situation has just become a need to keep people away from the virus, and autonomous driving can just achieve this. So we quickly launched disinfection and cleaning vehicles, spray disinfection vehicles, and hospital self-driving diagnosis and treatment vehicles.
I wanted to put the upgraded unmanned vehicle in Wuhan as soon as possible, but when the prototype was first made, Wuhan was still in a state of chaos. Everyone pays more attention to the urgent deployment of medical supplies, such as drugs, masks, protective clothing, etc If you put a self-driving car in this state, it may add chaos to the hospital. Because the self-driving car needs to do some preparations before using it, volunteers need to spend a day to help collect routes and build maps so that the car can run by itself.
Later, we changed our strategy and first let unmanned vehicles go to Shanghai, Beijing, Wenzhou and other places. Only on February 24, we put three unmanned cleaning and disinfection vehicles “Snail Xiaobai” into Vulcan Mountain Hospital to clean and disinfect roads outside the building. At that time, the order in Wuhan had entered a relatively stable state, and the hospital had the energy to receive unmanned vehicles and learn some simple operations.
“Snail Xiaobai” was originally an unmanned cleaning truck. Now we have increased its water tank and spray nozzles, and replaced the materials with corrosion-resistant materials. This is not difficult for R & D, the difficulty lies in the supply chain. The employees did not return to work, and the courier did not return to work. Basically, things could not be bought. They could only find the inventory of other suppliers, and then returned to the headquarters for modification and upgrade by air.
The upgraded “Small White” performs cleaning and disinfection tasks in hospitals
Later in the Beijing Luohe Hospital, Chengdu Infectious Diseases Hospital, Xi’an Eighth Hospital, and several schools, Capital Medical University launched an upgraded version of unmanned cleaning and disinfection vehicles, mainly for unmanned people with strong isolation Driving cleaning and disinfection helps the hospital reduce manpower, improve disinfection efficiency, and ensure the safety of the hospital area. So far, we have launched unmanned vehicles in 12 hospitals.
Breaking the price-performance dilemma, multiple scenes need to be laid out
During the holiday, I received a lot of text messages from employees, investors, and customers, saying that the outbreak was an opportunity for autonomous driving companies.
In fact, the epidemic situation has a very negative impact on the company’s management. We received a lot of orders related to scenic tourism, hotels, and so on, but they were basically postponed after the year. There are also some government orders, because they are busy with epidemic prevention work and can only be put on hold temporarily. Orders from charities and hospitals also increased during this period, but this is completely incomparable with the reduction in the number of orders caused by the epidemic.
Except for these scenes in hospitals, buyers are afraid to spend money in other scenes, thinking about how to save themselves. Everyone is thinking about whether they can survive. If the epidemic can end in March and April, it will be fine. In case of June to June, it will be very tense if it will not end in July. Such as attractions, hotels, properties, and some government application scenarios. In this state, many customers ca n’t interview face-to-face. Companies like ours to B have poor online communication results, so it ’s best to see them offline. The effect of practical application.
We have been cooperating with domestic passenger car manufacturers, but the manned part has not been used on a large scale for a while. However, special applications, including police and national defense, are not affected by the epidemic, and there will be major breakthroughs this year. So this time the epidemic gave me a lot of inspiration-the company must seize some businesses that are not affected by cycles and natural disasters.
Unmanned cleaning and disinfection truck at Vulcan Mountain Hospital
Many people asked me if the epidemic could accelerate the development of the autonomous driving industry. If it is only for the rapid application of autonomous driving applications, I think this impact will not be too big, because the epidemic situation is still short-term. Once it passes, autonomous driving still faces practicality, cost-effectiveness, and safety. And laws and regulations.
The unmanned logistics vehicle “Snail must reach”, we started to promote it in 2017. There are not many orders out now. This is the status quo. The most fundamental reason is cost-effectiveness. Concerns about chicken or eggs first-courier companies and takeaway companies say that they will start using them when they reach a certain price; we will say that we will lower the price when a certain order quantity is reached. The costs of both parties did not reach that intersection. At current costs, it may take about two-thirds to get to that intersection.
In order to reduce the overall cost, we not only make logistics vehicles, but also products for multiple scenarios such as sanitation and security, and create basic technologies and product platforms. Like sensors, chassis The underlying technology and product components are shared by at least 80%. Cost can be reduced if the quantity is increased, and the mystery of “chicken first or egg first” will never jump out in the logistics scene.
The epidemic can, to a certain extent, cultivate everyone’s acceptance of autonomous driving and the habits of autonomous driving. This is a positive impact that the epidemic can have on autonomous driving. There may even be some companies taking the opportunity to transform into this field, but if there is no long-term investment and accumulation of grain, I don’t think they need to consider it.
After the epidemic, companies will pay more and more attention to cash flow. An indirect result is the adjustment of corporate strategy, which will transfer the less effective scenarios to the quickly effective application scenarios. In terms of organizational structure, enterprises will accelerate the application of third-party outsourcing platforms and robots. Enterprises are trying to reduce fixed costs and convert them into variable costs. When they encounter similar situations, companies can quickly lose weight.
If robots are used on a large scale, labor costs can be saved. In the future, everyone will not blindly expand the size of the staff, but will think more about how to ensure the security of the enterprise. To get through the difficulties is nothing more than open source and reduce expenditures. Some companies are reducing wages, but they will encounter great resistance during this period, so this period has a great impact on the remodeling of corporate culture. We also implemented a pay reduction policy for February only, and then returned to normal. But after the policy came out, more than 200 people in the company said that they would work with the company to overcome difficulties. I was particularly moved. Candid communication with employees during special periodsVery important.
It will take 8 to 10 years for self-driving cars to be popular
Laws, regulations, and insurance, including the public’s acceptance and awareness of autonomous driving, are the soft foundation for the popularity of driverless cars, and it is also a difficult foundation. People are still curious about autonomous driving. Our self-driving cars are running on the road, and we often encounter people who tease or even challenge it. This is a big challenge.
When low-speed unmanned driving is used in fixed areas, fixed roads, and other scenarios, only relying on the smart solution of the bicycle, that is, the vehicle’s own sensors can run, without relying on communication and other technical means. Once running on public roads, and the speed is increased to more than 60 kilometers per hour, if you still rely on the solution of installing sensors on the car, the cost of realizing unmanned driving will be extremely high. Therefore, if driverless wants to get on the road, it must be vehicle-road coordination, which involves the improvement of road infrastructure. If the communication structure of the road network system can be set up, the cost barriers of unmanned driving will be reduced significantly.
Self-driving cars perform tasks in the hospital
But for the popularity of driverless cars, the most fundamental thing is to reconstruct the business model of the automotive industry. Because everything wants to be popular, it depends on commercial success, not technical success.
At present, the business model of the automobile industry is mainly to C. Autonomous driving cannot be popularized in this mode, because if you spend so much money just to reduce the time you usually drive, then autonomous driving is actually not for ordinary people. Really attractive.
Autonomous driving has to be truly attractive to the common people. The model of the car factory must be changed from to C to B. In addition to the attributes of vehicles, passenger cars must also extend other attributes and money-making models. It must become a new terminal and pipeline to really make money. In addition to not needing to drive a car by yourself, its real strength lies in the era of the Internet of Things. The car can be used as a terminal to push information to passengers, and can be used as a pipeline to place people at any place they want to go.
So after the advent of the autonomous driving era, the biggest impact should be the Internet industry. At present, travel depends on Ctrip, where to go to book hotels, but in the era of autonomous driving, these platforms are completely unnecessary. After we reach a strange place, we can call a driverless car, just tell it the destination , It can use big data to know our preferences for hotel stays, and then target us to hotels that satisfy us. Even meals, shopping, attractions and other scenes can be realized, which is the real value of driverless.
The popularity of self-driving cars may be around 8 to 10 years. First of all, it must be mature in technology, and follow-up on regulations will take four to five years. After the self-driving cars are fully popularized, it will take three to four years to build a large-scale application scenario. Just like Alipay, cashless payment technology depends on the popularity of smartphones before it can establish application scenarios in the entire field. On the whole, the entire autonomous driving industry is still in its infancy. After the technology and regulations mature, the construction of commercial formats will be faster.
The “Super Opinion” column is now launching the “Special Observer Settlement” program, inviting entrepreneurs from various race tracks, leaders of large company business lines, and other front-line business practitioners to share your entrepreneurial insights, dry goods, and methodologies. , Your industry insight, trend judgment, and look forward to hearing your voice from the forefront.
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