In 2009, 13 years ago, the predecessor of waymo, Google's autonomous driving department, was established. Many people regard it as a sign of the beginning of the development of automatic driving in the United States. In 2015, traviskalanic, the CEO of Uber, founded the autonomous driving department and threatened to replace human drivers with autonomous driving in the near future.
There is no calm day in the self driving Jianghu.
Article ｜ Lianzi editor ｜ vickyxiao
In 2016, Uber's rival LYFT did not miss this track. John Zimmer, CEO of LYFT, made a speech and predicted that in 2021, most of LYFT's travel services will be met by automatic driving. In 2025, private cars will be a thing of the past. Everyone will rely on automatic driving to go out.
Also in 2015-2016, many self driving start-up companies in Silicon Valley nuro, zoox, Argo AI, which later became the backbone of the industry, sprung up like mushrooms. The round table discussions on self driving all over the world made people believe that self driving has ushered in a big explosion. 10 years later, young people no longer need to learn the skill of driving.
However, these heroic words can not resist the reality in the end - 13 years have passed, and autonomous driving has not entered people's daily life as predicted by these companies at the beginning; But it is not without achievements. The whole industry has undergone a reshuffle in the past two years and has taken on a new look.
It is worth noting that the automatic driving pursued by these companies is not the same as the misleading "automatic driving" exaggerated in Tesla advertisements. No matter waymo, cruise or other companies, they are all pursuing the full automatic driving of level 5 without any human attention and intervention. At present, Tesla's assistant driving level is only level2, that is, partial automatic driving. This article will also only discuss the development of fully autonomous driving companies.
Waymo: first mover, last mover
Joel Johnson was nervous and funny in the back seat of the car. Last year, as a passenger, he experienced the self driving taxi operated by waymo in the suburb of Phoenix.
To his amusement, the whole car had been stuck for 14 minutes without moving. The one that stuck the car was an inconspicuous conical barricade. What made him nervous was that there was no driver in the cab, and he could do nothing in the back row.
It is this barrier that human drivers can avoid in less than a second, which eventually leads to long-term congestion in the whole street. 14 minutes later, waymo's technicians arrived, and the car started unexpectedly, which startled Joel. He posted the video on youtube, which instantly attracted 400000 people.
This is not the only embarrassing moment for waymo in recent years. For this company, the most inexplicable may be the massive resignation of the senior management team. Last year alone, CEO John Krafcik, chief security officer (CSO) deborahhersman, timwillis, CFO gerdwyer, who is in charge of the company's factory and international supply chain and serves as the company's general manager, and adamfrost, who is in charge of its autonomous driving partner, left their posts.
The reason why Dwyer's departure shocked the outside world is that he joined Google in 2006 and joined waymo a few months after waymo announced its independence in 2016. He is a veteran.
It can be said that no matter how waymo pretends that everything is fine, the collective resignation of senior executives still makes the outside world quite worried about its future. And this fear has gradually spread to the field of automatic driving - 13 years have passed, and it seems that there has been a lot of progress, but the call that automatic driving once replaced human drivers seems to have become a blank check.
So far, billions of dollars have been invested in the field of automatic driving. Tim Papandreou, a former employee of waymo, said that now people realize that there is a long way to go before autonomous driving. In the past 10 years, this industry has been in a state of flowering without fruit.
Startups: reshuffle in the Jianghu
This "no result" "This has directly led to the gradual decline of the whole industry in the past two years. Some small players have gone out of business directly, and some surviving players have chosen to tie up with large enterprises and form alliances to keep warm. After 2020, the whole industry has completed frequent reshuffles again and again, which has finally become today's multi-level situation. The biggest change in the alliance is the entry of technology giants and traditional car companies, and found the most suitable automatic in the autonomous driving Jianghu Driving start-ups to form alliances - this alliance is not just about investing money, but more importantly, they try to combine autonomous driving technology with their own products and businesses to seek the possibility of commercialization.
After 2020, after many years of high valuation and high investment foam, the whole industry seems to be on the decline. Only in the more than one year from March 2020 to April 2021, the self driving truck company starsky robotics declared bankruptcy and shut down all businesses. The company founded in 2015 raised more than US $21million, and its round a financing at the end of spring 2018 alone was US $16.5 million. The investors behind it include many famous investment banks, including YC and Shasta ventures.
In 2020, zoox, an autonomous driving company, was acquired by Amazon with us $1.2 billion. The autonomous driving company, also founded in 2014-2015, already has an overvalued value of $3.2 billion in the financing process in 2019. This was also the largest acquisition in Amazon's history at that time. This is not the first time that the giant Amazon has shown its interest in autonomous driving - as early as 2019, Amazon participated in Aurora's round B financing and invested more than $500million.
Although the number of autonomous driving companies is limited, there are many lawsuits of plagiarism and intellectual property in this circle. In 2019, Tesla sued zoox for stealing trade secrets through its former employees. Finally, the court ruled that zoox paid a large amount of compensation to Tesla. Because, when Amazon's acquisition was revealed, musk made a mockery on twitter without any concealment.
At the end of 2020, a major event occurred in the field of automatic driving, that is, Uber officially sold its automatic driving Department ATG to aurora. Meanwhile, as part of the transaction, Uber injected US $400million into the latter. ATG was a hot potato for Uber at that time. One year before the shutdown, ATG brought only $42million in revenue to Uber, but it caused a loss of about $500million. Uber can't afford to burn the money for the dream of autonomous driving that can't see the result in the distant future. According to the prospectus submitted by Uber before listing, the valuation of ATG department is about US $7.2 billion. At that time, Uber had invested more than $3billion in this business.
Just as Uber's entry into the industry in 2015 marked the first year of automatic driving, Uber's exit from the industry this year was also considered by many people in the industry as an important sign of the decline of the industry.
Since then, there have been more industry acquisitions. For example, at the end of 2020, nuro acquired Ike, the then autonomous truck company. In the spring of 2021, cruise acquired another startup company, voyage.
In April, 2021, Uber's rival LYFT failed to realize its heroic words in 2015, and finally could not bear the pressure. It sold its 6-year-old autonomous driving business to Toyota's Woven planet. At that time, the transaction price was about $550million.
In March, 2022, General Motors spent US $2.1 billion to acquire cruise shares held by Softbank, and made an additional US $1.35 billion investment in cruise instead of Softbank. At present, GM owns more than 80% of cruise and has an absolute say.
Car enterprises: enter the market with cash capacity
As mentioned above, after a major reshuffle brought about by industry integration in the past two years, traditional car companies and technology giants have entered the market and become the most important player in the whole automated driving Jianghu through acquisition and strategic cooperation. These car companies include Tesla, BMW, Ford, Volkswagen, Nissan, Toyota, Volvo and Hyundai.
We have simply combed the alliance relationship after the reshuffle.
First, the first group of important players are waymo and Chrysler. The two companies signed an exclusive cooperation agreement in July, 2020. The full name of Chrysler is Fiat Chrysler, which is the product of the merger of Fiat and Chrysler. According to the agreement, waymo will integrate its auto drive system into Fiat's Pro master van. In addition, Chrysler also opened its future level4 auto driving business to waymo.
The second important group of players is general motors and cruise. And their way of alliance is the acquisition mentioned above.
The third important player is Aurora, which acquired Uber, and Toyota, which is working closely with Aurora to acquire LYFT automatic driving. Maybe Uber and LYFT have been fighting for so many years in the field of automatic driving, and they will not expect this result in the end.
The fourth important player that cannot be ignored is Amazon, which chose to complete the alliance by acquiring zoox. In addition to the acquisition of zoox, Amazon also has a lot of layout in autonomous long-distance transportation. For example, last summer, they signed a $150million order for auto drive system with plusai, an autonomous truck company. Meanwhile, Amazon purchased 20% of the company's option shares.
The fifth is Ford, Volkswagen and their joint autonomous driving company Argo AI.
From this point of view, automatic driving in the United States has entered the integration period. The alliance between these companies is definitely not just an investment relationship of money. More importantly, they hope that through cooperation, they can accelerate the discovery of business application opportunities.
Taxi + distribution: multi tentacle landing attempt
For most automatic driving companies, a mainstream application direction is robotaxi, which carries passengers. Although it is the same taxi business, the progress of each company is different - some do not need drivers, some can walk in busy metropolises, and some are considering going to those areas with bad weather to accept challenges.
Waymo has provided driverless services to passengers in Phoenix, San Francisco and other places in the United States. In actual business, there is no driver sitting in the driver's seat. Although there is still the "awkward moment of being motionless for 14 minutes", on the whole, waymo is the most cutting-edge company and has the most experience in this regard.
The city chosen by GM and cruise for their rental business is also San Francisco. Mary Barra, CEO of general motors, said publicly: "this is an important step towards our commercial plan of paying taxis. In 10 years, our business will bring about $50billion in revenue." in their test in San Francisco, no human driver also appeared in the driver's seat.
Toyota and Aurora jointly test driverless cars in Texas. The test vehicle is Toyota Sienna equipped with auroradriver kit.
Amazon and zoox chose Seattle for their autonomous driving test. However, so far, their tests have not involved public passenger carrying business. They chose Seattle because they wanted to challenge the rainy and snowy weather in Seattle to see if these external factors would affect the identification of sensors. In addition, the company is slightly different in the body design of autonomous taxis. Their car is designed as a two-way electric unmanned car. It is two-way driving, four-wheel steering, pure electric, without throttle, no steering wheel, no driver's seat, and only four face-to-face passenger seats. It can be said that it has completely subverted people's understanding of the appearance of the car. Although this layout is very suitable for rental reception, at present, this business has not been started. It is a relatively backward "player" from the perspective of robotaxi.
Picture from zoox official website
Finally, let's talk about another application direction of top players in the field of automatic driving technology - last mile delivery.
At present, in addition to cooperating with Ford and Volkswagen to carry out robotaxi business in Miami and Austin, Argo AI and Ford are also trying to apply in the field of short distance distribution.
Argo AI has formed an alliance with Wal Mart to conduct pilot cooperation to provide driverless distribution services for online shopping customers. Since September last year, Wal Mart has put this business in Austin, Miami and other places. In the introduction video, after the Ford car equipped with Argo AI stopped at the gate of Wal Mart, Wal Mart's purchasing agent placed the goods on the back seat, and finally the "last mile" of transportation was completed by an autonomous vehicle. After parking, users only need to take their own goods from the back seat.
However, in addition to the expensive autonomous vehicle scheme, some companies are trying to complete the task directly with lower cost self driving robots. Doordash announced in November last year that he planned to develop his own transport robot. Similarly, Uber is also planning to transfer its efforts on autonomous vehicle to the field of autonomous distribution. Ubereats is cooperating with automatic driving company motional and automatic driving distribution robot company serve robotics to realize automatic driving distribution in Los Angeles. However, it is not clear whether ubereats depends on auto driving or robot distribution. Serve robotics was once a part of Uber. Later, it became independent and established a new company.
Although these applications mentioned above are still in a very early stage, and there is no sign of profit, at least, the commercial logic of autonomous driving has become clearer and clearer after some large companies join.
Technical and mass production issues
In addition to being difficult to make profits in the short term, autonomous driving companies also face some technical problems and difficulties in mass production. Even waymo, the technology leader, can't escape this.
In 2017, when waymo announced the start of automatic driving business (there were drivers in the driver's seat) in Phoenix, an employee of the company was told by the company that they would expand to 9 cities in the next 18 months.
”Waymo's internal staff often said that we had solved 99% of the problem of driverless driving. We are ready. We just need to start the car. " A former waymo employee said in an interview with Bloomberg.
But the final result, at least for now, is that the last 1% has become a problem. Five years have passed since 2017, and waymo's 18 month plan still has no hope of realizing.
For the whole industry, small disturbances such as street constructors, cyclists and pedestrians are still difficult for technology companies to solve 100%. In addition, each city has also put forward various new regulations for autonomous driving. Bad weather - rain, sleet or snow - is also a difficult problem for autonomous vehicle. Before solving these seemingly minor but vital problems for passengers and road safety, it is almost impossible for the wide commercial use of fully automatic driving.
Waymo also encountered difficulties in automobile production. In 2018, waymo signed a contract to produce 20000 Jaguar SUV autonomous vehicle. A few months later, waymo said that he would cooperate with Chrysler to produce more than 60000 autonomous minivans.
"Not many are assembled." Later, Krafcik confessed. In fact, according to Bloomberg, there is a lot of disassembly work to be done. Due to the precision of the parts, many engineers have to manually disassemble some parts and components, and then install them back after checking the problems. Even a wire placed in the wrong position can take engineers days to find the problem. These difficulties make it difficult for waymo to complete mass production. According to some parts manufacturers, waymo has reduced Crysler's parts orders, and the number of Jaguar cars delivered is also less than the data published earlier.
Of course, the less and less "boasting" about autonomous driving in Silicon Valley in recent years is also related to the industry's increasingly cautious and cautious attitude. Especially after the fatal accident in Uber in 2018, those big words became less and less.
These companies are trying to readjust people's expectations, no matter what can be done about autonomous driving or when it will become popular.
Many former waymo employees mentioned that the parent company, alphabet, has been extremely sensitive and cautious about this for many years. In 2018, Krafcik planned to show the company's technical capabilities in many cities in the United States through a marketing campaign, but it was opposed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They decided not to over advertise the product before it was ready.
In addition to reducing publicity activities, waymo also officially announced that it would abandon the word self driving and use autonomous driving instead. The difference is that the former refers to fully automatic driving, while the latter includes assisted driving. For example, waymo has been carrying out public publicity activities for three years: let 'stand self-driving is changed to let's talk autonomousdriving. The autonomous vehicle industry association, which includes Ford, Argo AI, Aurora, cruise, nuro and other autonomous driving companies, has also officially abandoned the self driving description.
On the whole, although the automatic driving industry has not changed the lives of ordinary people within 10 years as expected 13 years ago, and is experiencing some lows, its application direction is becoming more and more clear. What is important is that this industry is still flowing with a lot of hot money from traditional car companies and technology giants, as well as a large number of technical experts. As joel said after the video burst, it seems that 99% of the development of automatic driving has been completed. This industry still has a long way to go for the last 1%.