This week's Baidu Jidu auto press conference, the live broadcast barrage that was originally open, was silently turned off in the midst of more and more curses. "They think that the public doesn't understand driverless driving anyway, so they may also think that they haven't seen a car." A lidar engineer was almost overjoyed when he looked at the concept car that looked like a semi-finished product and the design details that could be punctured instantly. Many people in the industry said that they came to watch cartoons.
Over the years, the large scientific and technological enterprises that are best at paralyzing themselves with technical concepts can not cover up the "group mockery" attack of Volkswagen and the automotive industry.
Many people joked that in the extremely crude VR scenes, they only remembered this sigaga
It's not really a big deal.
"Filling the current gap with the halo of new technologies and future commitments" is a common routine and trick learned by enterprises from the Internet (only Baidu, which has never dealt with the 2C market in history, is too inferior this time).
This trick accidentally spread to all walks of life, especially China's immature software technology industry and automobile industry.
What makes us feel most strange but interesting is the successive "skin changing" admission of self driving start-ups above L4.
It has to be said that Baidu has made a "good start".
From June to November last year, Xiaoma Zhixing, which was exposed and denied by car making in just five months, was not only the L4 autonomous driving enterprise with the most financing in China (with an estimated value of US $8.5 billion), but also a typical deceiver of the "L4 car making capital bureau".
However, driven by complex factors such as capital and personnel, they quickly gave up and looked for a feasible way again, including honestly entering the bidding process cycle of automatic driving solutions for first-line car factories. Of course, demons and ghosts are still incubating inside, and ideas emerge in endlessly.
"Car making story" is not bad, but it is too difficult. Even with the full support of local governments, the entry threshold of up to 10 billion yuan is hard to hide.
Therefore, when we firmly believe that under the general environment, L4 startups that lack landing practice and capital will not repeat the bad story of car building,
The former CEO of Tucson, Chen Mo, was listed in Tucson USA and successfully exited. After that, he once again engaged in hydrogen energy heavy truck manufacturing project in the US savings Bureau. In the past few months, he has raised more than US $80million.
No matter whether it succeeds or not, we are more worried that this "enthusiasm" will be copied to China again and continue to make money according to the book, but it seems that this trend is becoming more and more obvious.
"Hou" has always been a high-profile autox in L4 autonomous driving enterprises and a unique CEO Professor Xiao. With a widely circulated PPT and a three-year production and sales plan, it has established a new car building script system.
It turned out that we were wrong. The fault lies in the belief that there are not so many people in the world who are stupid and have too much money.
A madman or a liar
In any case, autox is one of the few high-level autonomous driving enterprises in China, which must be recognized.
According to the official, Xiaojianxiong, CEO of autox, who served as the founding director of Princeton computer vision and Robotics Laboratory from 2013 to 2016, has been honored as "Professor Xiao" in the industry, and was also selected as the "35 under 35" young scientific and Technological Talent Award of MIT science and Technology Review.
However, Professor Xiao's high-profile and exaggerated American propaganda words have gradually made the industry's evaluation of this Chinese autonomous driving enterprise more and more disturbing.
Some people think it's just the style of the founders, but many people say it's a liar full of lies.
For example, in 2020, autox released a "video of driverless cars driving on public roads in Shenzhen" and declared that "it has realized real driverless driving for the first time".
But later, according to the reporter's investigation, the passengers in the video were "actors", and these cars did not get license plates. Even the Shenzhen regulatory authorities have publicly stated that they "never approved".
In addition, their license plates in Shanghai were suspended for one month due to excessive publicity.
Public video from autox
For another example, in the middle of 2021, they launched an "automatic driving solution of up to 2million yuan" to be sold to the car factory or government that needs to set up a fleet, which was ridiculed as the "king of stacking materials". At this time, the industry will smile at the mention of autox.
At this time point, both the car factory and colleagues are almost pursuing low-cost delivery solutions. Therefore, the move was described by an industry person as "a struggle after deep despair".
There are 50 sensors in the scheme, and the calculation force is 2200tops
Later, in 2022, they trumpeted that they had broken the global record of "1000 unmanned vehicle fleet", which was equivalent to crushing Google waymo and domestic Baidu.
However, no matter from the single vehicle cost calculation or the on-site photo details provided to us, this so-called large-scale team has a lot of moisture.
The pictures were taken by people on site. Obviously, these are not 2million configurations. And the bigger problem is that the paste feeling is serious
Of course, the technology is right, and so are the engineers.
However, an enterprise, with a high voice of personal heroism and a sword of cyberpunk, is not only no longer applicable to the current software market, but also to the consumer automotive market that is "late but always beaten".
We found the "Alex Automotive Technology (Baoding) Co., Ltd." registered by Professor Xiao from Tianyan. All the information seems very common. This is indeed an automobile company controlled by Xiaojianxiong, the founder of autox, in June 2021, but it does not show the relationship with the main body of autox.
However, in this ppt called "Electrolux Auto", in addition to the shocking words, it is not so much a business plan, but more like an unmanned car publicity book for local governments.
First of all, we don't know whether the words "the world's largest" and "China's only" in the plan violate China's relevant advertising laws and regulations. However, whether these statements are exaggerated or contrary to the facts, they can not shake the current uncertainty of the robotaxi industry.
Not to mention the misty market prospect of robotaxi, otherwise, there will be no corporate financing difficulties and the move of defecting from auto companies.
It is believed that the industry personages, investment institutions and the first and second tier cities have long been disenchanted by the boasting of market potential. The "prospect theory" here seems to be more like the preparation for "industry sinking in cities below the third tier".
Of course, there is no problem with 2050 as the node. It depends on how to ensure the continuous capital input within 30 years.
In addition, there is a common "one leaf blots out the eyes" trick in the automatic driving industry (below), which uses some rankings to prove their technical ability.
Once again, the autonomous driving disengagement report released by the California vehicle administration every year is never a list, it is just a California test data spontaneously uploaded by enterprises.
Two years ago, many Chinese enterprises had put the test focus on China, so this data is less referential; In addition, as of February 2022, the total test mileage of Google waymo exceeded 2.3 million miles, while that of autox was only 50000 miles. The data here is only MPI data.
There are many more. These exaggerated compliments, which are used to prove that they are leading in the country and have a great prospect, basically occupy half of the whole plan, but the details of the car building plan are still missing.
Even if they are not industrial people, the public now has a basic understanding of L4 automatic driving - Baidu, Xiaoma, Wenyuan, Yuanrong and other unmanned car enterprises seem to have been more or less offended by the "countless unique ones".
In fact, it is only in the last few pages that we see the product introduction and timetable for autox car building.
But what is slightly strange is that we haven't seen the word "morality" anywhere except for the brand name - "Zhijian automobile", which means "Tao Te Ching".
They use a lot of vague words to emphasize their automobile intelligent ability, but they are ambiguous about whether they have the ability to produce a complete car and lack the necessary planning information.
But what makes people feel more absurd is that these very sci-fi car concept drawings and architecture drawings seem to be downloaded from the Internet, not the original design of the enterprise. We see that part of it comes from Apple Original design of the company. (is this a taboo for designers?)
It's hard not to worry about whether it will make some necessary reference like a big factory.
But the most incredible thing is that "without the automobile architecture and product design drawings, the models and parameters were first seen; without the products, the marketing schedule was first drawn up".
This may be the fatal blow sent by technology companies to traditional industries? Use "surprise" to win.
The market strategy of selling enterprise (government) customers first and then consumer users... Is very localized
Their target market is very strange - the driverless market. This refers to all vehicle models with automatic driving function?
According to the consumer market target data and production plan of Zhijian automobile in different years, they want to achieve the sales target of those new car makers that have been established for at least 6 years within 4 years.
After the crossing, it is obvious that this ppt has an obvious intention. The first one is to expand the unmanned vehicle purchase business through local policy preference and investment promotion plan, but there are few details of the expansion, and the words are empty.
Another implicit intention is to finance local picture cakes, and finally continue to finance and list through the new story of "building cars".
It can be seen with the naked eye that it is difficult for the current autonomous driving enterprises to "go public". While struggling to dismantle the structure, many enterprises are also trying to make the book look better. Besides, is it really better after listing?
Among the advantages of this autox subsidiary named Alex, the "high success rate of listing" is impressively listed. It is not clear how this conclusion can be reached, but it is clear that cooperation with suppliers and technical reserves are not necessary conditions.
In fact, the business plan became even more confused after we read it in a muddle. We are trying to reflect on whether there is something wrong with ourselves.
After silence, a conclusion was drawn:
Even if we have been paying close attention to the development of China's autonomous driving industry, we may be wrong, because we really do not have enough ability to wake up people who are willing to pretend to sleep.
"When a technology company with an automatic driving sign wanted to build a car, many investors advised me to follow in: 'whether they really built a car or not, it has nothing to do with us. Let's grab this wave (first in position)." a respected industry insider recalled this dialogue in 2020 to us, which is still of great reference significance now.
Over the past three years, numerous domestic car making entrepreneurial teams that "travel once in an auto show" have fallen rapidly without giving car buyers the opportunity to "taste the fresh", which has proved the "rigid demand" of car making for enclosure of land and money.
It can only be said that it is not just the power of an enterprise that makes the industrial barren cavity go.