The topos “gold rush mood” sounds rather understated: Countless start-ups, tech giants, investors and others are looking forward to the age of autonomous driving with great expectations. This applies in particular to US and Chinese high-tech companies. A whole army of interested parties has set out to dig for the new mobility gold.
In addition to companies, autonomous driving is also putting Chinese megacities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Nanjing and Wuhan in an almost intoxicating mood. China is by far the largest and most dynamically growing mobility market. Whoever manages to set up functioning autonomous driving systems first in the People’s Republic has the chance to set up a monopoly. This is exactly what should have driven the US group Google to develop autonomously driving cars at an early stage. However: In the race for the robo-cars, many expectations have not yet been met.
Google started its autonomous driving projects around 2010. Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford scientist, became project leader. Thrun had been experimenting with self-driving cars, winning an autonomous driving race sponsored by the US Department of Defense – the DARPA Grand Challenge – with an upgraded VW Touareg. In just under seven hours, he brought his robo car to the finish line over a good 200 kilometers of desert terrain.
However, Thrun’s concept was not ready for the market. As early as 2012, Google co-founder Sergey Brin declared that citizens would have access to autonomous vehicles in less than five years. To date, however, there can be no question of this.
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Elon Musk also started dynamically with his Tesla autopilot. In the USA, the autopilot soon had to be replaced by the “Full Self Driving” software. The crucial difference to Thrun’s project, however, is that Musk’s “machine learning” software was able to collect huge amounts of data from actual journeys – and thus adapt its algorithms to reality. Despite the further development, however, Tesla did not succeed in developing an autonomous vehicle that any citizen could use.
Where does the new gold rush mood come from?
The classic automotive groups, on the other hand, have long approached the topic of autonomous driving with keen fingers – they only integrated individual assistance functions from the range of Advanced Driver Assist Systems to support the driver, especially in dangerous traffic situations. A major reason for the reluctance was the expected high costs and thus high selling prices for autonomously driving cars.
The so-called Level 4 automation, which allows vehicles to be driven without human intervention, was only approved for special areas such as motorway driving at up to 80 kilometers per hour. But where does the new gold rush mood suddenly come from in view of this rather dreary history? It comes from the fact that autonomous driving is no longer a project by pioneers like Thrun or Musk, but a concerted action by many companies, organizations and cities. Who are the key players?
On the one hand, there are the car manufacturers, who, particularly in China, are convincing their particularly software-savvy customers with technology. An example: The car brand AION of the Chinese car manufacturer GAC recently presented the SUV AION LX PLUS. Among other things, the model has 35 intelligent sensors, six millimeter wave radars, twelve ultrasonic radars and eight high-resolution cameras.
In addition, a computer is integrated into the SUV, which costs around 45,000 US dollars, which can handle no fewer than 200 trillion arithmetic operations per second. Such high-performance computers make it possible that autonomous driving in China will soon no longer be a vision of the future.
China is pushing ahead with autonomously driving trucks
On the other hand, logistics service providers, driving service providers and food suppliers are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in start-ups that deal with autonomous driving. The food supplier Meituan, for example, is represented in over 2,800 Chinese cities and processes 43.6 million orders every day. In the fall of 2021, Meituan was already using 100 autonomously driving robo-cars, completing more than 100,000 orders.
China’s largest IT company group Alibaba recently subjected similar projects to a practical test on the campus of Zhejiang University: On Black Friday, 22 robots called “Xiao Man Lv” – which can be translated as “robust donkey” – delivered 50,000 packages to the campus residential buildings. The last mile in logistics in China will soon be a robot mile. In addition, China is pushing forward with autonomously driving trucks.
This is how the start-up Plus.ai tests. its L4 software on Chinese roads with heavy trucks. Logistics service providers from Europe have already ordered 10,000 self-driving trucks. The Chinese truck manufacturer FAW-Jiefang already offers its commercial vehicles with the L4 system from Plus.ai.
Driverless robo-taxis are already being encountered in the People’s Republic. AutoX is the first company to have such taxis “live” on an area of 168 square kilometers. In the capital Beijing, the companies Baidu Apollo and Pony.ai have the license to drive 67 robo-taxis over a distance of 350 kilometers. The vehicles collect their guests at 600 stops. By 2025, Baidu-Apollo plans to deploy robo-taxis in 65 major cities.
Prices are likely to drop spectacularly
Last but not least, Chinese metropolises are competing for autonomous driving. The Shanghai Transport Commission, for example, announced last November that it would vigorously promote the commercial use of intelligent taxis, buses, freight services and last-mile deliveries. There is no question: Autonomous vehicles will change the world faster than many can imagine today.
And the prices are likely to drop spectacularly. The young Chinese company DeepRoute.ai. announced that it would soon be offering complete systems for making cars drive autonomously at a price of 10,000 US dollars. Things are progressing dynamically in China. And in Germany and Europe? In order not to lose touch with the mobility of the future, joint projects with the pioneer China are indispensable – especially since driverless cars and trucks will significantly reduce logistics costs, which is an important competitive factor on the world market.
However, it seems questionable whether such German-Chinese cooperation is possible given the Federal Foreign Office’s policy, which is primarily oriented towards human rights aspects. Instead of relying on idealism, our China policy should therefore allow for more pragmatism. Because one thing is certain: If we are largely dependent on Chinese technology for mobility in the future, Berlin’s scope for humanitarian interventions in relation to Beijing will tend towards zero. And that would not be in the interests of human rights.
The author: Ferdinand Dudenhöffer is director of the Center Automotive Research, Duisburg.
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