China AV - June Newsletter
June. 3rd: DiDi Autopilot established a safety work management committee to standardize safety management in all stages of R&D, testing, and operation of autonomous driving. Zhang Bo, CEO of DiDi Autonomous Driving, emphasized that “Improving road safety is the original intention of DiDi to develop autonomous driving, and therefore ensuring safety R&D, testing, and operation is the most important task in autonomous driving.”
June. 4th: The in-house development of a high-precision positioning system by AliDamo completed its latest iteration. The tightly coupled algorithm based on multi-sensor fusion realized centimeter-level positioning independent of GPS signals. The system has been deployed in the unmanned logistics fleet of AliDamo. Through the integrated design of software and hardware, it has reached the industry-leading positioning level at 10% of the cost.
June. 5th : Tencent Intelligent Mobility and Simba Technology (辛巴科技) signed a strategic cooperation agreement at Shenzhen. The two parties will carry out comprehensive and in-depth cooperation developing 5G new infrastructure, IoV, cloud, vehicle owner operations and big data. The two will jointly promote the digital upgrade of the automotive industry and explore business models for multi-scenario services.
June. 10th: GoHigh (大唐高鸿) and Alps Alpine announced that the new-generation C-V2X vehicle-grade module DMD3A production line, jointly built by the two parties, has been successfully completed and began mass production. The launch of the new product line of vehicle-grade modules has provided strong support and guarantee for automobile manufacturers downstream the intelligent network industry value chain.
June. 10th: JAC Volkswagen, Suning Motors and PATEO (博泰悦臻) jointly announced the launch of the strategic alliance. The three-party alliance will create a smart retail of electric vehicles based on a new scenario-based sales model, and carry out business cooperation in multiple fields to bring consumers a new electric travel experience.
June .10th: Beijing government released the “Beijing Action Plan for Accelerating New Infrastructure Construction (2020-2022)”. Focusing on IoV, the plan pointed out that it is necessary to speed up the construction of a highly reliable and low-latency private network that can support the operation of high-level autonomous driving (above L4 level), and accelerate the construction of vehicle-road collaborative information facilities in the autonomous driving demonstration area.
June. 15th: Waymo announced the results of the Waymo Open Dataset Challenge at the CVPR 2020 Autonomous Driving Workshop. Edge AI chip by Horizon Robotics won the first place in the world in four of the five challenges. In this challenge, Waymo opened up more than 10 million miles of autonomous driving mileage data collected by its autonomous vehicles in 25 cities. Drago Anguelov, Waymo’s chief scientist and project leader, said that the data set is one of the largest, richest and most diverse autonomous driving data sets in history.
June. 15th: China’s first 5G-enabled L4 autonomous vehicle, Dongfeng Sharing-VAN, roll off the production line. Dongfeng Sharing-VAN is the “1.0 plus” version, equipped with 4 LIDARs, 1-millimeter wave radar, 16 ultrasonic radars and 12 cameras. It has functions such as dynamic speed limit, roundabout passage, dynamic obstacle avoidance, multi-vehicle formation, automatic parking, remote control and dispatch monitoring.
June. 17th: QianXun SI and GAC NE jointly announced that the world’s first Beidou high-precision positioning 5G V2X smart car release and official launch. Relying on the Beidou high-precision space-time intelligent service provided by QianXun SI, the positioning accuracy of the “next-generation intelligent SUV”- GAC NE AionV reaches centimeter level, which makes driving safer and more reliable.
June. 23rd: WeRide made its autonomous vehicles available for ride-hailing on Alibaba’s map platform Amap. Riders in Guangzhou can summon one of WeRide’s autonomous-driving vehicles for a ride via Amap app. Without applying or go through eligibility review, riders can use the service for free during the first month, using exactly the same process as regular ride-hailing.
June. 24th: Tencent has released TAD Sim 2.0, the new generation of its autonomous-driving simulation platform, to improve the development and testing efficiency of autonomous driving. Compared with the previous generation, TAD Sim 2.0 fills the gap between road test data and virtual scenarios. Equipped with higher resolution in 3D scenario reconstruction and sensor simulation, the platform can make the simulation closer to reality. According to Tencent, TAD Sim 2.0’s cloud version is able to run more than 10 million kilometers per day.
June. 26th: Waymo and Volvo cars (owned by Chinese OEM Geely) announced an exclusive* partnership to build a new self-driving electric vehicle for a ride-hailing service. Volvo CTO, Henrik Green, added that the partnership with Waymo would create “new and exciting business opportunities” not only for Volvo-badged cars, but also the company’s Polestar and Lynk & Co brands. Future models of Polestar will be equipped with L4 level autonomous driving technology.
*The partnership exclusivity is one sided including Volvo L4 Robo-Taxi developments (L3 developed by Zenuity), while Waymo is working with multiple other OEMs as Renault-Nissan, Jaguar and FCA.
June. 27th: DiDi opened its autonomous driving service to the public for the first time. Users can register online through the DiDi app. After review is completed, a person is able to call an autonomous-driving vehicle for a free trial ride experience. At this stage, the service is limited to the open test road for AV at Shanghai, and the route passes through the core areas such as the automobile exhibition center, office area, subway station, and hotel.
June. 30th: The “Analysis Report on the Operating Capability of China’s Autonomous Driving Cars (2019-2020)” prepared by the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Autonomous Driving Industry Alliance Secretariat was released. According to the report, Guangzhou’s autonomous driving is about to move into the next level of autonomous driving deployment and cancel the requirement for safety drivers in AVs and enter a new stage of 5G remote driving at the operational level. The cancellation of safety drivers will be a key step in the establishment of the Robo-Taxi business model. Even without safety driver in in vehicle, the operation center of the Robo-Taxi fleet will still have a remote-end safety officer to monitor the safety status of the vehicle through technologies such as 5G and IoV.
Sources: Leiphone; Gasgoo; cnTechPost; TechNode; TechCrunch;
