China AV - Sept. Newsletter
After over two years I am sharing China Autonomous Vehicles Newsletter, watch the growing number of readers and the growing interest in the AV sector in general, I have decided to launch Israel Autonomous Mobility Newsletter! The new Newsletter will be released at English and Chinese to expose the community to the AV mobility industry in another vibrant area, while China AV newsletter will continue as usual.
This month we have witnessed the dominance of the largest local tech firms – the BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent). Starting with Baidu launching a first RoboTaxi service without safety driver! Alibaba announced their new autonomous vehicle for goods delivery and Tencent is building AV partnerships on an extreme pace. Huawei, Xpeng and DiDi and many others also made significant actions. Enjoy reading!
Sept.1st: Ford China announced that it had begun to test vehicle road coordination function based on cellular Internet of vehicles (C-V2X) on certain open roads in Changsha, Hunan Province. The company plan to push the vehicle road coordination function to some Chinese car owners by the end of this year. This is the first time a company has introduced a pre-commercial vehicle-road coordination function through pre-installation and mass production in China.
Sept.3rd: NIO announced the completion of the issuance of 107.75 million American Depositary Shares (ADS), including 13.275 million ADS shares purchased by underwriters (each ADS represents one common stock of Class A). NIO raised more than USD 1.7 billion, making it the largest additional issuance in China’s high-end smart electric vehicle industry.
Sept.4th: DiDi Autonomous Driving announced that it has obtained the autonomous vehicle test license-plate issued by Hefei city. Previously, Anhui’s first 5G autonomous driving open road demonstration line has been put into trial operation.
Sept.8th: Great Wall Motors, Tencent and Bean Tech (仙豆智能) announced the deepening of strategic cooperation. Based on last year’s strategic cooperation, the three parties will launch new partnership in four major directions: ecological vehicle networking, overseas cloud services, AR navigation and autonomous driving. In addition to those four workstreams, the group will explore other cutting-edge technologies in order to accelerate Great Wall Motor’s transformation into “global technology travel company” according to management targets.
Sept.8th: Huawei Group has established a wholly owned enterprise: Huawei Electric Technology Company, which is fully owned by Huawei was established, and position the tech giant from Shenzhen as a new automotive Tier 1 supplier! The new entity will focus on research and experimental developments, including engineering and technical research, manufacturing of intelligent vehicle equipment, and sales of intelligent vehicle.
Sept.9th: WeRide drove its autonomous driving vehicle into the crowded urban village at Guangzhou, completing the whole complex ride with no takeover. The building density in the area is over 70% and the road width is only 4 meters. WeRide plan to carry out a series of autonomous driving road tests in such an extreme complex and rare environment.
Sept.11st: Beijing municipality will build the world’s first high-level autonomous driving demonstration zone. The construction goal is to support large-scale operation of high-level autonomy (above L4), while still be compatible with the test operation of low-level autonomous vehicles and the realization of IoV application scenarios.
Sept.14th: iDriverPlus (智行者科技) announced that it had completed C+ round of financing, rising hundreds of millions of RMB, which was invested by Xinding Capital, Huaxia Weiming and other institutions. The investment will be used to strengthen technical advantages of autonomous driving products and accelerate the establishment of L4 autonomous driving fleet in the field of passenger cars. The startup that wat originally focused on small logistic robots for delivery and cleaning, started a line of full size L4 vehicles and could potentially use this tech for high-end L4 or RoboTaxi.
Sept.15th: Baidu Apollo has obtained the Chinese first batch of intelligent network unmanned vehicle test licenses issued by Changsha City. This means that the autonomous driving fleet deployed by Apollo in Changsha can formally remove the safety driver and carry out a completely unmanned road test on Changsha open roads.
Baidu launched the first fully unmanned Robotaxi live broadcast at the “Intelligence of Everything Baidu world 2020” conference. Li Zhenyu, general manager of intelligent driving business group, introduced the three major elements of completely unmanned driving: “front loaded mass production vehicle”, “AI old driver” and “5G cloud driving”.
Sept.16th: Tencent Autonomous Driving won the bid of Xiangyang Da’an digital twin autonomous driving test and evaluation system construction project. At the same day, Tencent also signed a strategic cooperation agreement with NAST (襄阳达安汽车检测中心), to carry out the construction of intelligent Internet connection demonstration area, autonomous driving simulation test, cloud platform, vehicle road coordination and information security development.
Sept.17th: Please welcome “Little Donkey“! Alibaba Damo Academy’s first logistics robot, which has human like cognitive intelligence, can easily handle complex road conditions and can plan its optimal path intelligently. In case of emergency, “Little donkey” emergency response speed up 7 times faster than that of human. The R&D team has achieved necessary conditions for large-scale commercial mass production: vehicle can run more than 100 kilometers with 4 degrees of electricity and can serve 500 express deliveries daily.
Sept.22nd: Li Auto will be the first OEM to use NVIDIA Orin system-on-a-chip (“SoC”) in its full-size extended-range electric vehicles to be launched in 2022. The single-chip computing power of NVIDIA’s Orin SoC can reach 200 trillion operations per second “TOPS”, 7 times faster compared with previous generation: Xavier SoC
Sept.24th: The Traton Group, Volkswagen AG’s heavy-truck business, has taken a minority stake in TuSimple as part of an agreement between the two companies to develop self-driving trucks. The two sides plan to launch a development program that will present Traton’s Scania trucks equipped with TuSimple’s autonomous driving technology. The testing will begin with a route between Södertälje and Jönköping in Sweden. Traton ultimately wants to test autonomous driving truck fleets on roads throughout Sweden, Germany and other European countries.
Sept.24th: Huawei has released its ADN (Autonomous Driving Network for enterprises) and introduced the embedded full stack solution into AI to create autonomous driving network solution. According to Huawei, ADN is realized by the open architecture of Cloud + AI, Network + AI and Network element + AI.
Sept.26th: BYD DiLink and Zhidaohulian (蘑菇车联) signed a cooperation agreement during Beijing Auto show. The two sides will cooperate in smart transportation, focusing on vehicle road coordination and exploring autonomous driving application solutions.
Sept.28th: Xpeng Motors announced that it had reached an agreement with Guangzhou GET Investment, a wholly-owned investment company of Guangzhou Economic and Technological Development Zone, under which GET will provide a CNY 4 billion funding to Xpeng Motors.
Sept.29th: GAC Group cements its ties with Huawei, signing a strategic agreement on intelligent vehicles development. The two parties will comprehensively deepen cooperation in the field of smart cars and leverage their respective resource advantages.
Sources: Gasgoo; EqualOcean; gwm; Baidu; OFweek; QbitAI; TechCrunch; QQ
