In addition to robotaxi, the self driving truck (robotruck) has also been included in Didi’s business territory.
On April 29, a head car supplier told the first financial reporter that the company was cooperating with didi docking robotruck project. A person close to didi also told reporters that didi robotruck project set up a team about a year and a half ago, led by CTO Wei Junqing. The team mainly has offices in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai.
Didi is one of the earliest enterprises in China to deploy automatic driving technology. According to Didi’s official website, Didi set up an automatic driving technology R & D department in 2016 and upgraded it to an independent company in 2019. At present, Didi has obtained automatic driving open road test licenses in Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou and California, and obtained the first batch of national intelligent networked vehicle demonstration application licenses issued by Shanghai.
Didi will open the automatic driving test to the public in Shanghai in 2020. In 2021, Didi reached strategic cooperation with gac-e’an to promote the mass production of all driverless new energy vehicles. In addition, Didi also cooperated with Volvo to build an automatic driving test team. It is worth noting that the layout of didi automatic driving earlier focused on the field of passenger cars.
However, according to the current development of the industry, commercial vehicle automatic driving not only has a good market prospect, but also its commercial landing speed is expected to be ahead of passenger vehicle automatic driving.
China International Capital Corporation Limited(601995) it is estimated that the potential market scale of China’s high-speed intercity logistics will reach 3.3 trillion yuan, the unmanned market in mining areas will reach 670 billion yuan, and the unmanned terminal distribution market will reach 170 billion yuan; The self driving travel service market is nearly 1.7 trillion yuan, and the scale of independent valet parking market is about 80 billion yuan.
China International Capital Corporation Limited(601995) believes that the economy of self driving truck is significantly better than that of traditional fuel heavy truck, which is mainly reflected in three aspects: first, increasing the running time of truck, second, reducing the cost of driver, and third, improving the fuel economy. According to its calculation, self driving trucks can eventually reduce costs by 45%.
Ma Zhenren, founder and CEO of yingche technology, once pointed out that the biggest feature of trunk logistics is “people don’t rest and cars don’t rest”. The one-way trip usually reaches 800 kilometers or more. It needs to be equipped with two truck drivers, with an average monthly salary of 15000 yuan for each driver. If automatic driving technology can replace one of the drivers and make the truck more fuel-efficient during driving, it can produce economic benefits.
At the application end, at present, the automatic driving of passenger cars is mostly limited to fixed sections in several cities, while the automatic driving of commercial vehicles has appeared in more real scenes.
Since July 2020, Youdao Zhitu’s L4 smart heavy truck products have started quasi commercial automatic driving operation on Donghai Bridge. By the end of 2021, the project has completed the annual transportation task of 40000 TEUs, and the cumulative test mileage is more than 2 million kilometers. During the covid-19 epidemic in Guangzhou in 2021, the driverless truck of Xiaoma Zhixing undertook the logistics and transportation work in some closed areas. Mainline technology has deployed self driving trucks in Tianjin Port Co.Ltd(600717) , Ningbo Zhoushan port and other ports, of which 25 trucks in Tianjin Port Co.Ltd(600717) have been completely driverless
At present, there are many start-ups focusing on self driving trucks, including Tucson future, Zhijia technology and yingche technology; Ma Zhixing, Wen yuanzhixing, Yuan Rong Qihang and other companies that started with automatic driving of passenger cars have also begun to make layout in the field of robotruck.
