In the era of artificial intelligence, the first job to be eliminated is the driver

Unexpectedly, in the era of artificial intelligence, the first profession to be eliminated will be the driver.

On September 26, 2019, Baidu's self-driving taxi fleet Robotaxi officially started trial operation in Changsha. The 45 pre-installed mass-produced vehicles "Hongqi EV" launched in cooperation with FAW Hongqi and reaching L4 level of commercial self-driving are undoubtedly the fruits of Baidu's hard work in the field of self-driving in recent years.

It is foreseeable that as Baidu officially starts commercializing its products in the consumer field, autonomous driving, a technology that seems so sci-fi to us, will subtly revolutionize our lives.

More importantly, Baidu's commercialization of autonomous driving will set an industry benchmark for many cautious autonomous driving manufacturers and further stimulate the potential of the entire autonomous driving field.

China's autonomous driving technology is in the world

Since 2016, autonomous driving has become a hot topic in the industry. Companies including search service providers, new car manufacturers, traditional car companies, and travel service providers have all increased their investment in this field.

In July 2016, BMW, Intel and Mobileye formed the Autonomous Driving Alliance, which will bring L4 autonomous driving cars to consumers in 2021.

At the end of 2016, Google integrated its own self-driving team into its independent subsidiary Waymo, and reached a cooperation with FCA Fiat Chrysler to build self-driving cars based on FCA's MPV models;

In terms of new car manufacturing, Wu Xinzhou, VP of autonomous driving at Xpeng Motors, once told the media that Xpeng Motors' L3 autonomous driving will be commercialized in March 2020.

I believe everyone is also very curious about which autonomous driving technology is better. According to the road test data of 48 companies that obtained California autonomous driving road test licenses released by the California Department of Motor Vehicles in 2018, we can get a glimpse of the technological gap between various companies in the field of autonomous driving.

In this test, Google's Waymo ranked first with an MPD (Miles Per Disengagement: the average number of miles an autonomous vehicle travels before disengaging) of 11,017.5 miles, nearly double the second-place GM Cruise's 5,205 miles. The protagonist of this article, Baidu, ranked seventh with an MPD of 205.6 miles.

Judging from this ranking and the trial operation of Baidu's L4-level autonomous taxi fleet Robotaxi, we have reason to believe that Google's Waymo and GM's Cruise have reached a higher level of autonomous driving technology. So why don't these manufacturers commercialize autonomous driving?

Realism: China's autonomous driving technology path

In fact, according to the SAE American Society of Automotive Engineers' classification of self-driving cars, only when the car reaches level 5, which allows it to operate without driver interference, can it be considered the most ideal unmanned driving. At present, all self-driving service providers, including Baidu and Google, have only achieved level 4 "self-driving" at most.

The reason why Baidu was the first to realize the commercial use of autonomous driving is mainly because Baidu has fundamental differences from Google in terms of technology implementation and concepts.

In terms of implementation, Google has chosen the "single-car intelligent technology route", which means that it uses sensors and processors to fully simulate the state of a human driver driving a car. The biggest advantage of this direction is that you can focus on your own car without having to consider planning the actual road surface.

However, when it comes to the technical level, the "single-vehicle intelligent technology route" has insurmountable technical barriers. For example, when encountering extremely complex weather or slightly changing a few pixels in the picture, Google's cars may make recognition errors.

Take Tesla Autopilot, the most widely used autopilot that uses the "single-vehicle intelligent technology route", for example. On March 1, 2019, a Model 3 crashed in Florida, killing the driver on the spot. Subsequent investigations showed that the primary cause of the accident was that Autopilot failed to recognize the side of the truck.

For this reason, Baidu chose the "vehicle-road collaboration" model, which connects roads, traffic facilities, pedestrians and other obstacles with self-driving cars, and provides two-way support for the implementation of self-driving.

At the end of 2018, Baidu open-sourced the Apollo vehicle-road collaboration code. At the World Conference that year, Robin Li stated that while Baidu's autonomous driving is building smart cars, it will also actively promote the construction of "smart roads" to achieve collaborative development of vehicles and roads.

In short, Google insists on taking the path of cars compromising the real "road". That is why Google will not dare to try commercialization until it achieves L5 autonomous driving technology. As Waymo CEO Lack said, "It will take decades for autonomous driving cars to become popular on the road", which also reflects Google's inability to achieve L5 autonomous driving.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak once said, "Roads are built by humans, and humans are imperfect, and cars can't solve this problem at present." Therefore, it is more realistic for Baidu to evolve the current roads adapted to humans into vehicles adapted to self-driving cars.

Autonomous driving will revolutionize the entire automotive industry

Considering the historical inertia of liberating productivity and improving efficiency, autonomous driving is definitely the outpost of the next technological revolution. Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari said in "A Brief History of Tomorrow" that in the future, due to the popularization of autonomous driving, the concept of private cars will completely become a thing of the past.

From the perspective of consumers, the main purpose of buying a car is to facilitate travel. According to Fortune statistics, the average utilization rate of cars is only 5%, which means that most people's cars are parked in the parking lot 95% of the time. With autonomous driving, we can be freed from the boring driving and further increase the utilization rate of cars.

Just imagine, after autonomous driving becomes popular, would you choose to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a car that you will only use a few times and will continue to depreciate, or would you choose an unmanned car that you can call whenever you want for only a few dozen yuan each time you travel?

Considering this perspective, the current online car-hailing platforms may be the ones that will dominate the automotive industry in the future. This is also the reason why online car-hailing platforms such as Didi and Uber are actively promoting the construction of autonomous driving.

Previously, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had publicly stated that once Tesla completely solves the autonomous driving technology, it is very likely to stop selling cars. Based on this, Musk claimed that consumers buying Tesla cars will become a "value-added asset" rather than a "liability" because in the future Tesla cars can help Tesla owners make profits through autonomous driving rental services.

This is also the primary reason why Baidu took the lead in the field of autonomous driving taxis. After all, Google's "single-vehicle intelligent technology route" only solves the autonomous driving technology needed by individuals at this stage, while Baidu's "smart roads" and "taxis" combined efforts are what cars should have in the next era.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.