When smart cars and low-desire life go against each other, who will pay for our future travel?

Why can a Weilai car manufactured by JAC sell for 400,000 yuan? Because its various intelligent devices are really expensive. Despite the high price, if you buy a JAC car with BMW's money, the intelligence you get is just a small part. If you want to go a step further and raise the level of vehicle intelligence to a higher level, you can only buy a JAC SUV with the money of Rolls-Royce Cullinan.

There is no grocery shopping cart in smart cars

This is a contradiction that has already emerged. When cars become intelligent and connected, cost reduction will be a slow process in the near future due to marginal effects. During this period, serious cost anxiety will always linger in the minds of vehicle manufacturers and consumers.

The various sensors required for autonomous driving, such as cameras, laser radars, and millimeter-wave radars, will rapidly increase the total cost of a car. Among them, laser radars are particularly expensive, and a high-precision laser radar can even cost as much as the price of a car.

Autonomous driving is far from enough to rely on sensors alone, and also involves algorithms, chips, artificial intelligence, high-precision maps, etc. The construction of connected cars and smart cockpits also requires upgrading the original in-vehicle operating system. All of these will add new costs to the car.

The software part of this may significantly reduce costs as the scale increases, but cost control on the hardware side is more challenging.

The scale effect can reduce the cost of car manufacturing. my country's automobile production and sales have ranked first in the world for many years. The scale of the automobile industry is already large and the development of the automobile industry is already very mature. In traditional vehicle manufacturing, the space for price reduction brought by the scale effect is not large. After the transformation of automobiles into electrification, intelligence and networking, the price increase of vehicles has become an inevitable trend.

The desire for private car purchases will decrease in the future

If people's income levels do not increase significantly, rising car prices will likely directly lead to a decrease in people's willingness to own cars.

In the eyes of many people born in the 1990s, a car is just a means of transportation. As long as they can get from point A to point B, they don’t care much whether it is a luxury car or a regular car. What young people care more about is whether the process is convenient, fast and comfortable.

In Europe and the United States, where the automobile industry developed earlier and more fully, cars have undergone a transformation from a status symbol to a common means of transportation. With the continuous development of my country's automobile industry, car prices have generally shown a downward trend, and car consumption has gradually entered the stage of mass consumption. When buying a car, the face factor has begun to weaken, and cars are increasingly returning to their use value.

Cars are big-ticket items that are expensive for most people. Cars start to depreciate from the moment they are purchased. In the future, the younger generation will have a lower desire to own cars.

The number of cars in China is increasing year by year, which has put tremendous pressure on urban traffic environment and parking space resources. In first-tier cities, it is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain a car license, which has directly suppressed the desire of young people to buy private cars.

Is car sharing the new future?

In fact, among the four new trends of automobile intelligence, networking, electrification and sharing, sharing seems to be the least promising. The farce of shared bicycles has cast a shadow on the prospects of the sharing economy. The more complex model of shared cars has been criticized by countless people, and many shared car platforms have announced their closure.

But the reality now is that when cars become extremely expensive due to electrification, intelligence, and networking, the advantages of sharing begin to emerge, and renting or sharing will be more economical than buying. No matter how superior the performance of new technologies is, cost factors must be considered and large-scale commercial use must be considered. If the cost of technology implementation cannot be reduced to a low enough level, it will not bring profound and comprehensive changes to related industries.

On the one hand, people are eager to experience the convenience brought by autonomous driving; on the other hand, the cost of implementing various technologies remains high. Private cars are large items with low usage frequency. Even if you drive to and from get off work every day, they are still idle for more than 90% of the time. This makes it possible to realize the shared car model.

When people's desire to own cars decreases, the travel service market will grow accordingly. Car sharing allows more people to share the high cost of cars, and can open up good technology and more comfortable travel experience to more people, and the threshold for consumers of technologies such as autonomous driving will be lowered accordingly. Smart cars can become more affordable through sharing, thus changing the automotive industry in a larger market scope.

When car owners are more likely to be operators rather than private individuals, the frequency of car use will increase significantly, a large number of parking space resources will be saved, the number of cars needed for urban operation will decrease, and traffic congestion will be alleviated.

Many multinational automakers are transforming into mobility service providers. Toyota, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and other international auto giants have all claimed that they have transformed from automakers to mobility service providers. Many domestic automakers have also expanded their mobility service businesses, such as Geely, SAIC, Great Wall and other companies.

The connotation of travel services is broader than that of car-sharing. For example, online car-hailing services are actually a kind of travel services, but they are not car-sharing. Car-sharing also has different models, such as time-sharing and P2P car rental. Most of the layout of traditional car companies in travel services belongs to online car-hailing. For example, Geely's Cao Cao Special Car.

Didi is currently the only player in the online car-hailing market, with most other players just playing catch-up. Traditional car companies are not planning to compete with Didi in the online car-hailing market, but are more preparing for shared car services.

The transformation of traditional car companies into travel service providers is actually a result of seeing the future development prospects of shared cars. Car companies are good at manufacturing and it is very convenient to form a fleet, but they lack Internet thinking and have shortcomings in travel service operations. Moreover, not all traditional car companies have enough strength and resources to deploy in this field.

Internet companies have already begun to deploy in this field. Alibaba has built a 2B shared travel platform based on AliOS, providing basic systems, data intelligence, and ecological integration capabilities for time-sharing rental operators.

The participation of Internet giants has further verified the correctness of the direction of car-sharing. The advantage of Internet giants in car-sharing is that they can integrate various existing services and expand the business ecosystem of car-sharing more easily.

What does autonomous driving mean for shared cars?

Currently, the main cost of shared cars comes from vehicle costs and labor costs. If traditional car companies enter the market, vehicle costs are expected to be greatly reduced. The most difficult part to reduce is labor costs, including the labor required for car maintenance, charging, and parking.

On September 14, the automatic valet parking technology jointly developed by Daimler and Bosch was demonstrated in China for the first time. This type of automatic parking has very low requirements on the car itself. There are no sensors on the car. It mainly relies on the intelligent infrastructure installed in the parking lot to achieve automatic parking. This technology is a primary application of autonomous driving technology, focusing on relying on infrastructure rather than the perception of the car itself.

This is actually a big boon for car-sharing. If car-sharing operators can put this technology into commercial use, it will significantly reduce the labor costs required for vehicle maintenance. Moreover, this technology only requires the renovation of parking lots, and does not require high requirements for vehicles, making it more feasible in terms of cost and practical operation.

In addition to further optimizing operations, reducing labor costs depends more importantly on the development of autonomous driving technology. Autonomous driving technology allows cars to automatically pick up and park, which greatly reduces the manpower cost of vehicle operation and maintenance.

If driverless cars can be realized in the future, the online car-hailing model will be overturned. Waymo, a subsidiary of Google, has planned to launch driverless taxis this year. This will save more than 40% of the labor costs of online car-hailing and taxi businesses.

China's autonomous driving technology is still far behind the advanced level of foreign countries, and no company has launched a similar plan. Recently, Alibaba and Baidu have announced that they will focus on relying on vehicle-road collaboration to achieve autonomous driving in the future. If autonomous driving relies only on the intelligence of a single vehicle, the cost and technical challenges are huge.

The biggest difference between vehicle-road collaboration and single-vehicle intelligence is the addition of intelligent road infrastructure. This intelligent road infrastructure consists of a variety of sensors and computing units, which can be hung on the road like a camera.

This device can provide autonomous vehicles with information about surrounding road conditions, monitor emergencies in real time, and remind nearby vehicles to prepare in advance.

With the assistance of this device, the requirements for smart car sensors can be reduced, and the corresponding cost will also be reduced. This can promote the popularization of autonomous driving. In fact, part of the car sensors are transferred to public infrastructure, which can not only provide assistance for autonomous driving cars, but also transmit information to cars driven by humans.

The combination of vehicle-road cooperative technology and vehicle networking technology can communicate between autonomous driving vehicles and non-autonomous driving vehicles, thereby further reducing traffic accidents and improving traffic efficiency.

Although China's car ownership is not as high as that of the United States, its annual sales exceed that of the United States by more than 10 million vehicles each year. It will not be difficult to surpass the United States in the next few years. China and the United States have similar land areas, but the population is more than four times that of the United States, and the road traffic environment is much more complicated than that of the United States.

Compared with the United States, vehicle-road collaboration is more suitable for China and will accelerate the development and popularization of autonomous driving technology.

Compared with fuel vehicles, smart cockpits and autonomous driving are more suitable for electric vehicle platforms. The intelligence of vehicles depends on electrification, and the improvement of vehicle performance brought by intelligence will also promote the popularization of electrification.

Similarly, the high costs of making cars smart and connected rely on car sharing to become universal; intelligence and networking also create conditions for sharing, allowing shared cars to get rid of the burden of high labor costs and prepare for them to replace online ride-hailing as a travel service model.

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.