For eight years, the unmanned "pioneer" Google's R&D path is bumpy, and the rapid rise of competitors is making the tech giant feel anxious.
On February 6th, Chris Urmson, head of Google's driverless car project, wrote an email to the company's two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin three years ago, about his concerns about the development of Google's driverless technology. Urmson warned in Google that Google’s driverless technology might lose its advantage, saying that “in the past six months, we are no longer fighting for victory. Instead, we are working hard to make up for the shortfall.†He bluntly, most The worried opponent is Uber.
Two years later, Google and Uber were really in the wrong place because of unmanned technology. Google accused Uber of stealing trade secrets. The lawsuit is still in full swing.
The lawsuit also exposed Google’s investment in the development of driverless technology for many years. According to the testimony released by Waymo (unmanned R&D department from Google) in September last year, the autopilot project began in 2009. By the end of 2015, Google spent $1.1 billion on the development of autonomous driving software and hardware.
Google's technical advantages and data shortcomingsAs the earliest technology giant in the field of unmanned driving, Google has been grinding a sword for 8 years, and today's technical level has significantly exceeded that of a large number of opponents. Last month, a report released by consulting firm Navigant showed that Google and GM are leading the overall ranking in technology, market strategy and reliability among companies developing R&D technology globally.
As a technology giant, the advantage of Google's layout of unmanned driving is undoubtedly technology. Waymo’s test report released in California earlier this year showed that the number of human interventions that drove a driverless car to 1,000 miles fell to 0.18. This achievement is enough to "snap" competitors. In contrast, data released by Uber in March 2017 showed that manual intervention is required for every 1.3 km of unmanned vehicles.
As of now, Waymo has tested more than 4 million miles in 25 cities in the United States, and the radar, lidar and vision systems used by driverless teams have been designed by the company.
In November 2017, Waymo announced that it could deliver passengers in a completely unmanned state. Its Pacifica test vehicle began to provide transportation services to the public in the Phoenix area of ​​the United States, which also showed the strength of Google's driverless technology.
However, Google's shortcomings in driverless technology are becoming more and more obvious. Compared with car manufacturers and shared travel companies, Google's disadvantage is that the commercialization path is unclear and the user's measured data collection is difficult. Morgan Stanley said in a research report in 2016 that Uber's data collected in 24 minutes is equivalent to all the data recorded since the birth of Google's driverless car. Although all of this data is not from fully driverless cars, the scale of the trial is sufficient to accelerate the development and mapping of artificial intelligence.
In this regard, Di Wei's founder and CEO Cheng Wei also pointed out in an interview with Caijing magazine in December last year:
It is difficult to sell unmanned cars to ordinary consumers within ten years, because unmanned driving is possible on certain roads and environments. And Drip knows the starting point and the end point before sending a car to pick up the passengers, and whether these routes are suitable for unmanned vehicles. If it is suitable, send an unmanned car. If it is not suitable, send a human driver car. This hybrid mode will last for a long time. Second, the data, there are 21 million cars, and Baidu and Tesla are not so big. The size of the team went to help it collecTIng data, which is why Google wants to invest in lyft.
Google's new rival - Drip on the driverless track, Google's competitors in addition to GM, Tesla, Baidu, Uber, Apple and other companies, are facing a new rival - China's shared travel giants.
Today, Didi has set Google as the "ultimate opponent" of the future. Cheng Wei said in the above financial interview:
If you look at the future, you will find that the current competition is just a prologue. Didi and the quick merger are the Asian regional group match. Didi and Uber merged to be the top ten in Asia and decided to win the Asian Championship. Next, we will usher in Uber's global battle, but this is still not the end. The champion of the network car race will compete or cooperate with the champions of the car race and the unmanned champions, including Toyota, Volkswagen, Google. Ultimately build the future of transportation and automotive systems.
Cheng Wei also pointed out that in the field of unmanned driving, Google is currently the first camp, and the second camp is in a melee. Didi is ready to fight into the first camp:
Our judgment on the market is that there are only one or two unmanned drivers and no third place, just like Android and IOS. At present, Google is the first place, and hope that Didi will become another one who will eventually survive. We have the chance to win in the second camp, which is 10 times more important in my mind than local competition. If the drop is unsuccessful, the $10 billion we will have invested in the diversified battle is tragic in my opinion.
From the perspective of the company's size, although Didi is not enough to compare with Google, the growth momentum of Didi has been particularly fierce in recent years. Since its establishment in 2012, Didi has completed 16 rounds of financing, with a cumulative financing of more than 20 billion US dollars. In 2017 alone, Didi received a total of $10.5 billion in financing.
After the crazy sucking of gold, the valuation of Didi has risen rapidly. After the completion of a new round of financing in December last year, market research firm CBInsights said that the valuation of investors on Didi travel is about US$56 billion, which has exceeded Uber. It is worth $48 billion) and has become the world's most valued unicorn company.
After two rounds of huge financing in 2017, Didi said that the funds will be mainly used for autonomous driving, AI smart transportation technology research and development, and promotion of international business.
Whether it is Cheng Wei's competition “target setting†or the drastic investment in drone technology, it is enough to make Google more anxious.
Old rival Baidu is still the enemy of the AI ​​eraAfter the Chinese search business lost Baidu, the battle between Google and Baidu in the unmanned field is still fierce.
In recent years, Baidu "All in AI" has invested heavily in R&D of R&D technology. In November last year, Baidu founder and CEO Li Yanhong announced that it will mass produce driverless cars in 2018. Compared with most car manufacturers, Baidu's mass production time commitment is obviously "faster."
Unlike Google, Baidu has opened the Apollo autopilot platform, which is currently used by more than 6,000 developers.
The industry believes that by 2025, China's driverless car market will reach 100 billion US dollars, Baidu may have a greater say in the Chinese market, because the company has its own unique algorithms, good business partners and Strong government support.
Google's attackIn the fierce competition in the unmanned field, Google seems to have seen its own disadvantages and began to work hard to make up the shortcomings.
Google is Uber's early investor, and after Uber turned against it, Google led a $1.5 billion financing from Uber's US competitor Lyft in late 2017. Lyft is the second-largest shared travel company in the US, and data from sales estimates firm TXN SoluTIons show that as of June 2017, Lyft's market share in the US has risen to nearly 25%. Google has partnered with Lyft on the development of driverless technology, and Lyft's travel business is expected to provide a large amount of measured data for Google's unmanned vehicles.
At the same time, Google also launched its own driverless car taxi business. This month, Ruth Porat, the CFO of Google's parent company Alphabet, first publicly mentioned at the earnings conference that Waymo will launch its own taxi software, which allows users to reach unmanned taxis through the Waymo App. Waymo officially revealed to Wired that it will produce thousands of self-driving cars again in 2018 and put them into taxi operations.
Industry insiders predict that according to the size of Google's self-driving team at the current stage, the test mileage for new actual roads in 2018 will be between 10 million and 100 million miles (average 1-3 million miles per vehicle).
The analysis believes that Google's launch of the driverless taxi business will bring reshuffle to the driverless industry and allow the travel industry to enter the "life and death march." When Google’s unmanned taxi fleet is large enough, the cost of the driver is negligible. Secondly, the “robot driver†is tireless, and the vehicle has almost no accidents. The safety of the operation will kill the human driver. More importantly, there is no upper limit to the supply of “robot driversâ€.
Former Uber CEO Travis Karanic said at the time of his appointment that autonomous driving technology will determine Uber's life and death.
For Drip, the only lucky thing is that Google can't enter the Chinese market in the first time, but this time will not be too long.
In addition, it is worth noting that Google is paying more and more attention to the Chinese market and is approaching the “base camp†of Didi and Baidu. Following Google’s announcement of the first Google AI China Center in Beijing last December, Google opened a new office in Shenzhen in January.
According to the First Financial News, Scott Beaumont, president of Google Greater China, introduced Google’s strategy in China on February 6th at the “BrandZ China 50 Brands Launch Conferenceâ€. He said that the development of AI requires first-class computer science, large amounts of data, rapid prediction, judgment, and excellent laboratories, and China has it all. Choosing to establish Google AI China Center in China is an imperative and very natural decision. Speaking of the Shenzhen office, Shibo League said that Shenzhen is mainly a back-office service office. There are many high-tech enterprises in Shenzhen. Google and some companies also have a lot of hardware joint development projects. They can set up offices in Shenzhen and can be closer to these enterprises.
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