The driverless car is here? You will only feel desperate if you finish the calculation.

Who doesn't want a driverless car? This is equivalent to hiring a full-time driver. As early as 20 12, Google said that their driverless car only cost $300,000. At this cost, it is a joke to want someone to own one. By 20 19, the development of science and technology has at least doubled, and driverless cars are still a flower in the mirror and a moon in the water. Fortunately, the manufacturer has given its final solution, that is, the trinity mode of laser radar plus positioning combination, to improve the map accuracy.

The core technology of driverless cars is divided into three parts, mainly perception, planning and control.

Perception mainly comes from various sensors on driverless cars, which will collect various information from the road environment, such as the location of obstacles and the detection of traffic signs. The strength of perception determines the fundamental ability of driverless cars. The second is planning, which refers to the route planned by the car to move passengers from one destination to another. Finally, control belongs to the executive level.

Among these three levels, perception will definitely occupy the biggest cost of driverless cars, and it is also the biggest problem in current technical research. At present, the perception system is mainly carried out by lidar, millimeter wave radar and camera. You can understand it as the eyes in a driverless car, which is not the general price. The initial cost of lidar is as high as $654.38 million. Although it is expensive, the imaging is very clear. The price has been reduced now, but it is also between 8000 and 75000 dollars.

Millimeter wave radar has low cost and is less affected by weather conditions. It can work normally even at night, with the disadvantage of poor resolution. Something that can't distinguish some details. In the industry, people generally don't use lidar because its price is too expensive. For example, Tesla prefers to use millimeter-wave radar with camera.

But lidar is undoubtedly the best. Then, we must find ways to reduce its cost. The first aspect is to achieve a breakthrough on the technical level. The second aspect is to expand the scale of production. But at present, it is difficult to break through these two directions.

According to the research of a team in Boston, the cost of an unmanned system equipped with lidar is about $6.5438+0.5 million. How to mass-produce such a high cost? Laser radar alone accounts for 70% of the total cost, which can be said to be a big spender.

Thomas, head of strategy of Volkswagen Group, said that the current intelligent driving system can reach the third level at the highest. Sensors, processors and software alone cost 50,000 euros. He thinks that if L3 intelligent system can be popularized, the cost should be reduced to around 6,000 euros at least. But its premise is that the price of lidar must be completely reduced.

You know, this is not the whole cost of a driverless car. Driverless cars also have the cost of high-precision maps and cloud computing. Are these costs to be passed on to enterprises, governments or consumers? At present, there is not a mature business model in the market for us to explore. I'm afraid it's also an idiotic thing to ask a company to pay hundreds of millions of euros for maintenance every year. Therefore, driverless cars are still far away from us.

This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.