Chang 'an Mass Production L3 Autopilot: Technical War or Propaganda War of Independent Brand?

Chang 'an and Schrodinger's L3 mass production.

Writing an article? |? Xiong yuxiang

Editor? |? Zhou changxian

These two days, I don't know whether it is coincidence or intentional. Two major events have taken place in the field of autonomous driving.

On March 9th, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued "Recommended National Standards for Approval and Publicity" (hereinafter referred to as "Publicity"), and the China standard for automatic driving classification surfaced. L3 autopilot is defined as "conditional autopilot".

On March 10, Changan Automobile conducted the first L3-class self-driving mass production experience in Chongqing. Affected by the epidemic, for safety reasons, the event took the form of official experience and live broadcast on the whole network. Zhu Huarong, president of Changan Automobile, personally took the stage, incarnating the dual roles of product experience officer and anchor, and completed the L3-class self-driving debut of the unit model on the 23km-long urban expressway.

In this situation, people have to feel the rapid progress of autonomous driving technology-three years ago, when Audi announced the mass production of the first L3 self-driving car, this technology only belonged to 800,000 Audi A8. Today, Chang 'an launched the "L3-level automatic driving with the right", which will invest less than 200,000 vehicles.

In fact, as early as 2009, Changan began to carry out related research and development in the field of autonomous driving, and has cultivated it for 1 1 year, and has repeatedly become the standard bearer of the person in charge of autonomous driving technology of its own brand.

However, the L3 autopilot function of Audi A8 has become "a flower in the mirror, a moon in the water" because of legal problems. Today, three years later, how does Changan ensure the smooth mass production of mass production autopilot?

"Out of Eyes" Autopilot

On the afternoon of March 10, the live broadcast of the "L3 self-driving production car" Chang 'an unit began. What is striking is that Liang Fenghua, director of Changan Automobile Intelligent Driving Research Institute, sits in the main driver's seat, and Zhu Huarong, president of Changan Automobile, sits in the co-driver's seat, playing the dual roles of product experience officer and anchor.

Interestingly, just one day ago, the China standard for automobile driving automation classification was just issued, and Changan Automobile participated in the formulation of the standard. People have to think whether the L3 autopilot of Changan Automobile is just the right time or has been brewing for a long time.

For L3 autopilot, the guideline is set in the publicity-"Whether to continue to perform all dynamic driving tasks under limited design and operation conditions, but not to take over the dynamic driving tasks."

Is it full? It doesn't matter, Zhu Huarong has prepared a simplified version of grounding gas: on expressways and high-ring roads, drivers can automatically remove their hands, feet and eyes, and the system will only ask drivers to take over when necessary.

The L3 autopilot software of Chang 'an Unit was independently developed by Chang 'an, and it was tested and verified by 50 million kilometers (including 2 million kilometers for field test and the rest for simulation test). In terms of suppliers, Chang 'an brings together Bosch, Ambofu, Baidu, Gaode,? A strong lineup, including companies such as Horizon, provides necessary modules for autonomous driving, including chassis control system, sensors, high-precision maps and computing platforms.

In Changan Automobile's L3-class self-driving mass production experience, two functions are highlighted: TJP (Traffic? Jam? Pilot (traffic congestion guidance) and expressway (expressway? Auxiliary, highway auxiliary).

Among them, TJP is developed for urban traffic jams, which supports automatic driving of vehicles below 40km/h, and its main task is to liberate drivers from traffic jams.

HWA supports automatic driving of vehicles with a speed of 40- 130km/h, and is equipped with automatic lane change function with turn signal and recommended lane change function for vehicles. It should be noted that in the live broadcast, when the vehicle turns on the HWA, the driver's eyes must always pay attention to the front, which means that the HWA is an L2 autopilot function.

In fact, Tesla, Weilai and Tucki in China have also developed similar functions to HWA. Without exception, they classified it as L2, or at most advertised it as "L2.5".

This also means that Changan's L3-class self-driving production car unit can only be called TJP with L3-class self-driving function at present.

Half L3

In fact, TJP is not a new word in the autonomous driving industry. In 20 17, when Audi announced that the new Audi A8 was the world's first L3-class self-driving production car, TJP was the main selling point and the supporting speed was higher. When the speed is less than 60 kilometers per hour, all vehicles can drive automatically.

At that time, the industry's understanding of L3 autopilot was still unclear, and the TJP signboard displayed by Audi undoubtedly provided important ideas for the industry. Unfortunately, Audi put this big move too early, and the laws, regulations and supply chain are still immature, so that the TJP function on Audi A8 has been hidden in the snow.

In 20 18, Bosch defined L3 as two specific functions according to the driving scene of passenger cars in its vision of autonomous driving-TJP and HWP corresponding to congestion (expressway? Pilots, highway guidance, that is, drivers can "surprise" at high speed).

If these two functions are taken as a reference, Changan's L3 automatic driving is far from the full blood version.

Then, why doesn't Changan develop and introduce the HWP function into the unit model? Many people in the autonomous driving supply chain analyzed to the routing organization that in the HWP function, the high-speed driving of vehicles will put forward higher requirements for the detection distance and accuracy of the autonomous driving perception system, the response time of the decision-making and control system will be stricter, and the redundancy requirements for the vehicle electronic and electrical architecture will be further improved. Although the supply chain has introduced new products and solutions at various levels, such as chips, domain controllers, sensors and chassis, it still takes some time for car companies to integrate and verify.

In other words, for safety reasons, it is necessary for Changan to be cautious about going to HWP.

In addition to the reasons of mature technology or industry, such as putting L3 autopilot into application, there are inevitable legal problems.

An interesting fact is that although the United States has allowed Google's L4 driverless taxi to go on the road in California without a security officer, it has not given L3 autopilot a clear legal status.

Because there is a scene in L3 autopilot where human drivers take over, it is more difficult to identify the accident responsibility than any other autopilot level. The responsibility for automatic driving in L0-L2 is borne by the driver, while the responsibility for automatic driving in L4 and L5 obviously belongs to the vehicle. L3 When an accident occurs in automatic driving, the driver will take the "pot" around whether the system should alarm, when the system should alarm, and whether the driver takes over in time.

Because of the problem of responsibility identification, L3 autopilot laws and regulations are difficult to promote. Some car companies, such as Volvo, choose to bypass L3 autopilot and directly develop L4 autopilot.

Similarly, due to legal restrictions, Chang 'an's unit model is likely to face the embarrassment of having to turn off L3-class autopilot function after listing. However, with the introduction of the China standard for automatic driving classification, more and more independent brands put the mass production of L3 automatic driving on the agenda, and the formulation of laws and regulations marking L3 automatic driving will also be accelerated. Zhu Huarong also mentioned this in the live broadcast.

Looking back at that time, Chang 'an unit's voice on L3 autopilot may have different meanings.

New technology/brand positioning

Although L3 autopilot is still in an embarrassing state of being able to see and use, it does not prevent the automobile industry, especially independent brands, from flocking to it.

Before Chang 'an, GAC New Energy passed Aion last year. LX started the first shot of L3-class self-driving of its own brand. Following Changan, Geely Automobile also announced that it will launch L3-class self-driving production cars this year. Next year, Great Wall Motor's L3 production car will come out.

What makes independent brands decide to gamble on a seemingly unclear technical road?

Although the prospect of L3 is not very clear, its "transitional" significance in the development of autonomous driving can not be ignored.

Gu Jianmin, CTO of Valeo China, said that L3 autopilot can be an upgraded version of L2 to enhance the customer experience, or it can be an asymptotic line from L3 to L4 (such as many so-called L4? Is a demonstration car or a test car strictly L3)? . He believes that L3 has its objective reasons regardless of whether the original intention of the car factory is to develop L3 system (especially mass production).

An auto industry analyst gave the reason from another angle. According to the data released by Gaogong Smart Car on March 7th, in June this year, L2 self-driving vehicles only accounted for 3.43% of the sales of self-owned brands. What is reflected behind the data is that due to the rapid popularization and homogenization of L2 autonomous driving in the whole industry, independent brands have not achieved obvious brand advantages through this technology.

In this case, the threshold is higher, but for large car companies, "touching" L3-level autonomous driving has become the technical position and propaganda position of independent car companies eager for brand promotion. In other words, whoever establishes the right to speak in L3 autopilot first will have the initiative in differentiated marketing and brand building.

Therefore, we have to say that L3 autopilot is a technical issue first, followed by a legal issue. At present, it may be more of a publicity issue.

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