Top Ten Events of Autopilot in 2024： Seeing L3／L4 Road in Chaos

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In the past 2024, autonomous driving experienced a turbulent technological breakthrough and a battle of commercial landing.

From a technical point of view, end-to-end has become an industry consensus, and all players are undergoing end-to-end technological transformation, and technological exploration like big model and world model is also in full swing, and the direction of next-generation intelligent driving technology like VLA has also entered the industry field of vision.

From the perspective of commercial landing, Zhijia is entering the stage of large-scale landing for ordinary users.

Specifically, providers of high-end smart driving solutions like Huawei, Yuanrong Qihang, Momenta and Horizon are sparing no effort to push their high-end smart driving solutions to the ground through specific models-and new players like Tucki, Ideality and Weilai are also actively pushing their smart driving to lower-priced models. To some extent, the war of intelligent driving has burned to the price range of 100 thousand to 200 thousand.

What is more noteworthy is that with the continuous advancement of technology, Robotaxi has once again become an industry concern.

Against this background, the intelligent driving industry in 2024 can still be said to be a competition between Qian Fan and other countries, but the competition is much more fierce. With technical exploration and commercial landing as the main line, major players began to look for the last chance to go to the table-in any case, this is still an annual drama worth recalling in the smart driving industry.

Therefore, looking back to 2024, we once again make an annual inventory of the top ten important events in the autonomous driving industry in time order, hoping to outline the general development outline of the whole industry in 2024.

1. Huawei launched Gankun ADS 3.0 and ADS SE.

On April 24, 2024, on the eve of the opening of Beijing Auto Show, Huawei released Huawei Gankun, a new brand of smart car solutions with intelligent driving as the core, and thus released Huawei Gankun ADS 3.0 and ADS SE versions.　

In terms of perception, Gankun ADS 3.0 has achieved a leap-forward progress from simple "recognizing obstacles" to deep "understanding driving scenes" based on GOD. At the same time, in terms of decision-making and planning, the new architecture of Gankun ADS 3.0 adopts PDP (Predictive Decision Planning and Control) network to realize pre-decision and planning a network, so as to realize humanized decision-making and planning, with more human-like driving trajectory and higher traffic efficiency.

As a result, ADS 3.0 has achieved an end-to-end architecture in terms of technical architecture. Based on this architecture, Gankun ADS 3.0 can realize the NCA function of intelligent driving from parking space to parking space, and at the same time, it can also realize leaving the car in the aspect of intelligent parking, and parking and driving also goes to full-scene commercialization.

In addition, in addition to ADS 3.0, which is positioned in high-end intelligent driving, Gankun ADS also launched ADS SE version, which supports high-speed easy-to-open and visible parking capacity-from the market positioning, Gankun ADS SE is positioned in the price range below 200,000.

From the industry point of view, the release of Huawei Gankun ADS 3.0 and ADS SE versions means the continuous evolution of Huawei’s smart driving technology on the one hand, and Huawei has also sought higher consumer recognition in the brand on the other hand, and sought the market expansion and price reduction of smart driving at the market level.

2. Horizon released Horizon SurDrive full-scene intelligent driving solution.

On April 24, 2024, Horizon released a new generation of in-vehicle intelligent computing solution Journey 6 series and Horizon’s self-developed SuperDrive full-scene intelligent driving solution at the smart driving technology product launch conference before the Beijing Auto Show.

Among them, on the software level, SuperDrive has adopted an end-to-end world model and a data-driven interactive game architecture. At present, it has got rid of the shackles of high-precision maps and achieved "national opening".

In addition, Horizon released the latest generation of intelligent driving computing solution Journey 6 series, which includes 6 versions, and the computing power covers from 10+ TOPS in the low-end intelligent driving market to 560 TOPS in the high-end intelligent driving market—among which SuperDrive is matched with Journey 6, the flagship version of Journey 6 with a computing power of 560 TOPS.

Horizon chose SuperDrive to build a "benchmark of high-level intelligent driving industry", which is essentially a major role change in high-level intelligent driving, and also to build and strengthen Horizon’s position as an important player of high-level intelligent driving-this is determined by the fierce competition in the industry.

Later, it turns out that today’s SuperDrive has become the core support point of Horizon in terms of technology landing, industry value and capital market.

3. Ideal publishing end-to-end+VLM dual system architecture.

On July 5, 2024, LI released a new generation of technical solutions based on end-to-end+VLM at its 2024 Smart Driving Summer Conference.

Among them, the ideal end-to-end adopts the algorithm architecture of One Model, the input is the sensor and the output is the driving trajectory. VLM is a visual language model, and its output information includes the understanding of the environment, driving decision and driving trajectory, and is transmitted to the system 1 to control the vehicle. In addition, LI also put forward a world model at this conference, which is equivalent to providing a training and testing venue.

In order to cooperate with this brand-new algorithm architecture, LI has also adjusted the structure of the intelligent driving team, and greatly expanded the cloud computing power in the subsequent progress-by the end of 2024, the cloud training computing power in LI has been upgraded to 8.1 EFLOPS.

It is worth mentioning that, starting with the release of the end-to-end+VLM scheme, LI’s advanced intelligent driving has undergone a very rapid evolution process in the second half of 2024. In October 2024, LI officially launched the OTA 6.4 version for all users, thus opening the first full-scale push of "end-to-end+VLM" in the industry.

In addition, Li Xiang, the head of LI, made it clear in the AI Talk at the end of the year that LI hopes to achieve L3-level supervised intelligent driving in 2025, and it is expected to launch the first car defined as L4-level autonomous driving three years later-these are also part of the evolution of ideals in promoting artificial intelligence to AGI.

4. Baidu radish runs quickly and attracts industry attention.

On July 10th, 2024, a piece of news about "Rapunzel Rush Orders Soaring Up" appeared on Weibo Hot Search, which attracted a lot of attention. On that day, Baidu’s Hong Kong stock price rose sharply, with an increase of over 10% at one time.

This aspect is due to the spotlight effect caused by autonomous driving at the commercial landing gate; From another perspective, this result is also deeply related to Baidu’s long-term investment and achievements in the field of Robotaxi.

In fact, in the past ten years, Baidu has only invested tens of billions in the Apollo project; In terms of landing, as of April 19, 2024, Baidu Radish Run has provided more than 6 million rides to the public and the test mileage has exceeded 100 million kilometers. It is the world’s largest self-driving travel service provider.

It is worth mentioning that on Apollo Day 2024 on May 15th, 2024, Baidu Apollo released the world’s first large-scale model Apollo ADFM (the full name in English is Autonomous Driving Foundation Model), and also released the sixth-generation unmanned vehicle equipped with Baidu’s sixth-generation intelligent system solution.

It is understood that the cost of radish running the sixth generation of unmanned vehicles has reached the range of 200,000, which is 60% lower than that of the previous generation (the cost is about 500,000), and this is mainly due to the decrease in the number of sensors (such as expensive lidar) and the decline in the prices of key components.

It is worth mentioning that, in terms of operation, Apollo also chose to replace manual plugging and unplugging of the charging gun with the power exchange mode, which not only reduced the labor cost, but also improved the charging efficiency, saved the charging time, and further improved the operation efficiency.

Regarding this layout, Baidu officials said that with thousands of sixth-generation unmanned vehicles put into use one after another, the revenue growth rate of Radish Run will be faster, which is very close to the critical point of breakeven-the goal is that by the end of 2024, Radish Run will break even in Wuhan and fully enter the profit period in 2025.

5. The world’s first 5-nanometer smart driving chip was successfully streamed.

On July 27th, 2024, at NIO IN 2024 Weilai Innovation and Technology Day, Weilai founder Li Bin and CEO announced the success of Shenji NX9031.

Shenji NX9031 is a self-developed intelligent driving chip announced by Weilai at NIO Day in 2023. This chip will be carried on Weilai’s flagship model ET9. It adopts the 5nm process technology, and it is also the first high-order intelligent driving chip manufactured by the 5nm gauge process in the industry.

According to Weilai’s official statement, Weilai Shenji NX9031 chip and underlying software have all been independently designed. Shenji NX9031 has more than 50 billion transistors. Whether it is comprehensive ability or execution efficiency, a self-developed chip can achieve the performance of four industry flagship chips.

On the technical level, Shenji NX9031 has a CPU computing cluster with superior task concurrent processing ability and abundant memory access bandwidth, which can realize fast and stable delay processing; Full-link extrasensory enhancement-self-developed image signal processor ISP can realize all-weather and all-scene recognition and realize earlier braking response in emergency scenes.

In addition, Weilai Shenji NX9031 chip also has the reasoning acceleration unit NPU developed by Weilai, the highest level of native safety design in the industry, and the millisecond backup capability of dual chips, which will improve the driving efficiency and travel safety of users in all directions.

Considering the core position of intelligent driving in the field of automobile intelligence and the profound relationship between intelligent driving and AI, there is no doubt that Shenji NX9031 chip is also a key layout of Weilai in the field of AI landing. 6. Tucki released Turing AI chip.

6. Tucki released Turing AI chip.

On August 24th, 2024, at the MONA M03 conference in Tucki, Xpeng Motors officially released the world’s first chip which can be used in robots, AI cars and flying cars at the same time-Turing in Tucki.

This chip is specially designed for end-to-end large model in Tucki. It integrates two self-developed neural network processing brains (NPU) and two independent image signal processors (ISP), and adopts neural network-oriented DSA (domain-specific architecture).

At the same time, it has a 40-core processor, which provides strong computing support for large models, and its computing power is three times that of existing chips, and it supports the local side to run large models with the maximum 30B parameters. In addition, in order to meet the safety requirements of L4-class automatic driving, it also sets up an independent safety island, which can carry out the safety inspection of the whole vehicle without blind spots in real time.

It is worth mentioning that the chip was successfully released on August 23, and its name pays tribute to the famous computer scientist Turing.

Regarding this chip, He Xiaopeng himself said in an interview: In the future, companies that are determined to make a difference in AI may all have non-universal chips, that is, proprietary AI chips like Turing chips in Tucki. It has reached or even surpassed the capabilities of the three Orin-X chips we are using now.

It can be said that Tucki Turing Chip is Xpeng Motors’s "AI killer" for the next decade, and it is also the biggest confidence for Xpeng Motors to become a "global AI automobile company".

7. BYD Equation Leopard and Huawei Gankun Zhijia reached a cooperation.

In late August 2024, BYD Equation Leopard and Huawei signed an intelligent driving cooperation agreement in Shenzhen. According to this agreement, the two sides launched in-depth joint research and development of intelligent driving for BYD’s Equation Leopard car. The first product focused on the upcoming Equation Leopard 8 model, equipped with Huawei Gankun Intelligent Driving ADS 3.0.

The two sides said that the smart driving cooperation between BYD and Huawei will be fully implemented in the model of its sub-brand Equation Leopard-and the Leopard 8 is the first model, and it is also the world’s first hard-core model equipped with Huawei’s smart driving.

On the signing agreement, Wang Chuanfu, chairman and president of BYD Group, and Xu Zhijun, rotating chairman of Huawei, attended and witnessed the signing of the contract, which showed that they attached great importance to this cooperation.

From the perspective of the industry, Huawei’s hand in hand with BYD not only proves Huawei’s recognition in the field of intelligent driving, but also shows that BYD attaches great importance to intelligent driving.

It is worth mentioning that Equation Leopard 8 has been officially listed on November 12, 2024, and the price is 379,800 yuan to 407,800 yuan-so far, the delivery volume of Equation Leopard 8 has exceeded 10,000 units.

8. Tesla Robotaxi product Cybercab was officially unveiled.

On the evening of October 10th, Pacific Time, a Tesla Robotaxi model named Cybercab was officially unveiled at Tesla’s "WE, ROBOT" event.

The overall appearance of Cybercab is very sci-fi, with a silver-white body, no rearview mirror, no door handle and only a row of seats. When the doors on the left and right sides are opened, they are like flying wings. At the same time, it has no steering wheel, accelerator pedal and brake pedal, and there is no configuration similar to the turn signal lever and wiper lever that are common in daily models.

In addition, the car will adopt induction charging technology, and the car body has no special charging port.

Regarding Cybercab, Musk said that thanks to autonomous driving technology, with Cybercab, people can read books after getting on the bus or take a rest directly.

Regarding this car, Musk said that users can also buy Cybercab privately, and its price will be less than 300 million US dollars (about 210,000 yuan). In terms of the specific production date, Musk also made it clear that Cybercab will be mass-produced in 2026, and no later than 2027.

With the arrival of Cybercab, Tesla has started the next stage of its own development, and at the same time, it has also set off another climax of Robotaxi in the whole industry-and this is undoubtedly another example that autonomous driving technology really benefits mankind. It is still far away, but it is worth pursuing.

9. Yuanrong Qihang announced the C1 round financing of USD 100 million.

On November 5, 2024, Yuanrong Qixing announced the completion of the C1 round of strategic financing of US$ 100 million, which was exclusively invested by the domestic head OEM. Although the official did not disclose the name of this OEM, according to the wisdom Time, the name of this OEM is Great Wall Motor.

According to the official statement, this round of financing will be used to consolidate domestic mass production projects, expand overseas business, and provide financial support for exploring cutting-edge technologies such as commercial operation of Robotaxi and layout of VLA model.

Yuanrong Qixing mainly focuses on high-level intelligent driving in the field of intelligence. It took the lead in launching the "no map" scheme on the technical route, and later launched the end-to-end intelligent driving model DeepRoute IO. Yuanrong Qixing’s high-level intelligent driving scheme has been put on the Wei brand New Blue Mountain and smart Elf 5 under Great Wall Motor.

Interestingly, Yuanrong Qihang was the first enterprise in China to acquire Thor chips. Yuanrong Qixing is developing a VLA model (Vision-Language-Action Model) based on this chip, which is expected to be officially launched in 2025.

According to reports, in 2025, Yuanrong Qixing will put more than 10 production cars on the market, including SUV, MPV, off-road and other models. The first MPV using Yuanrong Intelligent Driving System will be listed in Q1, 2025. It is estimated that in the whole year of 2025, the scale of production vehicles of Yuanrong Qixing will exceed 200,000. At the same time, Yuanrong Qixing is also using its domestic mass production experience to empower the development of overseas car enterprises.

10. Tesla officially pushed FSD V13 to car owners.

In December 2024, Tesla officially began to push the version of FSD V13 for ordinary car owners (rather than internal employees), which is also a major upgrade of FSD after entering the end-to-end era.

It is understood that FSD V13 can process AI4 video with 36 Hz and native definition. Its algorithm architecture is based on neural network, and the training data volume is increased by 4.2 times, while the training computing power is increased by 5 times and the delay is reduced by 2 times.

At the same time, it can support one-button parking lot activation, and can realize parking, turning around, parking and other functions, which improves the ability to avoid collisions-in addition, it has improved the controller, thus making the driving process more silky.

It is worth mentioning that Tesla’s Cybercab, which was tested by guests at the press conference on October 10, was equipped with the FSD V13 version.

FSD V13 is undoubtedly a major node of Tesla in the development of autonomous driving.

Earlier, Musk said that in 2025, unsupervised FSD technology will be promoted to land in California and Texas. In addition, according to the official news released by Tesla, FSD is expected to be launched in China and Europe in the first quarter of 2025-of course, it still needs the approval of the regulatory authorities.

Write it at the end

Looking back from today’s perspective, we will realize that the development of autonomous driving is still at the complex intersection of technological evolution and commercial landing.

From the perspective of technology, after the end-to-end blessing, the high-order intelligent driving has indeed undergone enough changes; But this change is not enough to support major players to realize L3 and L4. Therefore, the continued development of high-level intelligent driving requires both the continuous evolution of algorithm architecture (such as VLA) and the blessing of more powerful cloud and car computing power.

Of course, with the increasingly close relationship between autonomous driving and the development of AI technology, to some extent, the real realization of autonomous driving really needs the overall technological breakthrough of human beings in AGI to empower.

Therefore, in 2025, the technological progress of intelligent driving is still worthy of attention, and it is very likely that it will once again affect the ranking of players in the intelligent driving industry.

From the perspective of commercial landing, with the price segment of 200,000 as the dividing line, the division of intelligent driving in product landing is becoming more and more obvious.

Among them, above the price range of 200,000 yuan, high-order intelligent driving (supporting NOA in urban areas) is reaching more consumers through the new models of major manufacturers, and it has gradually become one of the key configurations of this price range, and this configuration is also more and more important for consumers to buy cars; On the other hand, in the price range below 200,000, the smart driving scheme supporting high-speed NOA is also constantly landing for new models, such as ADS SE.

Generally speaking, after ten years of development, intelligent driving has gradually become a product that ordinary consumers can truly experience the value from an unreachable concept vocabulary; It is conceivable that in the subsequent development, intelligent driving will play a more important role in consumers’ car purchase decision.

As smart driving benefits more consumers, its road to autonomous driving at the technical level is no longer so vague-this road is still long, of course, but people have seen its outline and will continue to move forward.