I wonder if you have noticed that in the case of automatic driving, which is a cheese with huge profits, it is different from the old “different battles†in the previous two years. In 2017, whether it is from vehicle manufacturers, technology giants or the supply chain Businesses have all started the “group warfare†mode, and the entire auto-driving industry chain is moving from chaos to alliances – as the media has described: 2017 is the “first year of self-driving senior drivers seeking teamâ€.
For example, two weeks ago, BMW, Intel and Mobileye jointly announced that Delphi will be the development partner and system integrator of its newest automated driving platform. The “BMW-Intel-Mobileye-Delphi†alliance will adopt a unified cooperation model. The automotive industry offers automated driving solutions; for example, Baidu also announced earlier that it will provide manufacturers with a complete Apollo software and hardware and service solutions, as part of the plan, on May 31 and June 1, Baidu We signed strategic cooperation agreements with Continental Group and Bosch Group, respectively, and quickly added two heavyweight friends in the auto circle of “friend circlesâ€.
Well, we can be sure that the commercial competition in the field of automated driving will increasingly occur in different courts. It is not difficult to understand that in the era of ever-increasing connection, the "barrel theory" (how much water a bucket can hold depends on the shortest piece of wood) has gradually become ineffective. In the same industry chain, different companies are meticulously polishing their own Longboards, then grafted with the longest boards of other companies, form a synergy with the construction of a value network, and quickly capture the market, is the most efficient and wise approach. As the economist Brian Arthur puts it: "Commercial networks are an ecological group, and participants must eventually compete by establishing a network."
This kind of commercial clustering that resembles the "symbiotic relationship" of the biosphere is increasingly in the auto-driving industry.
Automatic Driving "Brain": A Complete Solution
This is because, first of all, the complexity of autonomous driving technology has made it impossible for any company to carry out its own tasks. This has stretched the length of the industrial chain.
However, it is worth mentioning that, just as there are “value scarcity†in the industrial chain in any field, there is also a core node in the process of alliance between autonomous driving companies. In other words, since autopilot is driven by artificial intelligence. Self-employed people will play a role similar to the "brain", but considering that autopilot is not a simple splicing between technology and equipment (see traditional cars), but algorithms, computing hardware, sensing systems, basic decisions, Super-complex applications with data collection and other capabilities (Kai Kaifu has said bluntly that drones need to solve all the problems that AI needs to solve), the definition of “brain†is undoubtedly to provide a complete set of solutions.
More likely, the leader of the “brain†driven by artificial intelligence is bound to come from technology giants with many years of technological precipitation and alliances built around giants. They will provide full vehicle manufacturers with a set of direct hardware and software solutions that can be grafted. The plan helped the latter make alienated products - just as the story of Android repeated in the smartphone market ten years ago. Considering the crowdedness of autopilot tracks, the top priority for each depot is to find its own “brain†as soon as possible.
When it comes to Android's recurrence in the field of autopilot, it is inevitable to talk about Baidu's Apollo open source project. As you know, Apollo project solutions include four parts of vehicle platform, hardware platform, software platform and cloud data service. Baidu will open the code or capability of environment awareness, path planning, vehicle control, vehicle operating system and other functions. Complete development and testing tools help complete vehicle companies quickly build their own complete autopilot system.
In fact, an important feature of Apollo's plan is its completeness. Baidu has previously stated that it will select partners with the best degree of synergy and compatibility in the field of sensors and other components to form a collaborative alliance - now, for two days in a row with the German mainland. The strategic cooperation agreement between the Group and the Bosch Group also shows the ambition of Baidu's attempt to weave a “jumbo networkâ€.
If the "driving group" of autonomous driving is likened to a resource battle, the two generals recruited by the Baidu camp will inevitably influence the future situation in a large extent - and more importantly, considering the ambition of the Apollo project, The alliance of two heavyweight players is undoubtedly just a prelude to Baidu's fast-growing "Tian Luo network."
Grab the "next screen"
Of course, the Apollo plan is moving forward, but the suspicion about this plan has not stopped: the development of the technology platform, Baidu resolutely will not just to promote the advance of the entire industry, what is the game behind Baidu's move? Let's analyze it.
First of all, it should be noted that Baidu’s open source is based on a combination of prior industrial integration efforts. Through the double hunting of capital and technology, Baidu has built a clear value chain before the Apollo project: for example, capital. On the other hand, it jointly invested 150 million U.S. dollars in the investment of laser radar company Velodyne LiDAR last year; in March this year, it also participated in the financing of Weilai Automobile by hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars; in April, Baidu purchased Silicon Valley Computer Vision Company xPerception. At the business level, in the past two years, Baidu has successively established cooperative relationships with well-known manufacturers such as Foton Motor, Yuante Technology, Beiqi, FAW-Volkswagen and Nvidia. (Statistics shows that Baidu has launched strategic cooperation with more than 60 car companies, and its intelligent assistance The driving solution has been deployed on more than 200 models.) Therefore, on the basis of existing alliances, it is logical to expand the autonomous driving platform by continuing to attract friends and expand the ecological forces surrounding its own construction.
Of course, artificial intelligence that uses data as blood can fall into an incremental cycle of “more people use it more intelligently, and more intelligent use more peopleâ€. So, this kind of opening will also benefit Baidu itself. From the most superficial point of view, the partners' sequential collection will lead to a sharp increase in the amount of data. Under the “feeding†of massive data, Baidu can continuously optimize the algorithm and feed back its self-driving ability. It may eventually become The leader of the technical rules of this industry. As KK puts it, “Once a company moves into this virtuous circle, its scale will grow and the development will accelerate, so that no new opponents can hope for it.â€
In fact, compared to the “old school†style that occupies most of the history of human science, it is often the best strategy to increase the pace of research and development. What's more, the object of opening up is the smart car known as "the human next screen." Understand that in the case that the underlying operating system of the mobile Internet is already saturated, it is very important to take the lead in seizing the "next screen". In the future, when automobiles become one of the most frequently used smart devices for humans, whoever has the largest amount of data will be able to Is equal to have the greatest right to speak.
From a practical point of view, this right to speak will eventually be converted into commercial interests. Just one week after Baidu released the Apollo plan, Lu Qi, in answering the investment agency's question during the 2017 Q1 earnings briefing, emphasized that autopilot is a key aspect of Baidu's AI commercialization. It is reasonable to expect that the autopilot solution will bring very substantial revenue growth to Baidu. After all, the future business prospects for unmanned driving are not to let more people trade more cars, but to develop new business models.
More importantly, in my opinion, Baidu’s commercial interests in the autopilot industry chain will be honored with the role of “eco-dominantâ€, just as Android bundles mass users into the ecosystem based on Google Accounts. Baidu is also using the Apollo Project to build a “Tian Luo Di Network†of the auto-driving industry chain, so that more high-quality resources will be attached to this, and the more resources that are entrenched in this value network, Baidu’s own benefits will be more - More crucially, as mentioned earlier, due to the dominant role of the "brain" of the autopilot industry, as long as there are enough coalition players in the alliance, the scarcity of value will allow Baidu to be at the top of the autopilot ecological chain.
As some strategic scholars have analyzed, in the dynamic business world, the true strategic thinking is to embed the interests of others into a self-centered system: when more partners’ interests are tied up with you, the ecological barriers will also be Built naturally. Specific to Baidu’s automatic driving, this also means that Baidu will further consolidate the leading position of the Chinese autopilot industry.
In any case, Baidu took the lead in opening up the "ecological warfare" of the autopilot industry. The process of instilling wisdom into cars will eventually be a joint exploration of the whole industry chain - because all practitioners in this industry are convinced that the description of Xu Daquan, executive vice president of Bosch China, is: "One day in the future, Just as the government introduced regulations to eliminate yellow-label cars, then the government would have to introduce a law to eliminate artificially-driving cars. Perhaps in a while, young people will ask: The car was once driven by itself."
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