(Text/Zhang Jiadong Editor/Zhang Guangkai)
In 2024, two sessions of the National People’s Congress are just around the corner. As deputies to the National People’s Congress, entrepreneurs such as He Xiaopeng, Chairman of Xpeng Motors, and Lei Jun, Chairman and CEO of Xiaomi Group have also exposed their own suggestions on the development of their industries.
Although it has only been three years since joining the car-making industry, and the first Xiaomi car conference was just held in December last year, for Lei Jun himself, the automobile industry, which he called his last venture, is in a once-in-a-century transformation period, which undoubtedly has great development space and potential.
According to the document issued by Lei Jun on March 4th, he will submit four suggestions at this session, including "Suggestions on accelerating the construction of green and low-carbon supply chain in manufacturing industry", "Suggestions on strengthening the training of artificial intelligence talents to meet the needs of scientific and technological changes", "Suggestions on further standardizing the safe application of intelligent driving products" and "Suggestions on increasing the support of intelligent manufacturing and accelerating the development of integrated advanced technologies".
Among them, in view of the development of the automobile industry, Lei Jun believes that in order to better provide smart car users with a safe and comfortable product experience and further enhance the competitive advantage of Chinese automobile brands in the field of intelligent driving, it is necessary to promote the implementation of relevant laws and regulations and product supervision and management measures as soon as possible, and standardize the safe application of intelligent driving products.
Based on the above contents, Lei Jun put forward three suggestions: standardizing the application of assisted driving function to create a safe driving experience; Standardize the application of autonomous parking service function to ensure the safety of unmanned scene experience; Standardize the use of vehicle data to improve the safety level of intelligent driving products.
1. In terms of regulating the assisted driving function, Lei Jun said: At present, the assisted driving function of automobiles has been applied on a large scale, and the safety standards of assisted driving related products are being formulated one after another. However, the landing application scheme of relevant laws and regulations is not clear yet, which leads to great differences in the safety guarantee measures of existing assisted driving products. Drivers may not understand the state of assisted driving function clearly or even use it wrongly, which may pose a risk of safety accidents.
He suggested establishing a safety supervision and management mechanism for assisted driving products as soon as possible, speeding up the application of technical requirements and test and verification standards for assisted driving, refining the requirements for human-computer interaction such as drivers’ environment and risk warning, standardizing the correct use of assisted driving functions, and creating a safer assisted driving experience.
Second, in terms of standardizing the functional application of autonomous parking service, Lei Jun believes that in order to solve the parking pain of users, such as difficulty in finding parking spaces and long parking time, enterprises in the industry have successively introduced independent parking service solutions. However, there are some problems in the process of landing, such as inconsistent supporting standards for parking lots, nonstandard definition of product functions and unclear safety performance standards, which lead to difficulties in landing and promoting the unmanned scene of autonomous parking service.
Third, in regulating the use of vehicle-side data, Lei Jun said: The improvement of the safety level of intelligent driving depends on the feedback of real data of vehicle-side and road. In order to make more compliant and efficient use of data, enterprises need more detailed compliance measures and product standards for guidance in data collection, storage and use.
It is suggested to further refine the compliance measures and implementation rules of product standards in the collection, storage and use of intelligent driving data, so as to provide a clearer basis for the safe management and efficient circulation of intelligent driving data and guide enterprises to use intelligent driving data reasonably. At the same time, establish a unified intelligent driving safety monitoring data platform, and continuously improve the supervision system through big data empowerment.
According to the proposals made by representatives of car companies in the past two sessions, the proposals made by the participants are often closely related to the development direction of their own enterprises. Taking last year’s two sessions as an example, in order to help Xpeng Motors, which was trying to lead the development of intelligent driving technology in China at that time, broaden the track, He Xiaopeng highlighted the scheme of legislation and technical system related to autonomous driving. On this premise, the launch of G6 in Tucki in the same year and Tucki’s preemptive application of "BEV+Transformer" route made it unanimously regarded by the outside world as the banner of further popularization of advanced intelligent driving technology.
Nowadays, Lei Jun’s suggestion on smart driving legislation is also not groundless.
On December 28, 2023, after the first technical conference of Xiaomi Automobile, many voices believed that from the conference, Xiaomi Automobile, as a representative of cross-border car-making and a latecomer to the market, did not show enough subversion to the current automobile industry. Compared with new car companies such as "Wei Xiaoli", Xiaomi still needs to convince the market and users with absolute technical advantages.
Since Lei Jun has repeatedly stressed on social media that the price of Xiaomi’s first model SU7 is "not cheap", looking back at the whole conference, Xiaomi’s self-developed intelligent driving technology mentioned by Lei Jun may become a unique breakthrough in the market.
Regarding the self-developed intelligent driving technology of Xiaomi Automobile, Lei Jun once said that the total investment in the first phase of the project reached 3.3 billion yuan, and it has now increased to 4.7 billion yuan. The goal of its automatic driving is to enter the first camp of the industry in 2024. On the application level, the parking service application specification mentioned by Lei Jun this time is one of the "dominant technologies" of Xiaomi Automobile. Previously, Xiaomi demonstrated the performance of its unmanned parking service technology in the face of extremely challenging 0.05m extremely narrow parking spaces. Through high-precision sensors, advanced computer vision technology and deep learning algorithm, automatic parking in a very narrow space has been successfully realized.
At the same time, Xiaomi Automobile also released auto-driving technologies such as zoom BEV, super-resolution network occupation technology and large road model at the previous press conference, and plans to open 100 cities to pilot NOA by the end of next year, all of which demonstrate Xiaomi’s in-depth research in intelligent driving technology.
However, in the current market, in addition to Xpeng Motors, which promoted the development of high-level intelligent driving early, Huawei, which became famous for its AEB collision, followed by the ideal of self-developed intelligent driving scheme, and Zhiji and Jiyue, which are the first echelon of traditional automobile enterprises, all set their sights on the field of high-level intelligent driving.
For the above-mentioned intelligent driving head car companies, the technical performance and market voice of most of them have been fully precipitated, and the biggest limiting factor in the promotion of high-level intelligent driving technology is the perfection of corresponding laws and regulations.
This also means that if Xiaomi Automobile expects to enrich its brand image through the smart driving track, accelerating the implementation of smart driving regulations and regulatory measures will undoubtedly help this latecomer to make rapid response in a targeted manner, thus completing the vision of "entering the first camp in the industry".
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