The three Japanese brands Toyota, Honda and Nissan have always been leaders in the era of fuel vehicles. In the early process of electrification transformation, they have also gained a firm foothold in the field of new energy vehicles with a number of hybrid models. However, with the advent of the era of automobile intelligence, the pace of the “The big three Japanese brands” has been slightly slower, and the development of core intelligent technologies represented by autonomous driving has also faltered.
On April 25, Nissan announced the latest research and development progress of its driver assistance technology. and distance, as well as the spatial structure of the area around the vehicle, to automatically perform collision avoidance operations. At the same time, the technology can detect slowing traffic and road obstacles in the distance, and automatically make lane changes.
Such progress is good news for Nissan, but on the other hand, it also highlights the lag in the development of Nissan’s self-driving technology – at present, many models of Tesla, NIO, Xiaopeng Motors, etc. have been equipped with the above-mentioned vehicles. Functional assisted driving technology. Not only that, there are many car companies and technology companies at home and abroad that are vigorously developing autonomous driving technology, and Nissan’s progress is slightly weak.
However, Japanese car companies are always at the same pace in the process of changing new technologies. Just as the three car companies Toyota, Honda, and Nissan ignored the pure electric vehicle market, resulting in weak car sales growth, and their performance in the field of autonomous driving also lags behind. Although these three car companies have previously launched L2 and L3 self-driving models, they are still unfavorable compared with Tesla and other new car manufacturers in terms of mass production and application.
Toyota confuse
Toyota’s understanding of autonomous driving technology is different from the traditional concept of “liberating the hands of human drivers” – “zero casualties in traffic accidents” is Toyota’s core goal, and the use of autonomous driving technology is just a means. Under this concept, Toyota chose to walk on two legs. It not only developed autonomous driving technology in person, but also invested in many related companies to deploy autonomous driving products.
However, although Toyota began research on autonomous driving technology as early as the 1990s, the real push for autonomous driving technology was in 2016. This year, Toyota established the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) in the Silicon Valley of the United States; in March two years later, Toyota once again joined Aisin Seiki and Denso to invest 2.8 billion US dollars to establish the Toyota Research Institute Advanced Research and Development Corporation (TRI). -AD). They are used to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence and autonomous driving software, respectively.
Toyota is a little late in its self-driving technology, but it does not prevent it from launching the first L4-level self-driving technology platform e-Palette at CES (International Consumer Electronics Show) in January 2018. With the help of a large number of sensors such as lidar and cameras, as well as high-precision 3D maps, the platform can realize low-speed autonomous driving (the maximum speed is 19km/h).
Not only that, but at CES the following year, Toyota released the TRI-P4, an autonomous vehicle based on the Lexus LS500. The car is equipped with 4 cameras and 8 lidars, which can achieve 360-degree perception coverage of the body. Thanks to this, this model not only has the conventional L2-level automatic driving capabilities such as L2 automatic cruise and lane departure correction, but also has a certain level of L3 and above automatic driving capabilities. The system can completely replace the human driver and control the vehicle.
However, due to the high cost of lidar, Toyota has only a few high-end models such as the Lexus LS500 that can support the cost. Therefore, how to balance the cost is a big problem if you want to decentralize the TRI-P4 autonomous driving system on a large scale. Not only that, the injury accident of the e-Palette model equipped with lidar during the Japanese Olympics also cast a shadow over the safety of Toyota’s autonomous driving. Even now, Toyota’s models are mainly equipped with some L2-level automatic driving functions such as lane keeping and cruise control.
The cost of the lidar solution is too high and accidents still occur, which has become a difficult problem for Toyota and even the industry to develop autonomous driving technology. From the perspective of the industry, this may be the key reason why Toyota, which has adhered to the lidar solution in the past, recently announced to the industry that it has turned to a pure visual perception solution.
On April 7, Woven Planet (founded by TRI-AD), an autonomous driving subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation, stated that it will use a single vision solution to develop autonomous driving in assisted driving and higher-level autonomous driving projects. Woven Planet believes that pure visual routes can help reduce costs and obtain more driving data, which is more conducive to expanding the scale of autonomous driving applications compared to high-cost perception solutions such as lidar.
However, it is not inevitable for Toyota to completely abandon the lidar route of the past few years – even if Toyota changes the overall route to a purely visual perception route, the lidar solution currently mounted on a few high-end models such as the Lexus LS500 is in the pure visual sense. Until the plan is mature, it will still be Toyota’s main choice for developing autonomous driving.
The implementation of self-developed technology was blocked, and Toyota began to find another way out – investment.
According to incomplete statistics, Toyota has invested more than 1.5 billion U.S. dollars in the global autonomous driving field in recent years, and successively invested or acquired multiple autonomous driving business units, such as investing 500 million U.S. dollars and 400 million U.S. dollars in Uber and Pony.ai US dollars, the acquisition of Lyft’s autonomous driving division (acquisition price of 550 million US dollars), etc., focusing on L4-level driverless taxis (Robotaxi).
With a lot of money, Toyota and its partners have achieved certain results. For example, Pony.ai recently won the bid for the 2022 taxi capacity index in Nansha District, Guangzhou, which is the first domestic taxi operation license issued to an autonomous driving company. The bid-winning notice clarifies that self-driving vehicles that meet the safety technical requirements for the demonstration operation of intelligent connected vehicles in Guangzhou are allowed to provide taxi business services.
However, on the whole, most of the projects invested by Toyota are still in the research and development and testing stages, and it is still difficult to achieve large-scale commercialization in the short term. In addition, the self-driving products developed and put into use by Toyota, such as the e-Palette model, have not yet been implemented. To the outside world, Toyota’s road to autonomous driving is rather confusing. Perhaps this is just one of the means, and “zero casualties in traffic accidents” is the ultimate goal.
In this context, Toyota is not in a hurry. James Kuffner, chief executive of Toyota’s global research and development department, said that autonomous driving is still far from a real large-scale application, and fully autonomous driving will be realized as soon as 2030.
Honda Aggressiveness
Compared with the massive investment and acquisition of Toyota, the world’s largest car company, Honda has a much lower profile in momentum. However, when it comes to autonomous driving, Honda is the most radical player in the process of legalizing autonomous vehicle in Japan.
Honda legend, the “world’s first mass-produced L3 level autonomous vehicle”, has many attributes that undoubtedly highlight Honda’s ambition in the field of autonomous driving. As the world’s first L3 level autonomous vehicle with legal road exercise rights, legend is the first step for Honda to launch a technical challenge to its peers in the era of automotive intelligence.
Legend was released in March 2021. Equipped with Honda sensing elite intelligent driving system, it can realize automatic driving within a certain limit on specific roads.
Official information shows that the system is equipped with 12 ultrasonic radars, 2 front cameras, 5 millimeter wave radars and 5 laser radars. With the support of 3D high-precision maps and GNSS, it can accurately grasp the position, road conditions and surrounding environment of its own vehicle. The main ECU controller can sense, predict and judge, and control throttle, braking and steering.
In fact, because legend only supports automatic driving in some cases (such as traffic jam), and the speed is limited to 50km/h, and the high cost of radar and other hardware causes legend to lease only 100 vehicles at a high price of 660000 yuan, legend’s name of “the world’s first mass-produced L3 level autonomous vehicle” will be questioned. However, it can be seen that Honda is not satisfied with the traditional L2 level auxiliary driving ability.
Even if Honda has high aspirations, at present, except Tesla, which adopts a pure visual perception scheme, no car company can truly commercialize L3 and higher-level autonomous driving models from the perspective of technology and cost. If Honda adheres to legend’s automatic driving route, it can be predicted that legend can only be a legend until the industry’s high-level automatic driving ability is mature and the price of core parts such as lidar is lowered.
But obviously, in addition to achieving L3 level automatic driving from the technical route, Honda is also taking the road of Toyota investing in enterprises in the industry. Moreover, Honda is more generous than Toyota. In Honda’s investment activities, the most concerned in the industry is to invest in cruise, the driverless star company of general motors.
In October 2018, Honda announced an investment of US $2.75 billion in cruise, an autonomous driving subsidiary of general motors, breaking the previous industry record of Softbank’s investment of US $2.25 billion in cruise.
The investment is divided into two stages: Honda first invested 750 million US dollars in cruise to obtain 5.7% of Cruise’s shares; It will then continue to invest $2 billion over a 12-year period. With the entry of Honda, in the future, the three parties will cooperate to develop a autonomous vehicle deployed worldwide, betting on the commercialization layout of L4 level autonomous driving.
Honda’s ideal is the sea of stars, and L3 and L4 are what they love. According to Honda’s plan, it will launch L4 level autonomous vehicle in 2025. In the previous five years, Honda wanted to achieve the goal of L3 level autonomous vehicle driving on the highway.
It also announced that it would cooperate with two large taxi enterprises in Japan to launch the self driving passenger service in Tokyo, Japan in the mid-2020’s. The vehicle will be jointly developed by Honda, GM and cruise.
Nissan hysteresis
If Honda’s plan to launch L4 class autonomous vehicle in 2025 is “radical”, then Nissan’s self driving road is too smooth, or even sluggish.
Autopilot。
Nissan’s real automatic driving scheme that allows the driver to leave the steering wheel with both hands – propilot 2.0 was launched in 2019. This system supports both hands to leave the steering wheel, and the driver can drive with both hands off the steering wheel on the highway. It is reported that Nissan hopes to take advantage of propilot 2.0 to face off against Tesla autopilot.
Three years ago, propilot 1.0, the initial version of the scheme, realized ACC adaptive cruise function through front monocular camera, millimeter wave radar and other sensors, which has certain lane keeping ability, but the driver must put his hand on the steering wheel when using this function.
With the cooperation of 5 radars (1 front + 4 corners), 12 ultrasonic radars, 7 cameras and high-precision maps, Nissan’s propilot 2.0 can realize non manual intervention driving in the state of single lane cruise on the highway, allowing the driver to leave the steering wheel with both hands. At the same time, it can also assist drivers to overtake and change lanes in the process of multi Lane driving on the expressway until they leave the expressway according to the preset route.
In fact, the technical level of this scheme has reached some L3 level driverless ability standards, which is also in a leading position in 2019. However, at present, this scheme has no obvious advantages over “Wei Xiaoli” and even a number of traditional rivals.
Moreover, in terms of application scale, since only a few models of ariya and skyline under Nissan are equipped with the propilot 2.0 scheme, the main models such as altima / tenna and Sylphy are still equipped with some L2 level auxiliary driving functions, and the automatic driving scheme has not been effectively implemented. Compared with the new forces of car making, which are good at automatic driving, this is even slower.
At the presentation of Nissan’s automatic driving technology, Nissan focused on Nissan’s “road live sensing” technology, saying that it integrates the information perceived by the next generation of high-performance lidar, radar and camera, which can detect the shape and distance of the target in real time and accurately, as well as the spatial structure of the surrounding area of the vehicle, so as to instantly analyze the current situation for judgment, and automatically perform the operation of avoiding collision. At the same time, the technology can also detect the distant deceleration traffic flow and road obstacles, and automatically change the lane. Importantly, in the absence of detailed map information, this technology can still provide strong auxiliary driving support for drivers.
Overall, the new progress made by Nissan plays a key role in the development of its automatic driving technology. However, these developments are not significantly ahead of other enterprises in the industry. Even Nissan’s current investment in the field of automatic driving is more like a catch-up move.
Not only that, Nissan’s automatic driving technology is out of touch with the industry.
Takeshi Iijima, head of the advanced technology R & D Department of AD / ADAS of Nissan Motor Company, told cheyunwang and other media recently that Nissan plans to complete the development of road reality perception technology in the mid-2020’s. This technology will be first carried on some new models and is planned to be applied to all new models by fiscal year 2030.
In the view of the industry, 2030 is too far away for any car enterprise.
Cloud summary of vehicle
In fact, since Tesla, “Wei Xiaoli” and other emerging technology companies joined and led the reform of the automotive industry, electrification and intelligence have become obstacles that traditional car enterprises can’t get around in seeking survival and development. Even at the beginning of the reform, some old car enterprises can still maintain good performance with their long-term accumulated advantages in technology, resources and market. However, with the deepening of industrial reform, the definition of automobile is also being rewritten.
In this context, the top players in the era of traditional fuel vehicles such as Toyota, Honda and Nissan are facing a major test. But at the same time, we also found that no car company chose to “wait and die”. On the contrary, these old car companies are also exploring new development directions, such as Toyota’s vigorous research and development of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, Honda’s launch of new energy brand e: NP, and the actual perception of Nissan’s development road.
In this process, the industry should recognize the various attempts of different types of automobile enterprises in exploring reform. However, automobile enterprises should also see that on the market side, consumers’ urgent demand for green, safe and reliable automobile products is increasing.
In the period of electric transformation of the automobile industry, the three mainstream Japanese manufacturers were slow in the pure electric vehicle market because they only bet on hybrid models; In the intelligent stage, the actions of the three car companies are also slightly conservative. When a number of new car manufacturers successively launched models equipped with ADAS (Advanced assisted driving system), the technologies such as “constant speed cruise” and “lane keeping” possessed by some models of the three car companies also appeared to be somewhat outdated. If car companies fail to make up for market demand in time, they are likely to lag behind their competitors. The Japanese brand’s insufficient investment in pure electric vehicles in the early stage of the development of automobile electrification leads to its limited voice in this segment, which is a lesson from the past.
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