The latest hot project of autonomous driving

Editor? /? Zhang? south

Design? /? Du? triumphant

Source? /? Forbes? Author? Sabir? Jean vala

Amazon, an e-commerce giant, acquired Zoox, a Silicon Valley autonomous driving startup, and officially entered the field of autonomous vehicles, competing with companies developing autonomous driving technology such as Waymo and Tesla.

By Australian Tim (Tim? Kentley Clay) and Apple Chairman Arthur (Arthur? D.Levinson) son Jesse levinson (Jesse? Levinson) was founded on 20 14, and the name Zoox comes from zooxanthellae, because this creature also depends on renewable energy, and its symbiotic relationship with coral reefs also symbolizes the symbiotic goal of companies and people.

Zoox has a bold idea to develop a self-driving electric car specially used for online riding, and provide services to consumers through its own platform. I have taken care of a series of operations such as building cars, taxi software and autonomous driving technology.

To realize this vision, it means that it has to fight against large enterprises on many fronts, such as automobile OEMs (designing and manufacturing cars), technology companies like Google (spending ten years and huge sums of money to develop autonomous driving systems or self-driving cars), and online car companies like Uber and Raffles.

Not long ago, the two sides disclosed the details of cooperation. Zoox's expertise in computer vision is a key factor to attract Amazon. Generally speaking, it is its ability to perceive the environment and make decisions by using the information of various sensors such as optical camera, lidar and GPS, as well as artificial intelligence and background information.

Computer vision and perception are the key to the safe operation of self-driving cars. Self-driving cars are potentially big business, but Amazon's business goals are even bigger.

Although the announcement at the beginning of the cooperation was about Zoox continuing to provide autonomous driving services for passenger cars, for Amazon, the cargo distribution business may be a bigger and more direct driving force. Realizing the automation of long-distance transportation and last mile distribution can significantly improve the profitability of its core business.

Computer vision and perception can achieve this. Amazon's current home security products such as drone delivery, storage robots, Ring, and Amazon? Go and other unmanned stores are also for this purpose. ?

With competitors in the field of self-driving cars (Waymo, Argo? Like AI, Cruise, Aurora and Yandex, Zoox uses lidar as one of the key sensors in its sensing suite. However, unlike them, Zoox's lidar is purchased from an external supplier.

Waymo and Yandex have their own internally developed lidar suite, and Google even fought an exciting legal battle with Uber on lidar not long ago. Argo? AI, Cruise and Aurora acquire Lidar, Princeton? Light wave, strobe and Blackmore.

These companies realize that 3D sensing is closely related to the quality of the sensing suite. The direct control of the design, architecture and function of lidar determines whether the software stack of autonomous vehicles can achieve higher performance and lower delay.

According to Forbes, at present, there are more than 75 lidar companies with limited income and need a lot of extra investment, so the integration of lidar field will be inevitable.

With Amazon's acquisition of Zoox, the acquisition competition of high-quality lidar enterprises including products, design, market, IP and talents will intensify.

The ecosystem of potential buyers of lidar

As the picture shows, there are six potential buyers of lidar:

(1) Independent lidar company, with a financing of over 200 million USD and a valuation of over 654.38+0 billion USD. Willetto, Quanergy, Luminar, Innoviz and Vosai (and perhaps several others) all fall into this category.

Wilden recently announced his intention to pass an agreement with Graf? Reverse merger and listing of industrial enterprises. As a listed company, it can merge with other universities, or it can acquire smaller companies with difficult operations. Other LUnicorns can also choose to take a similar IPO route as an integration force.

Recently, Luminar announced a high-profile recruitment of executives, and the intellectual property cross-licensing agreement between Wilden and Voser may indicate a bigger move.

②? Large technology companies are involved in the field of autonomous driving. Amazon and Apple's ambitions go far beyond self-driving cars, and they both have enough resources to acquire LUnicorns. Amazon will first invest in companies that serve truck transportation, drones and people movement, and expand the product scale to serve logistics, security and retail applications.

The point here is that Amazon can make lidar into the order of magnitude needed by reality, which can be used for self-driving cars and many other applications. At present, no other company has this type of application binding demand and the number required for large-scale lidar.

Apple currently integrates 3D sensing functions in its smartphones and computers, and has commercial interests in self-driving cars, maps, security and next-generation AR/VR applications. Amazon's acquisition of high-quality lidar companies and talents is a potential competitive force.

③? Major autonomous vehicle technology companies, such as Waymo, Argo, Yandex and Aurora, all have their own lidar departments, and they are unlikely to make more acquisitions in this field. Other companies such as Baidu, Alibaba, Nuro, Uber and Tucson may take action in the future. Baidu has invested heavily in Vosay and Verdun.

GM-Cruise may actively try to acquire a lidar company. Obviously, it had ample cash flow and tried to buy Zoox, but Amazon beat it to the punch, and the acquisition of Strobe seemed to go away. It has been unclear to replace lidar with thermal camera.

④? First-class automobile suppliers are in an awkward position, responsible for powerful OEM customers, and generally not profitable, but they still need to provide cutting-edge technology to meet OEM requirements for function and performance. Mainland China, Valeo and ZF all have their own internal laser radar research and development and products, while Bosch is in CES? Its research and development plan will be announced in 2020.

Magna, Mobius, Veoneer (Weiner) and Aptiv (Amber) have basically served as manufacturing partners of Lidar (currently mainly used for ADAS). Denso, Hitachi and Aisin Seiki do not have their own laser radar departments at present, but it is unlikely that they will acquire LUnicorns. They prefer to buy small companies, which may be difficult to apply to the automotive field.

⑤? Semiconductor companies in the field of autonomous vehicles include Intel (Mobileye), AMS, NVIDIA, Infineon and Anson Semiconductor. Anson has been working on the research and development of lidar.

Mobileye, which has always claimed that it doesn't need lidar, recently made a small-scale acquisition in the field of lidar point cloud processing. It may make a fuss about radar companies, especially in FMCW (frequency modulated continuous wave) field, because this special radar method can make better use of Intel's investment in silicon photonics in the past 10 years.

⑥? OEM, but this is not a traditional OEM. Lucid, known as Tesla's biggest potential rival, recently announced that they plan to launch electric vehicles with lidar, mainly for ADAS? Secondary and tertiary autopilot. Their plan is exactly the same as Tesla's, selling electric cars with lidar or other sensors to consumers, collecting data from these cars/computers, and using these data to make progress in the field of autonomous driving.

However, the key difference is that Tesla has more than 500,000 cars/computers on the road, but it has always refused to use lidar, and has ambitious plans to launch a class 4 self-driving car by the end of 2020. If Tesla wants to change direction, Musk must admit that he is wrong about lidar.

However, selling cars equipped with lidar to consumers and competing with companies such as Tesla and Weilai is enough to make Lucid feel overwhelmed. It may not have the funds and energy to acquire and integrate a lidar company now.

To sum up Forbes' conclusion in one sentence, Amazon, GM-Cruise, Apple and Intel may actively deploy lidar in the next six months. Several companies are either acquired or listed.

For lidar, just when they thought they were going to be eliminated, spring suddenly came.

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