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Image source: Visual China

Author: Cheng Xiaoyi Editor: Ye Jinyan

Produced by: Deepnet·Tencent News Xiaoman Studio

"1.6 yuan per kilometer? Isn't that almost the same as ours?" said Mr. Zhang, an online car-hailing driver in Wuhan's Hongshan District. "We are charging 1.5 or 1.6 yuan per kilometer now. If you take advantage of the discount, you can get 1.3 or 1 yuan per kilometer."

He doesn't like the fully driverless taxis, Carrot Run, which have "invaded" the capillary roads of Wuhan city, nor does he want to take a test ride on "Tao Luobo". Like many people outside Wuhan, this Wuhan local online taxi driver also gets most of his information about Carrot Run from social media and short video platforms.

"It's said that (radish running) only costs 50 or 60 cents per kilometer." said Master Zhang.

The price of a few cents per kilometer has long become history.On July 14 and July 15, we called for "Carrot Run" a total of 24 times in Wuhan's Guanggu District, Hongshan District, Hanyang District, Qiaokou District, Dongxihu District, Caidian District, Economic Development Zone, and Hannan District, and successfully hit the target 6 times.

In these six orders, the lowest actual price per kilometer was 1.6 yuan and the highest was 1.98 yuan. If all preferential subsidies are removed and calculated based on the original price, the lowest price per kilometer for Luobo Kuaipao is 4.6 yuan and the highest is 6.7 yuan.

Carrot Run in Wuhan Economic Development Zone Photo: AI Light Year

Many users on social media who have used Luobo Kuaipao in Beijing and Wuhan in the past two years have reported that the price of Luobo Kuaipao has increased compared with previous years.

"The price will definitely go up. He can't maintain his car if he keeps driving like that. If it's a few dollars for ten kilometers as others say, how can he maintain it?" Most Wuhan online car-hailing drivers were not surprised by the price increase of Luobo Kuaipao. Having personally experienced the price war among travel platforms, they were already familiar with the platforms' low-price "routines", but they did not expect the price increase of Luobo Kuaipao to come so quickly.

“All online ride-hailing services have reduced their prices.”A young online taxi driver who was waiting for work near the Gree factory in Caidian District recalled that the price per kilometer he received orders for began to decline about half a month ago. "It used to be two yuan per kilometer, but now it's more than one yuan. The price has dropped very quickly. I just received an order for 40 yuan for 30 or 40 kilometers. Just imagine how much one kilometer is."

Baidu's autonomous driving project was launched seven years ago, and this year it publicly proposed its commercialization goals for the first time: to achieve 100 million yuan in revenue and 100 million yuan in profit in the long term; in the short term, the company aims to break even in Wuhan in 2024 and achieve profitability in Wuhan in 2025.

"The bus stops at fixed points, so why don't I take the bus?"

On the morning of the 14th, after I waited for the bus at the Luobo Kuaipao station in Wuhan's Guanggu District for half an hour, a young woman pulled a 20-inch suitcase and stopped next to me.

There was no bus stop, no subway station, no shared bicycles, no shade of trees where we were standing, and it was not a convenient place for online taxis to stop and pick up passengers. After looking at each other for a moment, we recognized that each other was waiting for Carrot Run at the station.

After she found out that I had been trying to get a Turnip Run for nearly an hour but still hadn't gotten one, she kindly invited me to ride her Turnip Run to the subway station. "I'm going to the airport, but it's too far and I can't get one, so I changed to the nearest subway station to try it out."

However, since the trunk of the Carousel could not be opened and the front passenger seat could not be used, the two of us with a suitcase could only squeeze into the back seat, and how to fasten the seat belts became a new problem. She was a little embarrassed and said, "Why don't we go first?" After clicking the start button on the screen, the car started and drove on the road normally, but a pop-up window popped up on the screen that could not be closed to remind us to fasten the seat belts. After a lot of haste, we fastened our seat belts and the pop-up window disappeared.

Carrot Run trunk Photo: AI Light Year

"This is just for experience." She set the destination at a subway station only one kilometer away from our departure point, but since there was no bus stop on the road in the same direction as the subway station, she could only get on the bus on the opposite road. The straight-line distance of 1 kilometer was stretched to nearly 4 kilometers, and the total fare was about 7 yuan."The price is the same as online taxis, and the pick-up and drop-off points are fixed, so why don't I just take the bus? It's even cheaper."

Why does Carrot Run still need to be like a bus, with only fixed stops for getting on and off, instead of starting, stopping and getting on and off at any time like Tesla FSD?

“You can start, stop, and get on and off at any time and anywhere, which places very high demands on the road network.”Wu Gansha, Chairman and CEO of UISEE Technology, a Chinese autonomous driving solution provider, told me that perception, positioning, fusion, decision-making, planning and control in autonomous driving are now done step by step. What to do next depends on the precise parameters or intermediate results provided by the previous step, so there are many constraints, one of which is the road network. "Starting and stopping are generally at a point in the road network."

Tesla FSD's end-to-end system provides a fault-tolerant space. "It does not need to find a point in the road network."Wu Gansha said that Tesla FSD does not require a precise point for starting and stopping, such as "What is the east longitude? What is the north latitude?" When driving, you don't need to know exactly "Is the obstacle in front of me 7 meters or 6 meters away? Is the moving speed 5 meters per second or 8 meters per second?"

"Baidu must also be researching end-to-end, (but) it has not been put into use yet." Wu Gansha said.

In May this year, Baidu Apollo released the Apollo ADFM, an end-to-end large-scale model for fully unmanned autonomous driving, to gradually achieve fully unmanned autonomous driving. Xu Baoqiang, general manager of Baidu's autonomous driving technology department, said that with the end-to-end large-scale model, it only takes half a year for a city to complete the full-domain unmanned driving operation preparation from 0 to 1.

Currently, Baidu Apollo's fifth-generation model Alpha T is being commercially tested in Wuhan. Baidu's end-to-end large-scale model Apollo ADFM will be installed for the first time on the sixth-generation model of Turnip Express, Yichi 06. This is a new model jointly developed by Baidu and Jiangling New Energy. It adopts a battery replacement solution and the price of a single vehicle is 204,600 yuan, which is nearly 280,000 yuan cheaper than the previous generation.

We encountered several Yichi 06s that were undergoing road tests in Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone and Caidian District. From the appearance, the sixth-generation model no longer has autonomous driving hardware such as lidar mounted on the body, but is integrated with the body.

I waited 4 hours and couldn't get a car to run fast.

444 Luobo buses cover about 3,000 square kilometers in Wuhan and serve about 7.7 million citizens. The transportation capacity is obviously tight.

In two days, the system automatically canceled my order five times because I waited for more than two hours, and the cumulative waiting time was more than 10 hours.Customer service explained: During the summer vacation, the number of call orders in Wuhan has increased.

"My estimated waiting time is shown as 18 minutes. After 18 minutes, the estimated time is pushed back by 10 minutes and then 10 minutes. In the end, my order was cancelled after I waited for two hours. Why is the estimated time so inaccurate?" I called the customer service of Luobo Kuaipao.

"The estimated time you see is the average order acceptance time for this boarding point during the same period. It can only be used as a reference. Next time after the estimated time, you can call customer service to inquire about the surrounding vehicles and call status, and then decide whether to continue waiting for the car." The customer service replied.

A senior product manager for autonomous driving explained to me the situation of "inaccurate estimated waiting time" from a business perspective: it means that the actual vehicle turnover rate is much lower than expected, and the traffic efficiency is relatively low.

SMS sent after the system automatically cancels an order. Image: AI Lightyear

On the afternoon of the 15th, after waiting for the car for more than two hours and the order was automatically cancelled by the car carpooling system again, I had to take an online car-hailing service to my destination.

The driver who took the order was about 30 years old, and looked neat and enthusiastic. As soon as he got in the car, he said, "I've been circling here for several times, and you've been standing here all the time." When he learned that I had been trying to catch carrots but failed, he laughed and said, "There are only a few hundred of them! It would be almost impossible unless we invested in tens of thousands of them."

According to Luobo Kuaipao's plan, 1,000 sixth-generation driverless cars will be put into use in Wuhan in 2024. However, the scale is far from that of the online ride-hailing service in Wuhan, which operates an average of nearly 30,000 vehicles per day.

"Many people are spreading rumors that the radishes in Wuhan have replaced all the taxi drivers in Wuhan and that taxi drivers have been laid off. I don't think so. Our daily turnover is still the same and it will never threaten us humans."A ride-hailing driver who has been driving for nearly 20 years said, "For example, if the traffic is so bad here, they won't dare to come. Do you see them on this road? To be honest, it's embarrassing. I didn't dare to drive when I just returned (to Wuhan). If you can drive well in Wuhan, you can drive well in any city."

At that time, we were near No. 1277 Jiefang Avenue, Jianghan District, Wuhan, and there were no taxi stations nearby. The online car-hailing driver we got was a local from Wuhan. He started out as a taxi driver and online car-hailing driver in Guangzhou, and returned to Wuhan last year to continue his old business. "Here, Union Hospital and Tongji Hospital, two large hospitals, are on the same main road. It's really congested from morning to night, and there's not a day that's not congested."

Wuhan is a city of hundreds of lakes "floating on water", and road planning needs to accommodate the terrain, which increases the complexity of traffic. In addition, unlike most cities with only one city center, Wuhan has multiple city centers, located in densely populated areas such as Hankou, Wuchang, and Optics Valley.

Rather than worrying about Carrot & Robbery stealing their jobs, local ride-hailing drivers in Wuhan are more afraid of encountering Carrot & Robbery during rush hours.

"Last time we were in Optics Valley, between 7 and 9 am, two taro carts blocked the two one-way streets, blocking them for seven or eight kilometers. What should we do? People were all in their cars, calling in for leave." A female online car-hailing driver who has been driving for more than ten years said that the passengers were anxious, and she was anxious too. "He has to spend a lot of money, and I have to waste a lot of time. If I drive faster, I can do two more orders for this one order, so why should I squeeze there?"

We also found that when we took the Luobo Kuaipao during the morning rush hour, changing lanes and merging lanes became a big problem for Luobo Kuaipao due to the heavy traffic on the road.

On the morning of the 15th, a Turnip Run in the leftmost lane failed to merge right and stopped on the road, blocking the car behind it that wanted to turn left. The driver of the car honked anxiously and stuck his head out. In desperation, he even pinned his hopes on us who were sitting in the back seat of the Turnip Run in the next lane, constantly gesturing in the hope that we could get the Turnip Run in front of him to move. About a few minutes later, the stuck Turnip Run turned on its hazard lights and merged right again successfully.

"Today, our autonomous driving routes are all planned and calculated according to formulas. From the outside, it looks a bit strange and not very human-like. So when it encounters some constraints, it may get stuck."Wu Gansha told me that Tesla's end-to-end anthropomorphism is relatively strong.

"If you look at the statistics, the safety of Tesla's FSD is actually not as good as Waymo (the leading driverless taxi company in the United States), but Tesla's FSD is firstly very human-like, and secondly, it is growing faster. So everyone has a very good impression of FSD," said Wu Gansa.

In June this year, Caixin quoted a person close to the Shanghai policy-making department as saying that the Shanghai Autonomous Driving Demonstration Zone has issued a road test license to Tesla, and FSD may be being tested. Tesla China declined to comment.

A Tesla owner told AI Light Years that "FSD feels like it's coming soon." Tesla's app shows that the FSD fully autonomous driving capability software package is now available for purchase. "Before, it reminded me that it was not available in China and could not be purchased."

"The industry is looking forward to it and wants to see how (Tesla FSD) really works in China. You keep comparing it to Guan Gong and Qin Qiong, which is hard to explain," said Wu Gansha. "We tested (FSD) in the United States and it was really good. That's something we must say."

The success of Luobokuaipao is more of a breakthrough in operations rather than technology.

"Autonomous driving is still a gradual development process, and has not yet reached a breakthrough state."Zhang Dezhao, CEO of Idriverplus, a Chinese general-purpose L4 solution provider, told AI Light Year that he believes that the popularity of Carrot Speed ​​Run is mainly the result of a qualitative change caused by a quantitative change. "After some vehicles are put into use, ordinary people can really see them."

In February this year, Luobo Kuaipao announced that it had crossed the Wuhan Cross-River Bridge, connecting the Jiangbei and Jiangnan areas of Wuhan, and gradually laid out stations into the capillary roads of Wuhan city. The expansion of the service scale is behind Luobo Kuaipao's accelerated commercialization.

Baidu expects Wuhan's Radish Run to break even in 2024 and become profitable in 2025. Then, the Wuhan Radish Run will be used as a profit model to quickly promote the business model that has been proven to be profitable in one city to other cities.

“Comparing input and output within a cycle, if the income is greater than the input, it can be regarded as a profit.”Chen Zhuo, general manager of Baidu's autonomous driving business unit, said at this year's Apollo Day that due to the huge investment in early research and development and promotion, it is not realistic to achieve a break-even in the short term, so the above-mentioned approach was adopted.

Goldman Sachs said in its latest research report that there are three main factors affecting the profits of Turnip Run:

1. The average price per trip, that is, the discount level compared with the market price of online ride-hailing and taxis. Currently, Luobo Kuaipao offers a discount of about 80%, and it is expected that the discount will shrink to 40% in 2025. 2. The vehicle utilization rate, that is, the number of trips, is currently above 60%. 3. The number of cloud security personnel, currently one person monitors two vehicles, and it is expected to increase to one person monitoring three vehicles in the future.

Goldman Sachs predicts that by 2025, the daily orders for 1,000 sixth-generation Carousel driverless cars will be on par with online ride-hailing cars at 22, with an average revenue of 14 yuan per order and a daily revenue of 308 yuan per car. The annual profit of 1,000 sixth-generation driverless cars is estimated to be 9 million yuan.

Wu Gansa believes that in addition to this, if driverless cars want to achieve a commercial closed loop, they also have to see what additional value they bring.

He gave several examples. 3C digital products are small and high value. An iPhone can easily be taken away by someone during transportation, so a large number of security personnel are needed. The appearance of a new mobile phone needs to be kept confidential before it is released, and transportation also requires additional sealing and unpacking. Unmanned transportation can save some intermediate links.

"Another example is the livestock industry. The pig farm manager never leaves the farm, but the most troublesome thing is the driver who goes in and out. He hangs around slaughterhouses and other pig farms, and it is easy for him to carry African swine fever." Wu Gansha told AI Light Years that once a pig is infected with African swine fever, the entire pig farm will be doomed. "So for every pound of pork we buy today, the cost of safety and hygiene is not low." Autonomous driving can better avoid this problem.

What additional value new technologies can bring to human society is far more worthy of consideration and more important than improving efficiency.

Since the beginning of automation in the industrial age, human scientists and engineers have been constantly balancing the pros and cons of automation on humans, that is, enhancement and replacement. As the book "Dancing with Robots" says, if you use technology to enhance humans, you are inevitably replacing humans.

Autonomous driving technology was originally developed to automate battlefield logistics to reduce costs and avoid casualties among human soldiers. Now it is at the forefront of reshaping mass transportation. The decisions made by human scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs involved in autonomous driving may determine whether it can lead to a better future.