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The Robotaxi Business Isn't Sexy”

Author: Qin Zhangyong

To win the boss's game to the end, it's a test of physical strength.

Despite severe lack of sleep and high-intensity work that squeezed out his meal and rest time, Li Bin, standing under the spotlight, was still full of energy.

At the NIO IN 2024 Innovation and Technology Day, he slowly talked about NIO's major new products and technologies, such as the announcement of the world's first5nm intelligent driving chip tape-outSuccessfully launched the entire vehicle's global operating system and the second generation of mobile phones.

At the press conference, he did not forget to liven up the atmosphere, and from time to time he made some golden remarks, which caused the audience to burst into laughter, showing his great ability to control the situation.

After the nearly three-hour press conference, Li Bin, Qin Lihong and other executives participated in a media interview. Compared with the press conference, Li Bin released more other information at the media interview. In addition to NIO's related technologies, what attracted more attention was Li Bin's views on Robotaxi:

“Robotaxi is not a big business, wake up!”

Although the clear attitude and straightforward opinions have made online car-hailing drivers feel more at ease, they will also affect some people's cake. Of course, the straightforward Li Bin did not stand on the opposite side of technology, but analyzed the business model of Robotaxi from the perspective of implementation and application. After all, as the "godfather of travel", he still has a lot of say.

After the two-hour media interview, with only 15 minutes left before the agreed live broadcast, he hurried to the live broadcast room and started his business on Douyin and Video Account.

This live broadcast to the public lasted another three hours.

From the early rehearsal to the end of the press conference, Li Bin's arrangements were almost concretized to every minute. This intensity seems to be commonplace for him. Before this, he also live-streamed for eight hours in a row, switching freely between various forums and meetings, and always showing his energetic side to the public.

Of course, we won’t talk about how busy he is. After all, as the CEO of a leading new car company, he is obviously more busy than the “old man in the car circle”. Today we will mainly talk about what Weilai and Li Bin did and said on such a day with such high information density.

01

The Robotaxi business isn’t sexy

Because she is optimistic about Tesla Robotaxi, Cathie Wood, the helmsman of Ark Investment Management Company in the United States, has been frantically touting Tesla's stock price, believing that Tesla's driverless platform will become its stock price.Increased by about ten timescatalyst.

She also described the driverless taxi ecosystem as a "huge opportunity worth $8 trillion to $10 trillion globally."

Li Bin brought Robotaxi back to reality with one sentence:We will never make driverless taxis。

In his opinion, Robotaxi is technically mature, but "liberating energy and reducing accidents" is the real social value created by intelligent driving, rather than stealing the jobs of hard-working private car drivers and taxi drivers.

At the same time, he does not think the Robotaxi business is sexy enough. From both a business and transportation perspective, this business is not inspiring.

"For example, if there are 1 million Weilai cars at night, they are all capable of doing business, and you can go out and hang out on the streets. If you use a third-party car instead of your own car, there are 4 to 5 million people driving their own cars to get off work in Shanghai every day. Do we need 4 to 5 million driverless taxis every day? What about normal days? There are only two orders a day. Isn't the price the same as buying a car yourself? This is a very basic economic account."

If there is overcapacity and a large number of Robotaxi are produced to clog the roads, the local government will not agree.

From the perspective of actual traffic conditions, if excessive investment is made in order to grab business without considering the real situation of society, the cars will eventually become "cannon fodder".

becauseThe roads are never crowded because of too many cars., because there are too many cars running at the same time. If 10 million cars stay at home, the road will be empty. If all the cars are running on the road, the road will immediately become a parking lot.

So in Li Bin's opinion, Robotaxi cannot solve the problem of traffic volume, because the number of operating vehicles that a city can accommodate, whether they are driven by people or not, is always limited.

"This volume means that Robotaxi will never become a business that is scalable without boundaries, like software cloud services."

"wake up!"

Although its attitude towards Robotaxi is clear, NIO has invested a lot in autonomous driving. On NIO's Innovation Technology Day, NIO began to expand its technology tree.

02

If you want to build a tall building, you must make the foundation deep.

At the press conference, Li Bin announced the world's first 5nm smart driving chip——Shenji NX9031 Tapeout Successfully。

This is a high-end intelligent driving chip designed independently by NIO, with 50 billion transistors. Whether in terms of comprehensive capabilities or execution efficiency, one self-developed chip can achieve the performance of four flagship chips in the industry.

In order to demonstrate the performance, NIO officially demonstrated the in-vehicle ISP processing demonstration on site. Thanks to the AI ​​noise reduction algorithm and 26-bit bit width, this chip is said to provide the "highest dynamic range in the industry" and has clearer imaging effects than the "flagship chip of the same specification in the industry."

At the same time, when processing imaging effects in low-light environments, the captured portraits and displayed details are also more prominent.

As for why we should make chips, Li Bin has a simple view. He believes that a successful smart electric vehicle company shouldMust be a successful AI company。

AI also became a keyword at the conference. Another highlight was the release of the vehicle's global operating system.SkyOS·Tianshu”。

This is the automotive intelligence foundation built by NIO for AI, which took four years to develop and invested more than 23,000 man-months.

Before this, domestic automakers were mostly secondary developers in terms of vehicle operating systems, and it was difficult to make system changes. The SkyOS system, however, connects smart hardware, computing platforms, communications and energy systems at the bottom layer, thus providing unified management and coordination for all-domain applications such as vehicle connectivity, vehicle control, smart driving, digital cockpits, and mobile phone applications.

This is somewhat similar to Huawei's Hongmeng OS, Xiaomi's Pengpai OS, etc. When talking about the original intention of making an operating system, Li Bin said that more and more companies have realized the importance of operating systems.

"I often use the example of building a building. It's different to lay the foundation for a five-story building or a 100-story building. Not every company has the ability to do this, and not every company can survive to see the results. Today, when we visited NIO, we saw that it has begun to work."

At the press conference, NIO also released the new Banyan 3 intelligent system based on the core underlying capabilities of AI. To sum it up in one sentence, Banyan 3 can give car owners moreEmotional Value。

For example, based on BanyAI's large model capabilities and native intelligent system, NOMI is more like a friendly friend. It will sing Happy Birthday to you on your birthday, comfort you when you work overtime too late, and you can also ask NOMI to call a designated driver directly through voice, and automatically edit and generate videos.

03

End-to-end is not enough

End-to-end has become an industry consensus, but companies have different views on how it will ultimately develop.

Not long ago, Ideal proposed a new solution - E2E (end-to-end large model) + VLM (visual language model). In short, it is to use System 1 and System 2 to cooperate with each other to achieve humanoid driving.

At the NIO IN conference, NIO also believed that end-to-end alone was not enough. "We believe that smart agents need to have the ability to recognize space, reconstruct imagination, and recognize time, and imagine deduction, just like humans." Ren Shaoqing, vice president of NIO Intelligent Driving, said that end-to-end models do not necessarily have these two core capabilities.

Therefore, NIO releasedIntelligent Driving World Model NWM（NIO World Model）。

NWM is a multivariate autoregressive generative embodied driving model that can fully understand data, has long-term time series deduction and decision-making capabilities, and can deduce 216 possible scenarios within 100 milliseconds to find the optimal decision.

As a generative model, NWM can use a 3-second driving video as a prompt to generate a 120-second video. NWM also has closed-loop simulation testing capabilities to fully test and verify performance in complex interactive scenarios.

This ability is based on the reconstruction of the real world.“Imagine” a parallel world。

So in summary, NWM can learn about people’s cognition of space, reconstruct imagination, and deduce time.

With the support of this capability, coupled with an end-to-end active safety model, the second-generation architecture of NIO's intelligent driving algorithm is formed.

Based on the new architecture and new functions, NIO’s point-to-point navigation assistance function will be available in vehicles in the second half of the year.

At the end of the press conference, NIO also released the new NIO Phone, with a starting price of 6,499 yuan. Its features are still "zero system ads" and "zero commercial pre-installation". In addition to realizing functions such as super-sensing car keys, super-sensing parking, and smart car search, it also has good on-paper data, such as the standard third-generation Snapdragon 8 flagship processor, a 6.82-inch 2K resolution screen, etc.

But compared to these, NIO Phone has another very appropriate function——NIO Link car broadcast functionThat is, when live streaming with a mobile phone, you can directly connect to the car computer, and then call the vehicle camera for live streaming, so that you can live stream with the camera outside the car while driving.

It is suggested that Li Bin try this function during his next live broadcast. Not only can he carry two more people in the car, but he can also allow the audience to see the scenery outside the car from a first-person perspective, killing two birds with one stone.