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text丨zhao yu

edit丨cheng manqi

we have learned exclusively that the smart driving supplier yihang intelligent recently completed a c round of financing of several hundred million yuan, jointly invested by baic capital, zhejiang financial holding investment company, deqing industrial investment, and caitong capital. among them, zhejiang financial holding investment company is a provincial-level investment platform in zhejiang, and deqing industrial investment is a county-level investment platform in deqing, huzhou.

baic reached a cooperation with yihang intelligent in 2022. the baic bj40 series models, which focus on off-road vehicles, have been equipped with yihang intelligent's l2-level forward-looking all-in-one machine (a hardware kit integrating sensors such as cameras) and l2+ high-speed noa solution.

yihang intelligent said that after this round of financing, yihang intelligent may develop intelligent driving solutions for models of beijing and polar fox brands under baic group.

the government of deqing county, zhejiang province, is attracting intelligent driving projects and building an intelligent driving demonstration zone. a production line of tudatong, a supplier of nio’s laser radar, and the headquarters base of the port driverless company si nian intelligent driving have been established in deqing.

yihang intelligent was founded by chen yuxing in august 2015. he received his doctorate in vehicle engineering from jilin university and studied under guo konghui, an academician of the chinese academy of engineering, who was also the founder of changchun konghui, the predecessor of zhejiang konghui, an air suspension company. during his exchange at the university of california, berkeley, chen yuxing also studied with j. karl hedrick, an academician of the american academy of engineering and an expert in vehicle control models, mainly developing vehicle intelligent control algorithms.

when yihang intelligent was founded, financing for autonomous driving was booming, but yihang intelligent did not enter the l4 fully autonomous driving field, but chose to do progressive intelligent driving, serve car companies, and positioned itself as a first-tier supplier of autonomous driving. later, it received investments from institutions such as mingshi capital, ideal auto, matrix partners china, cicc jiacheng, source code capital, and gac capital. yihang intelligent currently has more than 200 employees, with r&d centers and factories in beijing and suzhou, and a test base in gu'an, hebei.

chen yuxing said that yihang intelligent has independently developed core algorithms for perception, decision-making, control, fault diagnosis, etc. of autonomous driving, and has full-stack self-developed capabilities such as visual perception, planning and control, software and hardware development, testing and calibration.

wang shouxi, investment director of the equity investment department of baic capital, said that the main reason for investing in yihang intelligent is its full-stack self-research capabilities, engineering implementation capabilities and overseas market expansion potential.

yihang intelligent currently mainly provides mid-range intelligent driving software and hardware solutions such as high-speed noa for automakers, and has been mass-produced on more than 10 models including baic bj40, saic maxus g90, mifa 9, mifa 7, and jis 01. yihang intelligent said that its solutions have been installed in more than 200,000 vehicles.

next, yihang intelligent's goal is to develop mid-to-high-end solutions with medium computing power, which can realize functions such as high-speed noa (navigate on autopilot) and city memory navigation.

at the beijing auto show in april this year, e-hang intelligent released the intelligent driving platform "duxing" using the bev (bird's eye view) perception solution, which includes 3 versions: standard version, performance version and all-round version. among them, the standard version is based on the horizon journey 6e chip, covering high-end intelligent driving functions such as high-speed noa and city memory navigation. the price of the whole set of software and hardware is no more than 5,000 yuan.

ehang intelligent said that the city memory navigation function using bev is expected to be mass-produced on multiple models of baic and jisun in the first half of next year.

bev was already a hot topic in the industry last year. since tesla introduced the technical methods of bev perception in detail at ai day in august 2021, a large number of chinese automakers and smart driving suppliers have followed suit in 2022. its advantages are: combining road information (lane lines, curbs, etc.) and other traffic participant information (pedestrians, two-wheelers, cars, etc.) collected by multiple cameras and sensors on the vehicle into a 360-degree bird's-eye view, which can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the environment and plan routes more safely and efficiently.

the new direction of the industry this year is "end-to-end" intelligent driving. tesla's fsd (fully self-driving) v12, which was launched on a large scale in north america in january this year, uses an end-to-end architecture. many car owners reported that compared with the previous version, the driving experience of v12 is closer to that of a human driver, and the vehicle becomes more relaxed when meeting or overtaking on narrow roads.

yihang intelligent is not aggressively following up on end-to-end. chen yuxing believes that the development of end-to-end intelligent driving solutions requires processing massive amounts of data. after the algorithm framework is built, the main work is also data iteration, and the demand for cloud computing power has increased significantly. therefore, car companies with stronger financial strength and larger fleets are more suitable for investing heavily in end-to-end. in contrast, suppliers will have greater room to play in the intelligent driving solutions using bevs, so yihang intelligent regards the latter as the current focus. yihang intelligent has also begun to develop end-to-end related technologies, and in the future it tends to cooperate with car companies to mass-produce end-to-end solutions.

competition among smart driving suppliers is showing a phenomenon of "team battles" among different technology camps: the core role of each camp is the smart driving chip manufacturer. the two major camps that have been formed are nvidia and huawei. as nvidia began to develop its own mid-to-high-end smart driving solutions, it, like huawei, has become a company that can fully supply the underlying chip platform plus the upper-level smart driving solutions.

qualcomm and horizon robotics are expected to grow into the solution base of the new camp, driving the development of other intelligent driving suppliers. yihang intelligent focuses on developing high-end intelligent driving solutions based on horizon robotics' journey 6e chip, precisely for this reason. other solution providers that currently cooperate with horizon robotics include qingzhou zhihang and jianzhi robotics, and horizon robotics has also invested in these two companies; qualcomm's main partners include dji and momenta.

title image source: yihang intelligence