[1] Reflection of China’s-self-driving-car-prowess-is-greatly-exaggerated
After reading this article, I'd like to share my thoughts and analysis. The article mainly describes two points. First. Waymo is the best. Second. China's self-driving car prowess is exaggerated. But unfortunately, this article chooses wrong Chinese examples. (Baidu, Pony & WeRide were great, but all have problems now).
Totally speaking, Chinese self-driving companies are much weaker than American. It's a true and we can not deny that. But the problem is even if American is stronger, American companies won’t get Chinese market because an important part of self-driving is HD Map, which may threaten homeland security. So when guaranteed a big market, future of Chinese self-driving companies won’t be too bad. But they may become big but evil companies like Baidu, or become neutral companies like Tesla. Currently, from technology perspective, higher level (algorithms) are more Chinese, and these self-driving companies tend to buy infrastructure solutions from other companies (Chinese or non-Chinese doesn’t matter).More importantly, let’s go deeper about these Chinese self-driving companies, and I can provide more information about why using these companies as examples are not suitable.
First, Baidu is the first company to research self-driving application. But recent years, Baidu’s politics is severe, so many great engineers left Baidu, and they started own businesses. WeRide (Jingchi) and Pony.ai are best startups from Baidu, and once, WeRide was No.1 self-driving company in China. Baidu still has its own self-driving department, so it didn’t want WeRide becoming No.1, so it prosecuted WeRide (Jingchi). During this lawsuit, WerRde suffered, and finally, the founder was kicked out of the company, the team lost its soul.Now Weride is still active but hard to recover. (I got an onsite interview in Guangzhou. I felt it was so-so...
Pony.ai is another startup from Baidu, the founder is a very famous geek, such as TianCheng Lou(楼天城), so it got much funding in the beginning. But it didn’t make much accomplishment. Expect these Baidu-related companies, there are another 2 or 3 companies are worthy to watch: Tusimple, Momenta. :)
Tusimple is a Chinese company located in San Diego and other places , they mainly focuses on trucks. (Its business starts from America.) Momenta is a company having strong CV 🧬. It has strong relations with Sense Time. This company’s HD Map is No.1 in China. It learns a lot from Mapbox. I interviewed with all mentioned chinese companies, and working for one of them. I’m definitely more clear than this article that these companies are simply copying or doing innovation.
But Chinese road conditions are more complex than developed countries, so even if the industry is still relatively weak, it has a bigger potential (challenge). To me, I’m not very positive about self-driving’s future. I think people put too many expectations. maybe. :)
Fault tolerance of self-driving is extremely low, and people may not want to put their lives to some algorithms. Driving assistants (L2 or L3) will be the solid first step. But cool concepts can attract more money, so many companies say they want L4 solution.
Hope the future is getting better.