On April 2, sources said that Huawei plans to vigorously promote the development of self-driving technology and has set an internal goal of becoming China’s leading supplier of self-driving car platforms by 2025.
One of Huawei’s suppliers said the company had asked to prepare for a large number of tests, even amid the global spread of the virus.
According to the “Intelligent Vehicle Innovation and Development Strategy” released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, it is expected that the autonomous driving industry will achieve mass production in 2025. Therefore, Huawei’s actions at this moment will be the result of closely following the pace of policies and the market.
It was reported last year that Huawei was working with several automakers in China, Europe and Japan to develop artificial intelligence software for self-driving cars.
Autonomous driving is currently an application scenario at the tip of the artificial intelligence pyramid. Combining cutting-edge software and hardware with big data applications is undoubtedly a key technology. Huawei will face competition from U.S. companies in this area, including leading self-driving technology companies such as Waymo, Mobileye, Tesla and Apple.
Huawei, which has been planning to develop self-driving technology for years, has been aggressive and resourceful in recruiting talent for research and development, an autonomous driving expert said.
Huawei launched a new business unit last year focused on developing smart car solutions. In addition, Huawei has launched its own self-driving platform with its own Ascend chips, while also announcing partnerships with Audi, Toyota Motor and Groupe PSA to develop connected cars.
According to market intelligence provider IPlytics GmbH, among the top 10 contributors to autonomous driving standards and connected technologies in the world, Huawei applied for 66 patents as of October last year, accounting for 21% of the total number of 314 patents. This figure lags behind LG Electronics’ 81 patents, but ahead of Intel’s 21 and Qualcomm’s 10 patents.
It is reported that Huawei’s autonomous driving cloud service was officially released in April 2019. Huawei’s autonomous driving cloud service, also known as HUAWEI Octopus (Huawei Octopus), is combined with Huawei’s MDC intelligent driving computing platform and intelligent driving OS to form a car-cloud collaborative intelligent driving platform, which can help car companies and developers develop Autonomous driving applications, helping the commercial implementation of autonomous driving.
Take Huawei’s Octopus as an example. It is built on Huawei’s autonomous driving cloud and seamlessly connected to vehicle-end hardware platforms such as MDC (Mobile Data Center) and ADAS systems. If Octopus can be recognized by the industry, it will be The simulation market has established a “Huawei ecosystem”, that is, cloud services, hardware devices, data and even autonomous driving overall solutions.
In November last year, the Huawei Xinsheng community released the minutes of Ren Zhengfei’s German media roundtable. In the interview, Huawei President Ren Zhengfei told Deutschland that Huawei is currently “the strongest in the world” in artificial intelligence in terms of driverless and intelligent vehicles.
In fact, Huawei has been preparing for autonomous driving. Previously, it teamed up with Audi to complete the country’s first autonomous vehicle-road collaborative test on a highway. On July 5 last year, the Ministry of Natural Resources announced that Beijing Huawei Digital Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Huawei, is about to obtain a Class A navigation Electronic map qualification.
While Huawei has aggressive plans, it is undeniable that it also faces continued crackdowns from the U.S. government, which has accused it of posing a threat to global security by supplying technology to telecommunications networks. And Huawei’s entry into the space will also expose it to greater competition from U.S. companies, including Google parent Alphabet. Its Waymo, Intel’s Mobileye, Tesla and Apple, and Chinese search engine giant Baidu.
Navigant Research, an American research institution, publishes a list of autonomous driving competitiveness rankings every year, which requires the company’s technology, production capacity, product quality & reliability, as well as company vision, development strategies, partners, production strategies, marketing, and products. A total of ten indicators of combination and long-term investment are used for comprehensive evaluation.
In addition to traditional car companies, some technology companies have also successfully made the list, but Huawei is not on the list. Among them, Waymo has tested 20 million total miles, Cruise has passed the test of about 500,000 miles, and Baidu and Pony.ai’s self-driving car disengagement data are also very high. This requires Huawei to work harder to catch up with these companies.
However, as a Chinese company, Huawei’s advantage in autonomous driving is that it has access to China’s high-precision map technology, which is a key factor in the development of driverless technology. China’s ownership and control of high-resolution maps makes it difficult for foreign companies to enter this huge market.
The intelligentization of automobiles will help to improve its driving control and safety performance; the networking of automobiles is the basis for realizing traffic management and information services, and also provides important support for realizing automobile intelligence. Actively deploy innovative technologies and applications of the Internet of Vehicles and autonomous driving, and promote the development of intelligent and networked vehicles, which are of great significance for accelerating industrial transformation and upgrading, building industrial agglomeration, and effectively solving problems such as energy consumption, environmental pollution, and traffic congestion. .
