Desert and dessert, what comes to your mind when putting these two words together? It is likely that most people will feel puzzled.
But now, the same technology, autonomous driving, or say intelligent connected vehicles (ICV), makes these two unrelated things have something in common.
“Since our debut in 2021, we have deployed more than 300 driverless freight trucks in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and have carried out a series of regular tests and operations in vast and sparsely populated north and northwest China,” a staff member of KargoBot, an unmanned freight driving company incubated by Chinese leading automotive technology unicorn Didi Autonomous Driving, said at the 2024 World Intelligent Connected Vehicles Conference (WICV).
When it comes to the safety issue of freight autonomous driving, which is of most concern to the public, the reporter learned that the KargoBot fleet consists of a manned front vehicle with L2 assisted driving and several unmanned rear vehicles with L4 autonomous driving. In this mode, the scene processing capability could be improved by 50 times and the safety index can be improved by 20 times, which can stably solve various problems that are difficult to solve with single-vehicle autonomous driving.
“Our fleet is mainly used in large industrial parks, similar to fixed-point round-trip transportation in coal mines and power plants.” By now, the startup has started negotiations with Mongolia and Middle Eastern countries including the UAE and Saudi Arabia. “Our products have great potential in countries with geographical conditions that meet the requirements of unmanned freight driving,” the staff added.
“In contrast, our products cannot carry goods to travel freely across vast areas of land, but they can inadvertently bring surprises to people in corners of the city,” a manager from Neolix Autonomous Vehicle, another Chinese ICV company, introduced.
“Don’t underestimate this cute unmanned ice cream vehicle. After one charge, it can meet the working needs of 12 hours, that is, a whole day. In industrial parks, airports, railway stations, parks and other places, you can see it everywhere. Real-time speed adjustment and obstacle avoidance also included in its function.”
It is reported that Neolix products, including ice cream vehicles and delivery vehicles, have been popular in many countries and regions around the world, including Middle Eastern countries such as UAE, Japan, Southeast Asia, European countries such as Switzerland.
According to official data, the scale of China’s ICV market will reach 215.2 billion yuan in 2024. In addition, by 2030, this market size is expected to exceed 5 trillion yuan, and the whole market size related to vehicle-road-cloud integration will exceed 14 trillion yuan, including but not limited to the new output value of intelligent connected vehicles, intelligent roadside infrastructure, cloud control platform.
“Intelligent connected vehicles are subverting the form of automobile products in China and the world. They are rapidly evolving from functional and mechanical products to intelligent ecological products. New ICVs are not only means of transportation, but also information and energy storage terminals, becoming a super combination of logistics network, information network, energy network and the new three networks,” Qiu Xiandong, Chairman of China FAW Group, concluded in his keynote speech at the conference.
