The battle for NOA in cities that are the threshold for autonomous driving is about to begin

On the urban NOA track, the time for major car companies to "fight for the bayonet" is coming.

What is a NOA? Its full name is Navigate on Autopilot, which literally translates to navigation-assisted driving. It is also called "high-end intelligent driving assistance" by some car companies. Because each car company has different functions, the names are also different. For example, Tesla and Ideal call it NOA, Xiaopeng calls it NGP, and Huawei calls it NCA. There are also many other names such as NOH, NAD, and NCA, but they are all essentially NOA. At the end of 2020, some domestic car companies began to gradually apply navigation assisted driving to high-speed scenarios. In the second half of 2022, Xiaopeng and Huawei began to plan to preempt urban scenarios, and NOA extended from high-speed to cities.

As time enters 2023, almost all leading domestic companies participating in the competition of new energy vehicles have released their own urban NOA plans. 2023 can be called the first year of urban NOA. As the ceiling for assisted driving, urban NOA is also the threshold for fully autonomous driving in the future. Different from the complicated and diverse technical routes before, this year's solutions of each company tend to be similar, with "emphasis on perception and light on maps" becoming the key direction of development. However, on the issue of "whether to charge", each company retains different attitudes . Which brands currently provide urban NOA functions? Which models do they appear on? What are their respective charges? How will urban NOA develop in the future? Let’s talk about it in this issue of “Aika Unicorn SHOW”.

The suddenly rolled up city NOA

The first person to launch urban NOA was Xpeng, which has been deeply involved in the field of driving assistance. At the same time, Xpeng was also one of the first car companies to achieve high-speed NOA. On March 31, when Xpeng started pushing Xmart OS 4.2.0, it also released the first phase of XNGP capabilities: G9 (configuration Xpeng P5 (configuration Mocha (Configuration | Inquiry) DHT-PHEV and Lanshan, and is currently being built in Baoding and Beijing. Large-scale generalization testing will implement urban NOH functions in the third quarter of this year and expand to 100 cities in 2024.

On April 12, Zhiji Automobile announced that Zhiji City NOA pilot assistance and a data-driven road environment perception model that replaces high-precision maps are expected to start public testing in 2023.

On April 16, Huawei released the HUAWEI ADS 2.0 system. It also stated that urban NCA has been launched in Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, and Chongqing and Hangzhou will also be unlocked in the second quarter of this year. At present, these cities are still based on high-precision map technology, and Guangzhou, Chongqing, and Hangzhou are partially covered. In the third quarter of this year, Huawei Urban NCA will be implemented in 15 unmapped cities, and in the fourth quarter, an additional 30 unmapped cities will be implemented. Also on April 16, Baidu Apollo launched the urban smart driving product Apollo City Driving Max. It is expected that related models equipped with this product will be delivered this year.

On April 18, Ideal announced that the city NOA of AD Max 3.0 will begin rolling out to internal beta users in the second quarter of this year, and will roll out to 100 domestic cities by the end of the year. Also on April 18, NIO Li Bin revealed that NOP+ (enhanced pilot assist), which started internal testing earlier this year, will be officially launched for commercial use on July 1 this year. The NAD (autonomous driving) system after NOP+ hopes to launch a beta version in Shanghai in June this year. The specific time for large-scale commercial use has not been disclosed.

From Xiaopeng's three cities to the ideal 100 cities, the urban NOA track has reached new heights in just half a year. The reason is that the development of technology has accumulated to a time point from quantitative change to qualitative change. The establishment of large models and the application of large computing power have gradually made the implementation of urban NOA possible. Secondly, as consumers use ADAS assisted driving and high-speed NOA more and more frequently, while the reliability of the assistance system is gaining market recognition, urban NOA has naturally become a gap that the market urgently needs to fill.

Urban NOA models that have been launched or are about to be launched

·Xpeng

In fact, as early as October 2022, Xiaopeng had already launched the city pilot assisted driving function. At that time, this function was called C-NGP. C-NGP was first installed on Xpeng P5, adopting a technology route that emphasizes perception and light maps. C-NGP can enable Xpeng P5 to realize urban pilot assisted driving functions in Guangzhou. In addition to the Xpeng P5, some models of the P7i and G9 currently support upgrades to the city pilot assist function. This is due to the fact that the P7i and G9 use a large computing power platform based on dual Orin X chips, which has a computing power of 508TOPS, while the P5 based on the Xavier chip has a computing power of only 30TOPS. The stronger computing power allows P7i and G9 to achieve stronger city navigation assistance functions than P5.

What P5 can achieve is the XPILOT 3.5 version of C-NGP city navigation assistance, which only supports urban core main roads. P7i and G9 with higher computing power can implement XPILOT 4.0 version of city pilot assistance. This version can realize full-scenario intelligent driving from point to point, city, highway and parking, and covers main and secondary arterial roads in urban areas. Including complex roads such as entering urban villages, the reliance on high-precision maps will be further reduced.

· ideal

Ideal Intelligent Driving version 1.0 will be delivered in 2021, which is the debut of Ideal’s self-developed assisted driving system. Version 2.0 will come with the Ideal L series models in August 2022, and Ideal Intelligent Driving will be divided into AD Max and AD. Pro two versions. AD Max 2.0 uses NVIDIA Orin As a high-speed NOA product with pure visual perception, AD Pro 2.0 uses the Horizon Journey 5 chip.

During the Shanghai Auto Show, Ideal announced the progress of the AD Max 3.0 full-scenario assisted driving system. This system will be launched in the second quarter and will be rolled out to 100 domestic cities by the end of the year. It is worth mentioning that Ideal announced that the system will not charge any fees and will implement a lifelong free policy. However, not all ideal models can enjoy this feature. Only the Max version of the L7 and L8 can enjoy this feature in the future, while the L9, as the flagship model, comes standard with this feature.

· Avita

The entire Avita 11 series comes standard with Huawei's HI full-stack self-developed intelligent driving solution. The vehicle is equipped with 34 sensors, including 3 lidars, 6 millimeter wave radars, 12 ultrasonic radars, and 13 cameras ( 4 front eyes, 4 surround eyes, 4 side sensors and 1 rear camera). It can be said that Avita 11 has fully met the needs of urban NOA in terms of hardware. Currently, the entire series is equipped with high-speed NOA function as standard. Starting from March this year, Avita has officially opened urban NOA in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Chongqing. User test drive experience, and subsequent paid promotion of urban NOA will be carried out for users in these four cities.

· Extreme Fox

Also using the intelligent driving solution developed by Huawei HI full stack is the JiFox Alpha S HI version. As one of the earliest models to implement the urban NOA function, the Alpha S HI version has now launched urban NCA smart driving pilots in cities such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Urban NCA intelligent driving navigation can realize autonomous cruising, autonomous following, lane changing with lever, merging and lane splitting, merging and exiting, risk deviation and avoidance of large vehicles, straight driving at standard intersections, intelligent speed limit, and navigation switching on urban roads. It has rich functions such as lane changing, overtaking and lane changing, and marking intersections. It is worth mentioning that the starting price of the regular version of the JiFox Alpha S is 223,800 yuan, and the starting price of the JiFox Alpha S HI version is as high as 377,900 yuan, nearly double.

·Ask the world

On April 17, Wenjie M5 Smart Driving Edition was officially launched. The biggest upgrade of this new car is the Huawei ADS 2.0 system. With the support of lidar, the Wenjie M5 smart driving version has high-speed and urban NCA pilot assisted driving capabilities. This system is also installed on the Avita 11 and Extreme Fox Alpha S HI edition. Based on a multi-sensor fusion perception system and a road prediction neural network, ADS 2.0 can achieve traffic element correlation, road structure reasoning, and navigation map matching with real roads. Simply put, even cars can "understand" the road. "No need to rely on high-precision maps" is one of the highlights of Huawei ADS 2.0, which will significantly improve the applicable scenarios of the Wenjie M5. According to the official plan, NCA pilot-assisted driving will be opened in 5 cities (Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, and Hangzhou) in the second quarter of this year, and will increase to 15 cities in the third quarter. By the fourth quarter of this year, the number of cities covered will reach 45, basically covering most first-, second- and third-tier cities.