As the cold winter of autonomous driving arrives, is it useful for companies to work together?

As the winter of autonomous driving arrives, major automakers have begun to band together to keep warm, and many autonomous driving alliances have emerged in the automotive industry, with intricate connections between them. Alliances are not as simple as they seem, with hostility, fear, and sparks of cooperation intertwined behind them.

Autonomous driving technology has been hailed by Apple's current CEO Tim Cook as the mother of all artificial intelligence projects. Global automakers, first-tier suppliers, technology companies and other large companies have invested a lot of manpower, material and financial resources in research, which has also triggered a global entrepreneurial boom.

The reason why autonomous driving technology is so popular is that this technology is a disruptive innovation that will change human travel methods, traffic road construction, and even urban construction. Smart cars with autonomous driving as the core will be integrated with smart transportation and smart cities, and will have a huge impact on the future lifestyle of human beings.

Autonomous driving technology, known as the mother of artificial intelligence projects, is extremely difficult and involves many disciplines. Autonomous driving technology can be divided into perception, decision-making and control. The perception layer includes various sensors such as lidar, millimeter-wave radar, and cameras, while decision-making integrates artificial intelligence and deep learning.

Autonomous driving is an extremely complex technology that requires the mobilization of highly professional talents from all aspects, which places extremely high demands on the participants. Precisely because this technology is extremely difficult and difficult to popularize, it also means that it is unlikely for a single company to promote autonomous driving from research and development, testing, implementation to large-scale application.

Even Waymo, the American self-driving company that is now recognized as the leader in autonomous driving, was born out of the driverless car project of Google's X laboratory. After becoming an independent sister company of Google in 2016, even with the financial support of Google's parent company Alphabet behind it, it still needs to seek cooperation from car companies when it comes to commercialization.

Under such circumstances, a global alliance for autonomous driving has become particularly important. Vehicle manufacturers, technology companies, Tier 1 suppliers and startups have all sought cooperation to reduce R&D costs, speed up R&D progress and accelerate implementation. All of a sudden, various alliances have emerged around the world.

Car companies take the lead

BMW Autonomous Driving Alliance

In July 2016, the German BMW Group took the lead and held a press conference with Intel and Mobileye. The three parties jointly announced that they would jointly establish an industry standard and an open platform for autonomous driving. In May 2017, the alliance introduced Delphi to develop a highly automated autonomous driving platform for BMW, playing the role of system integrator.

In the team, as an automobile manufacturer, BMW is responsible for driving control, dynamics, functional safety assessment, prototype production, etc.; Intel handles vehicle networking, big data and recognition algorithms, and solves problems such as sensor aggregation, environmental modeling, and path planning; Mobileye handles computer vision and local processing; Delphi integrates the solutions of BMW, Intel and Mobileye into the autonomous driving platform. In addition, Delphi can also provide the necessary hardware and specific customized services and applications.

In August 2017, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) joined the alliance. In addition to providing engineering and other technical resources and expertise, FCA will also bring its sales performance, coverage and long-term experience in the North American market. FCA CEO Marchionne said in a statement, "Companies with the same goals can easily form economies of scale and synergies when they unite, and FCA will benefit from joining the alliance."

In October 2017, according to foreign media reports, Canadian automotive supplier Magna joined the BMW, Intel and Mobileye autonomous driving alliance to jointly develop an autonomous driving platform.

The alliance's members include Intel, Mobileye, Fiat Chrysler and automotive suppliers Delphi, Continental, Magna, etc. The strength of the alliance camp cannot be underestimated.

Recently, BMW has publicly stated that it is open to forming alliances with other companies to share the cost of developing autonomous vehicle systems, and hopes that other automakers can also join its autonomous driving technology alliance.

Volkswagen NAV Alliance

Founded in July 2018, the Networking for Autonomous Vehicles Alliance (NAV), which consists of Volkswagen Group and four major suppliers, NVIDIA, Bosch, Continental, and Aquantia, is committed to solving the difficult and complex problems of making autonomous vehicles a reality, such as improving the composition of electrical circuits so that vehicles can transmit larger amounts of data.

One of the main goals of the NAV Alliance is to promote standardization, and the main thing it is trying to standardize is the high-bandwidth data transmission required for AVs to process data from various sensors. In addition to promoting more standards, including networking, the NAV Alliance hopes to provide common procedures and requirements for AV systems in terms of safety and overall reliability, and educate the public on how to make AVs a reality.

The alliance identified five specific goals in its initial mission: 1. Build consensus among manufacturers on new technical standards related to multi-gigabit Ethernet required for autonomous vehicles; 2. Create common procedures and testing requirements for vehicle computers and sensors in terms of safety and reliability; 3. Promote the implementation of products and solutions that meet the new specifications; 4. Work with global standards bodies and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers to promote industry standardization; and 5. Better educate the market on the requirements for autonomous vehicle networks.

Toyota Mobility Alliance

Toyota Mobility Service Platform (MSPF) is the framework for Toyota's connected car applications and was launched in 2016. It can provide a complete set of services such as car rental and sales, fleet insurance and big data management to support the operation and development of mobile travel service companies.

In January 2018, Toyota officially announced that it plans to transform from an automobile company to a mobile travel company, and Toyota's competitors will also become technology giants such as Google, Apple and Facebook. Toyota plans to open the vehicle control interface to allow partners to install their own autonomous driving systems and vehicle management technologies. Currently, major members also include Amazon, Didi, Mazda, Pizza Hut and Uber.

During the 2018 North American Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Toyota grandly launched its new pure electric commercial vehicle e-Palette, which is one of the core achievements of Toyota's new "Mobility as a Service (MaaS)" development alliance.

Toyota's main reason for launching e-Palette is that the company aims to become a key hardware and service provider in the field of mobile travel, and to deploy many technologies including "big data". It is generally believed in the industry that the collection and distribution of "big data" will become the main source of income for "mobile travel service" companies. Toyota President and Board Member Akio Toyoda said that the establishment of the e-Palette project and related R&D alliances marks that Toyota's automotive business has entered a new watershed.

Renault-Nissan-Microsoft Alliance

In September 2016, the Renault-Nissan Alliance and Microsoft jointly announced that they had signed a long-term contract to jointly develop a new generation of intelligent connected cars. The cooperation will be based on Microsoft Azure cloud computing services and plans to develop more than 10 mass-produced models with autonomous driving functions by 2020.

Renault-Nissan Alliance hopes to make self-driving cars as easy to use as smartphones through cooperation with Microsoft. With intelligent interconnection technology, users can remotely control their cars from any location. For example, no matter where you are, you can rent your car to others through online permission, which means that physical keys are completely eliminated. When the vehicle is stolen, you only need to remotely control the vehicle through a mobile phone or computer, and criminals cannot drive your car.

Technology companies take the lead

Google OAA Alliance
On January 6, 2014, IT giant Google announced the establishment of the Automotive Alliance, and jointly established the OAA Alliance with four automakers, General Motors, Honda, Audi, Hyundai, and chip manufacturer Nvidia.

It is reported that the OAA alliance has expanded to more than 40 companies, most of which are car companies, including Volvo, Volkswagen, Opel, Skoda, Chrysler, Jeep, Ram, Opel, Chevrolet, Infiniti, Bentley, Hyundai, Nissan, Suzuki, Audi, Honda, Mitsubishi, Subaru, Alfa Romeo, Ford, Mazda, Fiat, Maserati, Seat, Lotus, Kia, Dodge, Renault and Toyota, etc. In addition, suppliers and IT companies such as Samsung, Nvidia and Delphi are also on the list.

From a strategic perspective, the establishment of OAA is Google's way of "forming alliances" and "enclosing territory". Through the "founding team members", OAA conveyed the following messages to the outside world:

1) Android's ecosystem will expand to the automotive platform;

2) Android devices (phones, tablets) will be connected to cars of multiple brands;

3) Nvidia will become the chip supplier for the communication module of the car center console;