Bosch Intelligent Driving changes its leader! It is considered to have fallen behind for many years. Can it fight a beautiful turnaround?

On December 25, Bosch Intelligent Driving and Control Division’s official WeChat account published an article, officially announcing that from January 1, 2024, Mr. Wu Yongqiao will serve as President of Bosch Intelligent Driving and Control Systems Division (XC) China, and the current head of the XC division, Li Yin, will step down.

At the beginning of 2021, Bosch officially established the Intelligent Driving and Control Division, with Li Yin as president of China. Li Yin made substantial reforms based on the original L2 assisted driving business. In just two years, the XC Division has grown into a team of 1,400 people, with R&D personnel accounting for more than 80%.

Wu Yongqiao graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2005 with a master's degree in mechanical and electronic engineering. He then joined United Automotive Electronics Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Bosch Holdings, to start his career. He has 18 years of experience in the automotive industry and has led his team to successfully obtain a large number of new energy and intelligent network projects for local car companies.

Benefiting from the wave of automotive intelligence brought about by new energy vehicles, automotive and intelligent transportation technology have become Bosch's largest business segment in China. In 2020, sales in China reached 88.8 billion yuan, accounting for about 76% of Bosch's total sales in China, and this figure is still rising.

The earliest entrants have already started developing humanoid robots

Bosch was not early in entering the field of autonomous driving, and was even considered to be lagging behind for many years. In 2021, Bosch integrated its automotive software expertise and established the Intelligent Driving and Control Systems Division, focusing on local R&D capabilities, smart cockpits, and innovative smart driving products. So far, Bosch has begun to follow the transformation of automotive electrification and enter the intelligent driving supply chain.

In the era of fuel vehicles, Bosch is a well-deserved supplier leader. From the braking system, ignition system, engine control unit to lights, almost every component in the car can be provided by Bosch, especially the ABS anti-lock braking system, which has saved countless lives and was officially launched for commercial use by Bosch as early as 1966.

As new energy vehicles impact fuel vehicles, smart driving has become one of the important selling points of new energy vehicles. Tesla began to develop full self-driving technology (Full Self-Driving, FSD for short) in 2016. CEO Musk announced the plan in a conference call and said that he would achieve a demonstration of unmanned driving across the United States in 2017.

Xiaopeng is one of the new car-making forces in China that first started research on autonomous driving. It began to focus on autonomous driving solutions in 2017 and launched NGP (Navigation Guided Pilot) for the first time in September 2020.

It is worth mentioning that the two automobile companies mentioned above, which started autonomous driving research earlier, have already invested in the research of humanoid robots.

The Huangpu Military Academy of the automotive industry, all in on autonomous driving

The entry of established suppliers into the autonomous driving market has delighted some car companies that are eager to keep up but find it difficult to develop autonomous driving on their own for various reasons. At the same time, some fleets that are building autonomous driving have also benefited from this.

According to Bosch's official website, Bosch has cooperated with Cariad, a software technology company under the Volkswagen Group, to jointly develop a state-of-the-art standardized software platform with an autonomous driving level exceeding L2. The goal is to use the platform in all private used car categories sold under the Volkswagen Group brand. The platform is scheduled to be launched in 2023.

The old luxury brand Mercedes-Benz has also carried out cooperation with Bosch on autonomous driving. Bosch, Mercedes-Benz and parking operator Apcoa hope to introduce driverless and fully automatic parking at Stuttgart Airport in the future. They plan to use the P6 parking lot at Stuttgart Airport as a pilot for commercial automatic parking services.

Here, they will test how the vehicle technology on the S-Class interacts with Bosch's smart infrastructure and APCOA FLOW, a digital platform provided by parking operator Apcoa. For the first time, the Stuttgart Airport pilot parking lot will be equipped with Bosch cameras to identify vacant parking spaces, monitor the driving aisle and its surroundings, and detect obstacles or people in the aisle. The parking lot's dedicated control center will calculate the vehicle's arrival at the available space and the required route.

Is autonomous driving facing a cold winter?

Since 2022, a cold wave has hit the field of autonomous driving. Relevant data statistics show that the average market value of 14 autonomous driving and related technology companies listed in the United States has fallen by more than 80% since their listing, with the largest decline reaching 99%. The star autonomous driving company Argo AI has even announced its bankruptcy.

In September this year, Bosch announced the contraction of its intelligent driving business. The news pointed out that Bosch decided to abandon the research and development of costly lidar and invest more resources in millimeter-wave radar.

Different car companies have different opinions on the solution of autonomous driving. Tesla, as the earliest manufacturer to develop autonomous driving, has abandoned the laser radar solution and switched to the full vision solution; Xiaopeng, a leading domestic company, is a loyal supporter of the laser solution. Its flagship product P7i is equipped with 2 laser radars and dual NVIDIA orin-x chips; Huawei's QX500 is equipped with 1 laser radar on some models, and most of them use the solution of 8 cameras + 12 ultrasonic radars + 3 millimeter wave radars.

Autonomous driving is not only applicable to cars, but also to robots. At present, mainstream autonomous driving chip manufacturers such as NVIDIA and Horizon Robotics have made achievements in mobile robots. Not long ago, NVIDIA and Ninebot launched a new AMR autonomous mobile robot, entering the US automatic warehousing and transportation industry with a market value of over 1 billion US dollars.

To summarize, the cold winter of autonomous driving is only a small bottleneck in the early stage. There is still a lot of room for application in fields such as mobile robots, smart cars and even the recently popular embodied intelligence.