Ten years of grievances, Toyota VS Tesla, who is the "handle" of autonomous driving?

Xi Dapu Ben, Tesla CEO Musk recently announced that all Tesla have the hardware needed for fully automatic driving, and L5-class automatic driving will be realized at the earliest by the end of the year.

It is reported that Tesla will push the latest beta update of fully automatic driving (FSD) and the newly written AutoPilot-assisted driving on October 20th, 65438. Musk said that this technology is quite mature and can completely interfere with driving home from the company.

From this point of view, four years ago today, that is, 20 16, 10, 19, the flag set up by Musk-all Tesla cars that were being produced at that time had fully self-driving hardware, which was about to be realized?

Due to investors' expectations of Tesla in frontier areas such as electric vehicles and autonomous driving, Tesla's market value has surpassed Toyota in July this year, becoming the most valuable car company in the world. So, who has more development potential in autonomous driving compared with the two? Relying on a strong global supply chain, can Toyota hang up Tesla and catch up later?

Speaking of this, I have to say that Musk and Akio Toyoda are actually old acquaintances. There was a "marriage" between Toyota and Tesla for six years.

In 20 10, Musk invited a "special" fan to California to test drive the Tesla Roadster. Yes, this "special" fan is Akio Toyoda.

Out of curiosity about this startup, Akio Toyoda ran around in a sports car and gave a thumbs up. This made Musk very happy, and the feelings between the two quickly warmed up. A few weeks later, they reached a cooperation.

Subsequently, Toyota invested $50 million to buy a 5% stake in Tesla 3./KLOC-0, and announced that it would jointly develop the RAV4 electric version. Tesla provides Toyota with development services such as batteries and power systems. Toyota also sold its factory in California to Tesla at a low price of $42 million.

The picture shows the RAV4 electric version jointly developed by Toyota and Tesla.

Aside from the "feelings" between Musk and Akio Toyoda, the cooperation between Toyota and Tesla is nothing more than getting what they need.

Tesla needs Toyota's factory to learn its world-class lean management model, and Toyota also takes a fancy to Tesla's technology in electric vehicles and batteries. In addition, Tesla's "intimate" relationship with Toyota strengthened the confidence of wavering investors. After all, Toyota was the world's top car company at that time.

With the help of Toyota, Tesla went public in June 20 10. At this time, the cooperation between the two sides showed a happy situation.

20 12? Toyota RAV4 jointly developed by both parties? The electric version was listed at a price of $49,800, but the market response was flat, and the cumulative sales volume was less than 2,000. This has also become the fuse for the breakdown of cooperation between the two sides. Later, the contradictions between the two sides were out of control. In 20 14, Tesla began to stop supplying lithium batteries to Toyota.

In 20 16, Toyota sold all its Tesla shares. Although the seven-year itch has not yet arrived, "marriage" has been announced in advance.

As the saying goes, different roads lead to no common goal, and the "breakup" between the two sides has long been reasonable. After all, Toyota is the big brother in the automobile industry, and Tesla has great ambitions. When traditional car companies and new forces decide to join hands, it will not only bring the joy of old and new forces, but also the inevitable generation gap.

Although Toyota didn't get the technology it wanted, its share price soared 10 times and made a lot of money. But making money is not Toyota's purpose. Toyota and Tesla cooperate in technology. Obviously, Toyota's goal has not been achieved in the past six years. On the contrary, Tesla has developed rapidly with the help of Toyota factory, and its dependence on Toyota has also declined.

After the "divorce", Akio Toyoda personally went into battle, rolled up his sleeves and dried up the electric car, driving automatically.

Toyota's strategic layout is actually divided into two legs, one is based on its own research and development, and the other is to invest in startups.

In terms of investing in startups, Toyota invested in PKSHA and Preferred? Network and other companies, these companies have been listed.

In terms of its own research and development, as early as 20 15, Toyota invested 10 billion dollars to establish the Silicon Valley AI Research Laboratory. On October 20 16 16 10, Toyota Research Institute was established, mainly studying robots and AI technologies related to self-driving cars. In 20 18, Toyota established the Toyota Institute for Advanced Development (TRI-AD) as an autonomous driving research center, with the intention of accelerating the development of autonomous vehicles.

Interestingly, James, CEO of TRI-AD of Toyota Advanced Development Institute? From 2009 to 20 16, Kuffner, Google's engineering technical director, was one of the veterans of Google's autonomous driving team. You know, the team made the world's first Google self-driving car.

In addition, Toyota also plans to develop a brand-new car platform, declare war on in-vehicle IOS and Android, and even announce that it will develop flying cars, and plans to light the Olympic flame with flying cars at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. A few days ago, Toyota obtained the road test qualification for self-driving vehicles in Beijing in 2020, and put four vehicles into operation test.

In 20021year, Toyota Institute for Advanced Development (TRI-AD) will set up a company called Woven? Planet? Holding? Inc. The company's goal is to develop a more agile Software priority development process and software definition specification (software? Definition? Architecture).

Woven it? Planet? Holding. Inc also includes two subsidiaries, one is Woven? CORE, responsible for developing, implementing and expanding autonomous driving technology for Toyota; The other one is woven? Alpha is responsible for incubating innovative projects, including the Toyota Future City Project (Woven? City) and Toyota Open Automatic Drawing Platform (AMP).

Among them, AMP is an API that enables developers to make high-precision maps for self-driving cars and use the data on self-driving cars for big data analysis.

It can be seen that Toyota invested a lot in the years after its divorce from Tesla in order to transform Toyota from a car company to a mobile travel company. As for whether Toyota can catch up with Tesla, it is still unknown. At the very least, Toyota, like the public committed to electrification transformation, must aim at benchmarking and surpassing Tesla, and even "hang" Tesla.

Toyota said that after autonomous driving, it is not simply to keep the vehicle in the center of the driving section, but to consider the feelings of passengers. Even if driving at high speed, passengers will not be uneasy, and the turn is very smooth and smooth, without slight jitter.

Toyota originally planned to "show its talents" at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, mainly the production version of Toyota e-Palette, to show the world Toyota's future travel concept, including new energy vehicles, intelligent transportation systems, urban transportation systems and related technologies of vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems. This car was also unveiled at this year's Beijing Auto Show, giving domestic consumers a quick look.

The picture shows the Toyota e-Palette at the 2020 Beijing Auto Show.

There is no doubt that Akio Toyoda wants his global competitors, including Tesla, to know that Toyota is still strong in the "new four modernizations" of cars. Compared with the reform resistance encountered by Volkswagen's "elephant turning around", Toyota has a president personally in command and is obviously more powerful.

Objectively speaking, compared with traditional automobile giants such as Toyota, the advantage of Tesla and the new car-making forces lies in focusing on the new technical architecture from the beginning, without any burden of sunk costs. The real data accumulated by users also provide valuable support for algorithm evolution and technology update.

It is worth noting that although the new Tesla vehicle is equipped with the hardware required for fully automatic driving, the upgraded vehicle in the future will be able to achieve fully automatic driving in almost all cases, but this does not mean that the driver can leave the driver's seat. In the future, the driver still needs to monitor the vehicle.

Since Tesla first released Autopilot in 20 14, there have been many accidents in this system, some of which even caused death.

Some researchers say that by invading Internet billboards, only a few milliseconds of images can induce Tesla's autopilot system to take emergency braking, parking or turning. Simply put, some images can confuse autonomous driving and assisted driving systems, such as a sign, which displays specific content to guide the car to have an accident without leaving any obvious traces.

This is a problem worthy of attention. How to realize safe automatic driving in the whole environment? This is crucial.

Write at the end:

As a new technology, autonomous driving is a hot spot in the automobile industry. In the field of autonomous driving, Toyota is a latecomer, but it has made a beautiful turnaround. At the same time, although Tesla claims that L5-level autopilot will be realized soon, the autopilot technology is not absolutely mature at least at this stage, and there is still a lot of room for development. Therefore, the contest between traditional car companies such as Toyota and Volkswagen and Tesla may only begin now, and we will wait and see who will come from behind.

This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.