Risk and Opportunity: Self-driving Electric Vehicle in China
Market Research on LeEco Brand
On April 20, 2016, LeEco (formally LETV) released a self-driving car called LeSEE, which attracted the public eye. The Internet and the car as a joint mobile terminal become a hot spot for investment in the Internet business. The concept of the electric vehicle in China began hotly. This year the Alibaba made an acquisition of AMAP by $1 billion. In November 2015, Google submitted the draft design of unmanned vehicles. In December 2015, Baidu’s driverless car completed the first road test and puts forward the three years to achieve the commercial self-driving car and 5 years to achieve the production goals. Baidu also predicts that in the next 10 years, 80% of new cars will be the new energy vehicles and used for automatic driving technology. The capital market has raised an unmanned hot. The smart car which relatively easier to develop than the unmanned vehicle will become an important entrance of the Internet application. Thus, the joint formation of the car networking becomes the next hot spot for investment.
New supercar LeSEE was released
Ding Lei, the co-founder of LeSEE, a manufacturer of the electric vehicle in China, and vice chairman of LeEco introduced the basic information of LeSEE on the reference. The front face of LeSEE with a large LED screen can be displayed the vehicle state to passerby. This concept car can not only realize the automatic driving, but also learn by itself. It has face recognition, emotion recognition, environment recognition and path recognition and other functions. According to Ding Lei’s introduction, since the “SEE Program” announced, the LeSEE ecosystem has been established and formed a whole industry value chain in the field of smart internet electric vehicle in China, such as research and development, manufacturing, and other fields. Ding Lei said that in the past year, the LeSEE has been applied for more than 800 patents worldwide.
“EIC” is known as the most critical areas of the electric vehicle in China. LeSEE as a supercar has independently developed an “EIC” power assembly system, and successfully makes an output to the strategic partnership of Aston Martin. LeSEE also shares the advanced VPA variable platform structure technology from the strategic partner—Faraday & Future. According to Ding Lei, in May this year, the LeEco will obtain the unmanned test license in California and establish the world’s first Artificial Intelligence Research Institute — “FF& Le future” by car makers and internet companies. In addition, through the strategic cooperation with Aston Martin and Faraday & Future, LeEco supercar has been able to make the production. It is reported that, in the near future, LeEco supercar will work with a mainstream domestic automobile group. The first supercar flagship store has completed the site and will be built in the year.
Electric vehicle in China: a prosperous market
From the market scale, China has the world’s largest auto market and the largest mobile internet market. With the rise of the middle-class consumer groups, this will continue to maintain growth. The vehicle is regarded as a mobile terminal, the use of vehicle networking is able to collect the owner’s discrete behavior data. If the car can be like a mobile phone which are able to achieve an extensive collection of owner’s behavior, environment, and consumer information, with network sharing, the intelligent service around the car owners will become richer.
The penetration rate of car networking reached 10% in 2015 with a market size of about 150 billion yuan. By 2020, car users who connected to the network will exceed 40 million people with a permeability exceed 20% and a market size exceeds 40 billion yuan. Academician Wu Hequan expected that China’s car networking market will be 36.13 billion Euro in 2020 which account for more than 1/3 of the world’s car networking market. By 2022, 25% of the car will have a car networking capabilities. China will achieve full coverage of the car networking after 10 years.
The unmanned vehicle’s investment risk is very big
However, in the short term, the high cost will restrict the commercialization. For example, at present, the cost of a vehicle motion sensor in Baidu unmanned vehicle is around 700 thousand yuan, the cost of an unmanned car may even exceed a few million dollars, such manufacturing costs will seriously restrict the commercialization.
Technical problems still need to be broken. The technology of Google’s driverless car is most advanced nowadays. Yet it can only be used in the western of the United States and other appropriate geographical environment. It has not overcome difficulties running in the eastern area of rain and snow.
A few days before the LeSEE conference, the originator of the global electric car Tesla announced the recall of 2700 units “model X” SUV cars at the reasons that the last row of seats in the accident may from the fixed lock off and forward folding. Some places in China and Southeast Asia, the traffic signs are in large differences and in short term unmanned technology is difficult to achieve such a complex traffic demand.
The core problem is the obstacle on the laws and regulations. Accident insurance and laws are far from the solution. If an accident happened to an unmanned car, there are no laws on how to identify the responsibility, how to allocate the interests of automobile manufacturers and insurance companies. Last October, in order to speed up the automatic driving legislative process, Volvo, Google, and Mercedes-Benz first comment that if a car accident happened when the car is in self-driving or due to the technical reasons for accidents, the manufacturer is willing to shoulder the responsibility, but this is only the first step. From the domestic point of view, the law and insurance issues take longer to coordinate.
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