In 2024, it's a pivotal year for the ascent of smart driving. For consumers, an increasing number consider smart driving as a crucial factor in their car purchasing decisions, growing ever more important. For mid-to-high-end automotive companies, the quality of advanced smart driving experiences will be closely tied to product sales.
This Chinese New Year, Yu Chengdong caused a sensation across the internet with a single post on his social media. He wrote: "Driving back from my hometown in Anhui to Shenzhen in the Huawei Wenzhen M9, 1314 kilometers of uninterrupted smart driving, completely hands-free, I relaxed for the entire 15-hour journey without having to worry about driving. It's truly effortless!"
What excited him and onlookers so much was Huawei's push to its vast Wenzhen Smart Driving Edition users just before the Chinese New Year, introducing a nationwide "Drive Everywhere" update without maps. Huawei became the first and only manufacturer in China to achieve this capability.
The system doesn't rely on high-definition maps but covers all publicly accessible roads nationwide, including highways, elevated roads, expressways, and all types of urban roads (main roads, secondary roads, and local roads), as well as national roads, county roads, township roads, and village roads, with a coverage rate of up to 99%.
Today, just over a month later, another nationally recognized manufacturer has officially emerged, as expected, it's Xiaopeng Motors.
On February 29th, Xiaopeng Motors announced the immediate rollout of the Unlimited XNGP Intelligent Assisted Driving feature for users with smart driving experience. This feature is available across all cities and routes where regular navigation is supported.
The term "experienced autonomous driving users" refers to XNGP (Xiaopeng's Next Generation Platform) owners who are particularly familiar with the system based on historical driving mileage and usage data of autonomous driving.
After all, such users are more adept at handling XNGP autonomous driving interventions, having a clearer understanding of system boundaries. They can safely intervene or take control in individual extreme situations, thus reducing the occurrence of safety risks.
Furthermore, since the underlying logic of the XNGP version available nationwide differs, some G9 and G6 users who previously applied to participate in the Xiaopeng Tianji system beta testing cannot participate in the current beta testing.
As a leader in Chinese autonomous driving, Xiaopeng and Huawei are locked in fierce competition, akin to the clash of titans. Both are striving to establish themselves as the foremost benchmarks in Chinese autonomous driving, engaging in intense competition across various fronts such as feature development, mass production deployment, and user experience optimization. This competition has led to a serious trend of overcompetition, leaving other competitors far behind.
However, they differ in specific decision-making processes. Huawei's recent rollout of nationwide availability undoubtedly poses a challenge to numerous domestic automotive companies.
Therefore, it is only appropriate for Xiaopeng to accelerate its pace and become the second company to roll out nationwide autonomous driving capabilities. In fact, Xiaopeng's internal testing version had previously revealed its capability, but it refrained from opening it to users for the sake of safety and prudence.
Similar situations are also occurring among more manufacturers.
Since the Spring Festival, autonomous driving has become a frequently mentioned topic in online public opinion, especially the topic of nationwide accessibility. According to many bloggers and media reports, Ideal Automobile is also actively preparing to roll out a nationwide accessible autonomous driving version, which is expected to be pushed to all users as early as the second quarter.
In addition, supported by Baidu Apollo, JiYue is also striving to achieve the same goal. Just the other day, JiYue 01 released version 1.3.1OCC, becoming China's first mass-produced autonomous driving manufacturer using purely visual network resources. The future potential is enormous.
Time is tight, tasks are heavy, efforts are immense, and competition is fierce in the field of autonomous driving. As the pivotal focus on vehicle intelligence rapidly expands in 2024, high-level autonomous driving will become a decisive factor in the survival of automakers, amidst a competitive landscape filled with numerous contenders.
