Introduction
In one week, the leading self-driving company in China, Mogu Car Alliance, has established strategic partnerships with two major companies. On August 24th, 2021, the company officially reached a partnership agreement with Beijing City Service (North Control). On August 30th, Mogu Car Alliance signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Datang GaoHong. It is reported that more projects are in the negotiation stage, and the list of Mogu Car Alliance’s partners is continuously updated.
In the past two years, Mogu Car Alliance has made rapid progress in self-driving technology and commercial exploration, making it one of the most noticed self-driving companies by capital markets and upstream and downstream enterprises in the industry chain. It is incompletely estimated that the companies currently cooperating with the company include multiple mobile communication operators, network security suppliers, technology providers, and automobile manufacturers. In addition to the two newly signed companies, Mogu Car Alliance’s strategic partners include China Telecom, Qihoo 360, State Grid Electric Vehicle Service, BYD Auto, Great Wall Motors, SAIC Motor, GAC Group, Tencent Connected Vehicles, and SF Technology. In addition, the company has landed self-driving commercial projects in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Hubei, Hunan, and other places and cooperated with local governments. At this point, Mogu Car Alliance has built an eye-catching and powerful circle of friends.
Mogu Car Alliance needs these friends. The autonomous driving system developed by the company is the only and leading system in the industry, which can be regarded as the most complex real-time data system at present. Competing alone may not be a good choice. The “vehicle-road-cloud integration” autonomous driving system of Mogu Car Alliance aims to connect the information of the vehicle end, road end, and cloud end. The system needs to process external environmental information in a timely manner and issue it to the vehicle. This mechanism is similar to that of search engines such as Baidu and ByteDance, which use real-time search engines to filter and recommend personalized content. However, compared with these search engines, autonomous driving has higher requirements for data volume and data processing timeliness. For example, the time required for data to be uploaded from the road end to the cloud end and then issued to the vehicle by Mogu Car Alliance is less than 100 milliseconds, which is also considered as the human limit reaction time. As the technology becomes more mature, Mogu Car Alliance needs to cooperate with local governments and enterprises such as Beijing City Service (North Control) to turn these plans into reality.More people need the mushroom vehicle alliance. Mobile communication operators, technology providers, and others also need to open up broader blue ocean markets. The application of 5G is not just about the extremely fast network speed that boosts happiness, the more powerful mobile communication technology should play a greater role in the development of autonomous driving, smart transportation, and smart cities. Under the background of the “New Four Modernizations” (electrification, intelligence, networking, and sharing) of automobiles, autonomous driving is expected to become an important gold mining field for upstream and downstream enterprises in the huge automobile industry chain. The government needs to use autonomous driving technology to improve people’s quality of life and urban traffic efficiency. As it happens, the Mushroom Vehicle Alliance and they have come together.
The essence of autonomous driving is to help people get rid of heavy tasks, which is of great significance both in terms of commercial and social value. Taking the environmental sanitation market as an example, due to the high risk and heavy tasks, it is increasingly difficult to recruit people. The government hopes that technological innovation can benefit the people, reduce the work pressure of environmental sanitation workers, and environmental sanitation companies need to consider economic benefits and other issues. Autonomous driving technology may help solve their problems. Just like the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century replaced manpower with machines, autonomous driving may trigger a major revolution in the field of transportation and urban public services.
Many technology companies at home and abroad have joined this competition. Starting in 2004, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States has held three consecutive autonomous driving competitions, and then autonomous driving companies have gradually been established. Currently, giants such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent have entered this field. However, although autonomous driving has been developed for many years, there is still some distance from landing. On the one hand, the safety of autonomous driving still needs to be further improved; on the other hand, autonomous driving needs to find true commercial scenarios. Major technology companies are currently mainly exploring L4/L5 level autonomous driving technology and applications. Here, L4/L5 is the classification standard for autonomous driving levels of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), which is divided into L0-L5 levels from low to high. L4 and L5 level autonomous driving vehicles no longer require a safety officer in the driver’s seat, which is closer to people’s imagination of autonomous driving.
# L4/L5 autonomous driving is often referred to as the “Moon landing project“. There are indeed similarities between the two, such as the difficulty of project implementation and the wide range of technical areas involved. The “Apollo Moon landing project” was one of the most challenging technological achievements of the 20th century. During the engineering peak period, more than 20,000 companies, 200 universities, and more than 80 scientific research institutions participated in the project, with a total of more than 300,000 people involved. The impact of this project continues to this day, accelerating the development of aviation, aerospace, and computer technology, and helping Silicon Valley become the world’s most well-known high-tech industrial zone, with a large number of outstanding technology companies emerging. In the process of promoting L4/L5 autonomous driving, cooperation among all parties will also become the norm.
New and Old Partners
From the perspective of Beijing Urban Construction Group’s urban services, there is no better partner for autonomous driving than MUSHROOM CAR CONNECT. Beijing Urban Construction Group deeply cultivates the urban environmental sanitation field, operating and managing more than 100 city service projects in 24 provinces (municipalities and autonomous regions) across the country, with a cleaning and sanitation area of over 200 million square meters and a market share ranking first in the industry. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to hire people in the sanitation sector, and there are almost no young people willing to do this arduous job. According to statistics, there are more than 6,500 front-line sanitation workers in a certain provincial-level city, with an average age of 58, of which 70% are over 45 years old. MUSHROOM CAR CONNECT is expected to solve this problem. It has been committed to providing urban-level autonomous driving landing solutions and has built a city public service fleet including autonomous driving cleaning vehicles. Therefore, MUSHROOM CAR CONNECT and Beijing Urban Construction Group are a perfect match.
MUSHROOM CAR CONNECT is quite unique among all autonomous driving companies. It positions itself as a “full-stack technology and operation service provider” for autonomous driving, which can be understood as a set of autonomous driving technology systems plus a set of business operation systems. Specifically, MUSHROOM CAR CONNECT uses the technology scheme of “smart bikes + vehicle-road coordination” to enhance the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems. At the same time, it uses vehicle-end and road segment data to build cloud services. Its “integrated vehicle-road-cloud” system can support the implementation of urban-level autonomous driving projects and provide a reference for the construction of future smart cities. MUSHROOM CAR CONNECT can stand at the city-level perspective and participate in the top-level design of city travel.The self-driving companies that focus on developing Robotaxis and self-driving logistics vehicles are distinct from companies such as Wenyuan Zhixing and Xiaoma Zhixing, which specialize in self-driving technology and full-stack software and hardware development for bicycles. Wenyuan Zhixing and Xiaoma Zhixing are currently promoting the applications of Robotaxis, self-driving minibuses, and self-driving trucks. Due to differences in technology and business models, different self-driving companies also have significant differences in their choice of partners. Wenyuan Zhixing’s main partners include car manufacturers and travel platforms, such as Nissan, Yutong Bus, and Gaode Taxi.
In the field of technology, the “Bicycle Intelligence + Vehicle-Road Coordination” solution adopted by Mushroom Car Alliance is regarded as an upgraded version of the bicycle intelligence solution, which has been recognized by industry insiders. Li Jun, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, chairman of the China Society of Automotive Engineering, and professor at Tsinghua University, pointed out that the development of smart cars no longer emphasizes “bicycle intelligence”, but instead promotes the implementation of vehicle-road coordination. Zhu Xichan, director of the Automotive Safety Technology Research Institute of Tongji University’s School of Automotive Engineering, referred to “vehicle-road-cloud integration” self-driving as a “Chinese solution” that is more in line with national conditions.
Mushroom Car Alliance has cooperation in various fields in the technology industry. Mushroom Car Alliance previously reached a strategic cooperation with China Telecom, which is understandable as the landing of self-driving technology cannot be separated from the development of mobile communication technology. In April of this year, Mushroom Car Alliance signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Qihoo 360 and Zhongdian Power Co., Ltd., mainly towards network security for self-driving. The newly signed Datang Gao Hong is a key enterprise in the car networking industry under China Information Technology Group, and is also a core developer and promoter of C-V2X standards. “Both parties will share technological advantages and implementation experience, and jointly promote the commercial application and large-scale landing of national key construction areas such as vehicle-road coordination, smart transportation, and self-driving, which will help the healthy and rapid development of our country’s C-V2X car networking industry,” said Bi Haizhou, vice general manager of Datang Gao Hong during the signing ceremony on August 30.
Collaboration and Self-Breakthroughs
Mushroom Car Alliance’s self-driving solution has a larger space for imagination, which is one of the reasons why it attracts many partners. Mushroom Car Alliance does not merely position itself as a cutting-edge technology supplier, it aims to become the designer and implementer of the entire city’s self-driving travel solution.
Mushroom Car Alliance has created the world’s largest city-level self-driving commercial project, which is an eye-catching business card. As early as 2019, Mushroom Car Alliance verified the feasibility of the “vehicle-road-cloud integration” self-driving solution in the Shunyi project and planned to replicate the entire solution to more cities. In March of this year, Mushroom Car Alliance reached a strategic cooperation agreement with Hengyang City, with a total investment of about 500 million yuan.
Cooperation with all parties will further promote the implementation of Mushroom Auto Driving Plan. Zhao Kexi, Chairman of Beijing Urban Services, said that the new generation of information technology promotes the scientific, refined and intelligent urban governance, helps the innovation of urban management means, management mode and management concept, and has important value for sustainable urban development and economic and social transformation and upgrading. Mushroom Auto Driving and Beijing Urban Services will jointly build a new benchmark for smart cities.
At the government level, they play multiple roles as reviewers and demanders in the process of technological and commercial evolution, and their goals and demands are relatively diverse. Therefore, enterprises need to make complete planning in advance and find out the real needs. Mushroom Auto Driving’s city-level automatic driving landing plan conforms to the trend of smart transportation and smart city construction, which can greatly improve traffic safety and efficiency. At present, Mushroom Auto Driving’s automatic driving projects in various places are progressing smoothly, and its cooperation with multiple cities is in the stage of negotiation.
While reaching cooperation with more enterprises, Mushroom Auto Driving is also making some adjustments internally. Mushroom Auto Driving has summarized its main business as “Three Major Campaigns,” which include improving the engineering experience and stability of automatic driving algorithms, building data twin system, and providing the “Eagle Eye System” for C-end users. These challenges test Mushroom Auto Driving’s team. It is understood that Mushroom Auto Driving’s core team comes from companies such as Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei and BMW, with more than 10 years of R&D, operation and management experience in related fields. They have helped Mushroom Auto Driving set multiple industry records, such as the domestic first open 5G commercial smart transportation road coordination project located in Shunyi, Beijing, and the urban-level automatic driving landing plan in Hengyang.
Vision of the Leader
In the past few years, Mushroom Auto Driving has followed a principle in commercial promotion, which is that “technology should be able to match the essential needs of society and users.” This has helped Mushroom Auto Driving achieve rapid development and will attract more peers in the future.
“The intelligent car with automatic driving as the core may be the greatest era opportunity for several generations.” Zhu Lei, the founder and CEO of Mushroom Auto Driving, said in a recent interview, “I believe that there will definitely be a large number of great companies, and these companies must have their absolute core technological ability and commercial ability. From our industry’s perspective, we are looking forward to the whole technological change in the future.”From a policy perspective, the Mushroom Auto Network’s urban-level autonomous driving project “contributes to the construction of smart transportation and smart cities, which is in line with the country’s plan for ‘new infrastructure’.” The national relevant departments proposed the “new infrastructure” plan last year, which mainly includes 5G base station construction, ultra-high voltage, intercity high-speed railways and urban rail transit, new energy vehicle charging piles, big data centers, artificial intelligence, and industrial Internet, involving many industrial chains, many of which are related to autonomous driving.
After the signing of this cooperation project, changes quickly followed. On the day when Mushroom Auto Network and Beijing Urban Construction Service signed the contract, they determined the plan to develop medium-sized autonomous driving cleaning vehicles, and arranged personnel to follow up within the company. This reflects Mushroom Auto Network’s strong maneuverability. In the autonomous driving industry, there is no lack of giants who occupy advantages in funds, personnel, and other aspects, but entrepreneurial companies that are “easier to steer a small ship” can often adjust quickly according to market demand, making it easier to keep up with the rhythm.
Mushroom Auto Network is also “exploring more scenarios for the use of autonomous driving technology.” In August of this year, Mushroom Auto Network’s autonomous driving city public service fleet entered the Tsinghua University campus to provide teaching and living environments that are clean, low-carbon, and interdisciplinary. In addition, Mushroom Auto Network’s autonomous driving cooperation projects in airports, highways, and other scenarios are under planning. Insiders revealed that Mushroom Auto Network is currently working with a domestic logistics industry giant, one of the largest comprehensive logistics service providers in China. The cooperation between the two parties will promote the application of autonomous driving in the field of intelligent logistics.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.