Bitche Original Speaking of autonomous driving, it is difficult for everyone to think of Japanese cars at first.
After all, compared with the Chinese brands involved in the "Lidar War" and Tesla, which relies on "pure vision" to show off its skills, the three major Japanese car companies, Toyota, Honda and Nissan, have different attitudes towards autonomous driving. More cautious.
But today, Nissan announced that it will use next-generation lidar technology to implement assisted driving functions, and it has also kept up with the trend of technology. What tactics will Nissan use to deal with the involution?
In 2019, Musk, who has always been angry and outspoken, publicly stated that "only fools can use lidar", which has since triggered This led to the dispute over the two technical routes of the “LiDAR school” and the “Pure Visual school”.
At that time, Nissan took the lead in lining up with Tesla, stating that it would insist on using radar and cameras and avoid using lidar and other light sensors.
So the ProPILOT assisted driving system released in the same year (China) uses a technical solution of camera + millimeter wave radar + ultrasonic radar.
ProPILOT system composition
Why not use lidar? For Nissan, the most fundamental reason is that it is too expensive.
For reference, the author visited a well-known autonomous driving company in 2019, and the person in charge revealed that the unit price of the Velodyne lidar (32 lines) purchased by the company in 2017 was as high as more than 200,000 yuan (4 Approximately 10,000 U.S. dollars).
Even in 2019, the unit price has dropped to hundreds of thousands of yuan, which is still expensive, let alone being installed on mass-produced civilian models.
Velodyne 32-line lidar (old model)
In the past year or two, with the influx of domestic and foreign companies such as Huawei and DJI into lidar On the track, costs are gradually falling, and there are many breakthroughs in technology.
On the other hand, autonomous driving safety accidents occur frequently, and people have higher and higher requirements for the safety of assisted driving. Now most car companies have begun to join the "lidar faction", and Nissan is no exception.
Tesla has had several accidents before due to its inability to recognize the objects being measured. The main reason is that the millimeter wave radar cannot distinguish stationary objects on the road and can only rush straight into obstacles. things.
The picture comes from the Internet
Li Xiang, CEO of Li Auto, once said: "The current combination of camera + millimeter wave radar is like the eyes of a frog. It’s okay to judge dynamic objects, but it’s almost incompetent for non-standard static objects. “
It’s different with lidar. Lidar detects the distance of surrounding objects by emitting light beams and accurately obtains three-dimensional information. It has wide detection range, high resolution and strong anti-interference ability. These are advantages that millimeter wave radar cannot match.
Therefore, in order toTo further improve safety, the industry has gradually formed a redundant multi-sensor fusion solution consisting of laser radar + millimeter wave radar + camera. These sensors complement each other and complement each other, giving full play to their respective advantages.
The question is, after it is equipped with lidar, what is special about Nissan’s assisted driving system?
The answer is "road reality awareness".
The so-called live perception means that the vehicle instantly analyzes the current situation to make judgments based on the three-dimensional real-time information sensed by lidar, radar and cameras, and automatically performs operations to avoid collisions.
At the same time, this technology can also detect distant slowing traffic and road obstacles, and automatically complete lane changes.
Composition of Nissan's assisted driving system
For example, when the vehicle in front is reversing, the vehicle behind chooses to change lanes to avoid it, but when someone suddenly When present on the road, the vehicle will brake suddenly.
This is largely due to a Luminar lidar on the roof of the car. It is like having a pair of eyes that can see higher and farther, and the system will be more accurate and efficient when identifying objects.
The Luminar new generation lidar installed on Nissan
Its vertical viewing angle is greater than 25 degrees, and the accuracy of angular resolution is less than 0.05 degrees. The maximum detection range is 300 meters, which is equivalent to twice the overall detection range of existing lidar.
From the perspective of standards such as ranging range and vertical viewing angle, the new generation of Luminar lidar adopted by Nissan is more advanced than the lidar installed on Weilai ET7, Lideal L9, Xpeng G9 and other models.
However, Nissan’s technology has not yet reached the stage of mass production and is only planned to complete the development of road reality sensing technology in the mid-2020s and be the first to apply it to Some new cars.
Until fiscal year 2030, Nissan will apply this technology to all new cars, by which time the cost of lidar will also drop significantly.
Today, industry technologyis iterating rapidly like Moore's Law. In particular, existing car companies in China and Germany have successively launched models equipped with lidar, and even Great Wall Its subsidiary Salon Auto also shouted out the rhetoric of "If there are less than 4 (lidar) sensors, don't talk."
Counting from 2022 to 2030, Nissan still has a time difference of about 8 years. During this period,how to maintain core competitiveness? This is an issue facing Nissan.
In fact, just 2 weeks ago, Nissan heldA solid-state battery briefing. Similarly, both are technologies that will be mass-produced several years after being demonstrated to the public. The official launch time nodes are 2028 (solid-state batteries) and 2030 respectively.
If compared with the lively "car-building corps" in China, Nissan's two times are a bit late. Looking at Japanese car companies, Nissan is not the only one who is cautious about the development and application of new technologies.
As early as the 1990s, Toyota announced that it would develop autonomous driving with the ultimate goal of "zero traffic accident casualties". It established an autonomous driving company in Silicon Valley in 2016, but its technical level in recent years has obviously not been as good as its peers. Tesla in Silicon Valley.
Whether it is intelligence or electrification, Japanese car companies seem to be hesitant.
On the one hand, traditional car companies like Toyota and Nissan have more rigorous and longer R&D processes than new forces. On the other hand, it may be due to the fact that lidar and solid-state battery technologies have not yet been perfected and the cost is relatively high. High concerns.
Furthermore, L3 level autonomous driving has not yet been legalized in many countries, and L2 level autonomous driving may be enough for current consumers. It is better to wait and see what happens and take it step by step, which is more in line with the Japanese car companies' car-making ideas.