At the beginning of July, Argo AI of Ford and Volkswagen announced that it would lay off 65,438+050 people to prepare for future growth plans. In June, nearly 200 jobs in Tesla's autonomous driving department in California were abolished, and Musk announced the decision to lay off 65,438+00% of the company's employees in the mail; Pushing the time forward one month, Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, announced that it would lay off nearly 8% of its staff, including the extremely important team of lidar engineers. ...
Behind the wave of layoffs, deep-seated contradictions such as high R&D cost, crowded track and long road to commercialization in the autonomous driving industry are becoming more and more prominent. Head car companies such as Tesla take the lead in slimming down, which may send a brand-new signal to the market: the autonomous driving industry needs to return to rational management, bid farewell to the growth of burning money, and fanatical capital should calm down and stop blindly advocating bubbles.
However, for autonomous driving enterprises, cost saving is not the biggest problem, but making money-the commercialization of autonomous driving technology is the last hurdle for their profit.
On July 7, Argo AI, an autonomous driving technology company, announced layoffs, involving about 150 employees. An official spokesman said that Argo AI had to "carefully adjust its existing business" because it was planning its future growth plan. According to public information, Argo AI currently employs nearly 2,000 people worldwide, and the proportion of layoffs in this round is not high.
According to public information, Argo AI was founded on 20 16 and is headquartered in Pittsburgh, USA. The two founders Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander are the hardware development director of Google Autopilot Project and the engineering director of Uber Advanced Technology Group, respectively, and they have strong technical background and contacts in the autopilot industry.
Argo AI focuses on virtual driver systems, sensors, software, computing platforms and high-precision maps, which are also just needed by the autonomous driving industry and have high investment potential. Therefore, Argo AI has been the darling of capital from the beginning, and Ford and Volkswagen are its staunch supporters.
2065438+February 2007, Argo AI, which was established less than one year ago, received a capital injection of $0/0 billion from Ford/Kloc, making it the highest single investment obtained by an American autonomous driving startup at that time. In 2020, Volkswagen entered the market strongly and injected $2.6 billion into Argo AI. After this round of capital injection, Volkswagen and Ford have 40% equity and two board seats respectively, becoming the behind-the-scenes owners of Argo AI.
At its peak, Argo AI's market valuation was close to $7.5 billion, nearly three times that of the first round of financing. Bryan Salesky also revealed at the information self-driving car summit last year that Argo AI has a preliminary plan to go public in 2022. At that time, Argo AI was carrying out a new round of private financing, and the prospects looked bright. Who would have thought that it is now caught in the whirlpool of layoffs?
However, in the view of the value research institute, it is not surprising that Argo AI has come to this step today-this is just a microcosm of the environmental deterioration of the autonomous driving industry. Recently, Argo AI is far from falling into the mire of layoffs.
The last one that was hotly debated by the outside world because of rumors of layoffs was Tesla, the boss of new energy vehicles. In June, Bloomberg reported that Tesla planned to abolish the autonomous driving department in san mateo, California, involving nearly 200 jobs.
As early as the beginning of June, Musk announced the decision to lay off 65,438+00% of employees and suspend global recruitment in an internal email, but no one expected that the autopilot department, which has always been highly valued, would also enter the layoff list. According to foreign media reports, the laid-off employees of Tesla's autonomous driving department are mainly responsible for system data labeling, which is an important link to test the capture effect of cameras and sensors.
However, compared with the core R&D team, these employees are relatively more replaceable, and many car companies will choose to hand over the data labeling work to the outsourcing team. Therefore, under the pressure of cost, it is reasonable for Tesla to open the knife to the team first.
In contrast, GM, who works in core positions such as lidar engineers, may be even worse.
In May of this year, Cruise, a self-driving subsidiary of GM, also announced the news of layoffs through internal mail. About 8% of employees were fired, and the number was about 140. Although Cruise claimed that in order to protect the rights and interests of laid-off employees and companies, he would not disclose the specific number of layoffs and the positions involved, but Reuters still found out a lot of inside information.
It is reported that some of the laid-off employees are from Cruise's engineering team in Pasadena, California, and are mainly responsible for the research and development of lidar. As we all know, lidar is one of the core technologies of autonomous driving, and it is also the basis of identifying the surrounding environment and intelligent ranging, which is very important for a self-driving car. Moreover, such an important technical team has been abolished, which shows how cruel Cruise is in this round of layoffs.
May Cruise, June Tesla, July Argo AI. Head car companies have joined the army of layoffs, which can't help but add a little worry to the future of the autonomous driving industry. In this regard, the Value Research Institute believes that deep-seated contradictions such as high R&D cost, crowded track and long commercialization time in the autonomous driving industry are the fundamental reasons behind layoffs.
Even the head car companies are embarrassed. Under heavy pressure, the mid-waist start-ups with short establishment time and weak capital strength are in a difficult situation. The wave of layoffs sweeping the autonomous driving industry may also be the beginning of a major reshuffle of the industry and the survival of the fittest.
Undoubtedly, autonomous driving has still become the hottest entrepreneurial outlet in the past few years, and a large number of start-ups and star unicorns have been born.
Take the domestic market as an example. As of the first quarter of this year, China * * * has 40 self-driving unicorns with a valuation of more than 654.38 billion US dollars. After careful observation, it can be found that the unicorn business, which ranks in the top of the list, is mostly concentrated in the core technical fields such as L3 and above autopilot solutions, chips, high-precision maps, lidar and so on, and has good growth prospects.
In addition, it should be noted that this list does not include autonomous driving businesses that have not yet been split by major giants, such as Baidu Apollo–and Apollo's current valuation is as high as 40 billion US dollars. If Apollo is added to the list, the valuation scale of domestic autonomous driving companies may be stronger than the data shows.
However, the self-driving unicorn that has sprung up like mushrooms after rain can't escape the fate of burning money and losing money.
It is a well-known fact that the autonomous driving industry burns money. As early as 20 12, Google, a pioneer in autonomous driving research and development, announced that the production cost of an L4-class self-driving car was as high as $300,000, which was more than six times the starting price of the popular Tesla Model S at that time.
Although the production and R&D costs have been effectively reduced with the maturity of the industrial chain and the breakthrough of key technologies, it is still an astronomical figure for most enterprises. This group of new players can stand on the market, relying on the generous blood transfusion of capital.
According to the statistics of 01 think tank, in 20021year, the total equity financing of domestic self-driving racetracks exceeded 70 billion, and predators such as Sequoia China, Gaoyou Capital and Wuyuan Capital, head car companies led by Wei Xiaoli, Geely and BYD, and Internet/technology giants represented by Tencent, Ali and Xiaomi entered the market one after another.
According to the statistics of ICVCity research institute, in 20021year, there were 46 financing projects in the global autonomous driving industry, with China and the United States accounting for 44, accounting for more than 90% of the total track financing, which is a veritable capital hotspot.
However, the gift of capital has always been clearly priced: unicorns with financing must constantly speed up the research and development process and expand market share to push up the valuation. What followed was the soaring labor cost and R&D cost.
In June last year, the news that Xiaomi hired Hu Zhengnan, president of Geely Research Institute, with more than 100 million shares and ultra-high salary spread like wildfire. After Internet giants such as Xiaomi left the market, the shortage of high-quality engineers and R&D personnel for autonomous driving became more prominent, and the war of grabbing people led to an increase in the market salary level.
Looking through the official recruitment information of major head car companies and the third-party recruitment websites such as hunting and hiring, we can find that the salary levels of popular positions such as R&D engineers in vehicle systems, R&D engineers in computing acceleration platforms and autopilot architects are quite scary. Among them, Didi and Meituan provide basic quotations of 40K monthly salary and 15 salary for system development engineers, and the post salary of new force engineers such as Weilai is generally between 20 and 40k.
The value research institute believes that the reason why the self-driving track has become so fanatical, the loss of unicorns has pushed up the valuation, which has a lot to do with the capital behind it. However, long-term loss-making operation is not a good thing for any industry. The bursting of track bubbles such as new consumption and community group buying in the past two years is the best evidence.
In the past year, a large number of self-driving start-ups such as Drive.ai and Starsky Robotics have successively withdrawn from the historical stage. Zoox, the former king of financing, sought self-promotion and hired independent investment bank Qatalyst Partners to find potential buyers, which sounded the alarm for colleagues who were still struggling to support.
But from another perspective, the giants take the lead in shrinking their business and turning to a rational business model, which is also a signal to the whole industry-they are trying to calm down the fanatical capital, stop blindly investing and blow up the bubble.
In fact, the wind direction of the primary financing market has quietly changed, and capital has begun to gather in the head enterprises, which will accelerate the survival of the fittest and reshape the competitive landscape.
According to the data of ICVCity Research Institute, more than 40% of self-driving track financing in China is obtained by Horizon, Momenta and Wen Yuan Star. In the United States, Cruise, Waymo and Nuro*** received US$ 654.38+02.85 billion in financing, accounting for more than 90% of the total financing of the whole bank. Among them, only cruise ships completed three rounds of financing on 202 1.
Nowadays, even Cruise is slimming down, and the bubble in the autonomous driving industry is inevitable. But saving costs is not the biggest problem for Cruise, making money is-the commercialization of autonomous driving technology is the last hurdle for their profit.
In the United States, where autonomous driving technology is the most perfect and social acceptance is the highest, commercialization has been put on the agenda by many head car companies.
Waymo, an autonomous driving company spun off from Alphabet (Google's parent company), has conducted several rounds of commercialization exploration in the past two years, including launching driverless taxi services in Phoenix and charging service fees for some pilot travel services, and began to formulate pricing models. It is worth mentioning that Waymo is also the first company in the world to operate a self-driving taxi business without a security officer.
In China, Baidu, Didi and Wen Yuan Zhixing also started commercial exploration. Among them, Didi and AutoX have successively launched self-driving taxi services in Shanghai, while Ma Xiao Zhixing has launched Robotaxi services in several cities. Baidu Apollo's autopilot service platform, Radish Run, has also stepped up its staking, and it has been fully rolled out in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
However, judging from the current operation effect, Waymo's charging business still has obvious experimental color and has not yet had the basis for comprehensive promotion.
In general, compliance and scenarios are two major problems faced by autonomous driving companies.
In terms of compliance, whether at home or abroad, the laws and regulations related to autonomous driving are still in the stage of continuous revision and improvement, and there is still a long way to go before the full implementation of supervision.
On July 5, Shenzhen issued the Regulations on the Management of Intelligent Networked Vehicles in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, which comprehensively regulated road testing, demonstration application and access. Among them, the provisions on the division of responsibility for accidents of L3-class smart cars show that the relevant departments are quite cautious about self-driving cars on the road.
The lack of commercial scenes is another pain point in the autonomous driving industry.
In order to popularize autonomous driving in various road scenes, it is necessary to complete enough road tests and collect a lot of test data. Rand think tank once counted a data: In the United States, an autonomous driving team with 100 road test vehicles needs 24-hour uninterrupted testing for nearly a hundred years to accumulate the1700 million mile test data needed for the popularization of the scene.
Waymo, which started the first time, has a cumulative test mileage of only 20 million miles, which is far from the standard of Rand think tank. If the distance between 20 million miles and 65.438+07 billion miles is the distance from the full commercialization of the autonomous driving industry, how many enterprises can wait until the day of commercialization? I believe the answer will not be too optimistic.
It is said that 202 1 is the first year of commercialization of autonomous driving, but now it seems that there are still many problems to be solved in business models such as Robotaxi. The value research institute believes that considering the realistic conditions, landing in an exclusive scene may be a more realistic choice than the grand ambition of mass popularization and comprehensive commercialization.
At present, autonomous driving is mainly used in limited scenes such as high-speed trunk lines, terminal distribution and mining areas. It is still in the experimental stage in the urban road scene with complex road system and large traffic. Leading car companies such as SAIC and BYD focus on the development of specific business scenarios. The former promotes the exploration of intelligent driving heavy trucks with Yangshan Port, while the latter cooperates with Nuro to develop unmanned terminal delivery vehicles.
The commercialization of autonomous driving is a grand proposition, and every step forward is very difficult. I only hope that these seemingly insignificant progress can make the troubled self-driving enterprises survive.
In an interview with the media in June this year, Musk talked about the significance of autonomous driving to Tesla:
In the second quarter of this year, due to the month-on-month decline of delivery volume of 65,438+08% and another large-scale recall, Tesla's share price also fell from a high of $1 trillion to about $780 billion today. The decline in market value and stock price has brought heavy pressure to Musk, and autonomous driving is his last magic weapon to relieve the pressure.
In addition, Musk recently re-emphasized that 654.38+million people will join the FSD Beta test project before the end of this year, and the test results will provide reference for the upgrade of Tesla's autonomous driving technology.
What is certain is that among serious head car companies such as Tesla and Volkswagen, the automobile industry with autonomous driving technology is the most important way out, and it is also the growth point that they cannot give up. The current layoffs and slowdown are more like saving strength for the future.
Tesla is like this, and GM, Volkswagen and Ford believe it will be the same. Focusing on a series of problems such as commercialization and cost control, I believe they will find solutions as soon as possible.