Autonomous taxis are coming? Will Bolt drivers be affected in the future?

Recently, the "Radish Fast Run" that shuttles through the streets and alleys of Wuhan, China, has went viral. The vehicle adopts the Baidu Apollo fifth-generation autonomous driving system solution and is equipped with Hesai Pandar series lidar as the main perception radar.

On July 17, Hesai Technology revealed that the sixth-generation Baidu Apollo autonomous vehicle will use Jiangling Yichi 06 as the base model, and will be equipped with 4 Hesai lidar AT128.

It is known that the overall vehicle cost of the sixth-generation autonomous vehicle has dropped by 60% compared to the fifth-generation vehicle. Yin Ying, General Manager of Baidu's Automotive Robot Division, once stated that the sixth-generation autonomous vehicle plans to complete the deployment of a thousand units in Wuhan within this year.

The main lidar of the sixth-generation autonomous vehicle is exclusively supplied by Hesai: a single vehicle is equipped with 4 ultra-high-definition long-distance lidar AT128, with a detection distance of more than 200 meters, and 3D perception coverage is extended to 360 degrees. This is also the first time in China that the ADAS semi-solid-state lidar solution has been deployed on a large scale on Robotaxi, which means that AT128 extends from pre-installed mass production fields to the L4 level autonomous driving market.

According to the situation announced on the official website of Hesai Technology, the AT128 lidar can produce 1.53 million points per second. The official stated that such four lidars can meet the requirements of L4 level autonomous driving in terms of high-precision perception and full coverage of 360-degree field of view.

It is reported that Baidu once publicly deployed a plan to deploy 100,000 autonomous driving vehicles nationwide in China. Therefore, the corresponding lidar order scale will be as high as 1.5-2 billion RMB, which may become the largest order in the Robotaxi lidar market.