Figure | Source Network
Toyota is very active recently.
On April 2nd, BYD Toyota Electric Vehicle Technology Company, a pure electric R&D company jointly invested by Toyota and BYD, was officially announced. The joint venture company will "design and develop pure electric vehicles and platforms and components used for vehicles". This is regarded as an important step of Toyota's electrification layout and R&D localization in China.
But in fact, Toyota's recent accelerated layout in China is not only the research and development of electric vehicles, but also in autonomous driving.
Two "seed players" were chosen one by one.
/kloc-In March, 2008, Toyota announced that it had reached a strategic cooperation with Momenta, which will provide Toyota with high-precision maps and update services based on camera vision technology, and both parties will jointly promote the commercial landing of Toyota Automatic Map Platform (AMP) in China.
Headquartered in Suzhou, Momenta is a China autonomous driving technology company, which was founded on 20 16. It is committed to building an "autonomous driving brain", and its core technologies are environmental awareness based on deep learning, high-precision maps and driving decision-making algorithms.
According to media reports, Cao Xudong, founder of Momenta, graduated from Tsinghua University. After graduation, I joined Microsoft Research Asia to engage in AI-related research. 20 15 moved from Microsoft to Shangtang Technology, an artificial intelligence startup, as executive director of research and development. In 20 17, Momenta was led by Weilai Capital and Daimler Group, and became famous in the industry.
As for why Momenta was chosen, Toyota's explanation is: "Momenta has vision-based perception technology and high-precision mapping technology ... Through cooperation with Momenta, Toyota's competitiveness in the field of automatic driving in China market can be strengthened."
Another source said that Toyota and Momenta are not only business cooperation, but also possible to invest in the latter, but this news has not been officially confirmed.
Although both Toyota and Momenta, which are still in the initial stage of cooperation, choose to cooperate in a low-key way, from the perspective of the cooperation path between Toyota and another China autonomous driving company, it is very possible to change from commercial cooperation to strategic investment.
On February 26th, Toyota, as a strategic investor, invested 400 million US dollars to lead Ma Xiao Zhixing. Expand cooperation between the two companies in the field of tourism. In August last year, Toyota established cooperation with Ma Xiao Zhixing, and the two sides jointly launched an autonomous driving pilot project on the open road in China.
According to media reports, Ma Xiao Zhixing was founded by Peng Jun, chief architect of Baidu, and Lou Tiancheng, the youngest T 10 engineer of Baidu, at the end of 20 16. After the angel round investment was completed in 2065438+early 2007, Ma Xiao Zhixing completed the A round of $65438+1 20,000 and1round120,000 respectively in 2065438+2008. In February this year, the second round of financing was 462 million US dollars. After this round of financing, Ma Xiao Star has become the startup company with the highest financing scale in the field of autonomous driving in China.
Regarding the above cooperation, Toyota China told the media: "China has its own unique autonomous driving rules. We believe that cooperation with local companies in China is very necessary to develop autonomous driving technology suitable for the road environment in China."
At the critical moment of technological upgrading, Toyota overweight China.
Yi Jie believes that apart from the official explanation, Toyota's betting on two start-ups in the field of autonomous driving in China also reflects two trends of Toyota in the field of new technologies.
First, open your heart and make friends. As we all know, Toyota was not very keen on electric vehicles before, and its executives also publicly expressed their disapproval of the industrialization of electric vehicles. However, since the announcement of the strategy of accelerating the transformation of electrification last year, Toyota has made frequent moves in the field of electrification, and unlike the previous research and development of new technologies mainly by itself and Japanese suppliers, Toyota has a very open attitude in the field of electrification, making friends and borrowing from many sources.
In China, Toyota first established cooperation with BYD and Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd. to implement the localization of supply chains such as batteries; Later, we joined hands with BYD to set up a joint venture company to promote the localization of electric vehicle research and development.
The same is true in the field of autonomous driving. Previously, Toyota has announced cooperation with China technology giants such as Baidu, Didi and Huawei in autonomous driving and mobile travel. Today, we are beginning to pay attention to startups in the field of autonomous driving. Compared with giants such as Baidu and Huawei, startups are more innovative and have lower costs, and giants like Toyota can also have more dominance in cooperation.
Second, "China is the most important"? Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota, has repeatedly stressed that "China is the most important". Now, it's not only the China market that matters, but Toyota has also begun to be more inclined to China in the research and development of new technologies.
Previously, Japanese car companies such as Toyota were considered to be less active and relatively conservative than European and American companies such as Waymo, Mobileye, Ford, GM, Tesla, Bosch and Apple in the field of autonomous driving. Previously, overseas, Toyota's biggest investment in autonomous driving was to establish cooperation with Uber in 20 18, and jointly invest 1 billion dollars in Uber with Softbank.
China has been recognized as a hot spot for new technologies such as electrification and intelligence. In terms of quantity, by the end of last year, there were more than 30 companies with autonomous driving technology in China. In the 20 19 self-driving road test report released by California DMV, five of the top 10 companies are from China. From the perspective of application scenarios and government and policy support, China also has more advantages.
L2 autopilot technology is not a problem after mass production. Autopilot technology has reached a critical moment of upgrading, and the difficulty of L3 and above autopilot technology has greatly jumped. Whoever takes the lead in upgrading L3 is expected to win the final victory on the autopilot track.
In addition, like electrification and car networking, China's self-owned brand car companies have taken the lead in the application of autonomous driving, but multinational car companies such as Toyota are stepping up efforts to provide better technical support for their joint venture car companies in China.
Recently, Toyota has successively placed bets on two China start-ups, Ma Xiao Zhixing and Momenta, and jointly released the autopilot simulation platform "VISTA" by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which shows that Toyota should accelerate its development in the field of autopilot and attach great importance to China's strategic position as a "hot spot" for the development and application of new technologies.
This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.