Autonomous driving, smart parking, and wireless charging will form the "iron triangle" of smart transportation

Smart investors are paying attention to driverless cars. According to incomplete statistics, there are as many as 26 domestic start-up companies focusing on the research and development of autonomous driving technology, with a financing scale of nearly 10 billion yuan. In July, news broke that Baidu CEO Robin Li drove around the Fifth Ring Road in Beijing in a self-driving car equipped with his own "Apollo Project" platform, which triggered people's endless imagination about the future of self-driving.

(The picture shows the driverless car jointly developed by Baidu and BYD)

However, from a broader perspective, driverless driving is still only one of the core components of future smart transportation. The true implementation of autonomous driving still requires the support of two other major solutions to jointly build a complete smart transportation ecosystem. Among these two major solutions, one is smart parking and the other is wireless charging.

Let’s talk about smart parking first. Although self-driving cars already have the ability to sense and make decisions while driving, freeing people's hands from the steering wheel. However, when people get off the car and the car needs to be parked, how do they find a parking space, park the car, and park the car on their own? What about a series of complex activities such as payment of fees?

At this time, the car needs to access a smart parking platform to obtain the location of nearby parking lots, parking space availability and other information in real time, and formulate the optimal parking plan. At the same time, parking lots must also be equipped with relevant software and hardware facilities to provide driverless vehicles with a series of services such as parking lot indoor positioning, navigation, parking space indexing, automatic pole release, and electronic payment. Only in this way can the vehicles be ensured that they can eventually Complete the entire parking process without anyone around.

In short, self-driving cars must not only "run" but also "be able to stop." Since the software and hardware technologies and supporting resources involved in "running" and "stopping" are very different, few companies can "cover everything", and more companies adopt cross-border collaboration to achieve coordinated development. Therefore, it can be foreseen that autonomous driving companies and smart parking platforms will be close partners in the future.

There are already some smart parking practitioners who are keenly aware of the future. For example, ETCP, a unicorn in the smart parking industry founded in 2012, has cooperated with more than 6,000 parking lots in more than 200 cities across the country to implement parking space search, recommendation, reservation, navigation and even electronic payment services. These services and the big data supporting them are exactly the capabilities that are urgently needed to achieve "unmanned parking" in the autonomous driving era. This year, Alibaba chose to cooperate with ETCP to promote "sensorless payment" for parking, which is precisely because it recognizes the broad prospects of smart parking technology in the field of smart transportation in the future.

(The picture shows the ETCP cooperative parking lot)

In addition to "running" and "stopping", how to solve the energy supply problem of driverless cars? As the third corner of the “iron triangle”, wireless charging has great potential.

An obvious trend is that driverless vehicles generally use electricity as energy source, which is challenging the status of oil as the main vehicle energy source. In other words, driverless electric vehicles will be the mainstream in the future. So, how does the vehicle complete charging on its own?

The currently popular manual plug-in charging piles will be eliminated in the future, and the popularity of wireless charging is the general trend. Now, companies such as Qualcomm and WiTricity in the United States have made wireless charging of electric vehicles a reality. Simply park the car in the garage and the car will automatically receive power from a charging source underneath the vehicle. According to relevant reports, well-known foreign companies such as BMW, Ford, Toyota, and Porsche also plan to launch new energy vehicles equipped with wireless charging equipment in the next two years.

(The picture shows Halo, the wireless charging technology for electric vehicles launched by Qualcomm)

From this point of view, driverless cars will carry the main services for realizing smart transportation in the future, but smart transportation is indispensable for smart parking and wireless charging. These three major solutions cover three different aspects of driving and will build a truly unmanned smart transportation in the form of an "iron triangle" in the future.

Currently, the competition in the field of autonomous driving is so intense that it can be called the "war of the century." Even giants cannot fight alone. Building allies is an essential strategy to organically combine autonomous driving with smart parking. , is a good way to break out. After all, smart parking, as an indispensable part of driverless driving, can not only ensure that the parking process of driverless vehicles is truly unmanned, but also the big data mastered by its platform is also indispensable for the research and development and implementation of driverless driving. The value of neglect. It is foreseeable that strong companies in the field of smart parking will soon become the hot spots for autonomous driving giants to compete for cooperation.