How Robotaxi will survive the coldest self-driving winter

Recently, what everyone cares about is not the technology of the self-driving company, but how the self-driving company should survive. What provoked this topic was the collapse of the autonomous driving company Argo AI.

An autonomous driving company backed by two giants, Ford and Volkswagen, was once in a hurry and eventually went bankrupt. In fact, the winter of autonomous driving is not the first time. As early as 2019 and 2020, there were also a number of autonomous driving companies facing an existential crisis - but in the end they all survived with a few huge investments.

The capital two years ago was nothing more than betting on a future, and two years later, they seem to have "confirmed" the future of autonomous driving: they can't afford it, and they don't know when they can bet. Even those so-called big factories have started to stop burning money.

In order to further promote the implementation of autonomous driving, Baidu personally built cars and established a joint venture with Geely. Huawei has also repeatedly emphasized within the company to reduce investment in the automotive business and promote commercial closed loops as soon as possible.

L4 is definitely the future, but L4 can only be the future. How should self-driving companies betting on Robotaxi (driverless taxis) survive this coldest winter? The second cold winter of autonomous driving Compared with the certainty of the future of autonomous driving in the technical field, this cold winter seems to come from the attitude of the capital market, which reflects the temperature of the autonomous driving market.

Autonomous driving has entered the cold winter again, from three mainstream events that are concerned- Recently, the self-driving unicorn Argo AI, which was once valued at as high as 7.3 billion US dollars, and both Volkswagen and Ford invested more than 1 billion US dollars, suddenly declared bankruptcy. The main reason is that the road to L4 is still too long, and Ford and Volkswagen can't burn it - even traditional OEMs with their own application scenarios can't play. Unicorn Argo