Recently, Wuhan's streets and alleys have witnessed an innovation in transportation.

Hundreds of self-driving taxis carrying Baidu Apollo 5th generation self-driving system solution shuttle through the streets and alleys of the city. The hot topic of "Robots running quickly" continues to attract many consumers to experience it. A number of key words such as "only 4 yuan", "yield to pedestrians", and "orders skyrocketing" have shown the clear direction of unmanned taxi from concept verification to practical implementation.

Hesai contributes to the large-scale deployment of self-driving vehicles.

Baidu's Apollo autonomous driving system continues to integrate advanced technologies and constantly pushes the performance and user experience of autonomous driving to new heights.

The self-driving vehicles put into operation in Wuhan this time use Baidu Apollo's 5th generation autonomous driving system solution, and are equipped with Hesai Pandar series high-performance lidars as the perception main lidar. It's worth mentioning that the 6th generation Baidu Apollo self-driving car, Yiqi 06, has been stored and will be put on the market in succession this year. The main lidar of Baidu's 6th generation Apollo autonomous driving car is exclusively supplied by Hesai, each car is equipped with 4 ultrahigh-definition long-range lidars AT128, and can detect distances beyond 200 meters. High-definition 3D perception is covered up to 360°. This is the first time in China that ADAS semi-solid-state lidar solution has been deployed in large quantities on Robotaxi and it marks the AT128 breaking into the L4 autonomous driving market from the domain of front-loading mass production.

Hesai AT128, as a unique "true 128-line" lidar on the market, is developed based on Hesai's self-developed chip architecture, achieving highly integrated transceiving modules and outstanding comprehensive performance. It can generate 1.53 million points of data per second, and four lidars can fully meet the needs of L4-level autonomous driving for high-precision perception and 360° full coverage of vision. At the same time, AT128 provides an economical vehicle-grade semi-solid-state mass production solution, which helps reduce the unit cost of the vehicle and create favorable conditions for the large-scale deployment of self-driving vehicles. It is understood that the vehicle cost of Baidu's 6th generation Apollo self-driving car has significantly decreased compared to the previous model, with a price of only 204,600 yuan.

Looking to the future, the Chinese Robotaxi and supply chain markets show huge development potential. According to Pacific Securities' forecast, in 2025 and 2030, the market size of China's Robotaxi is expected to exceed 1.18 trillion yuan and 2.93 trillion yuan respectively, making it one of the largest autonomous driving scenarios. Baidu has publicly announced plans to deploy 100,000 unmanned vehicles nationwide. Industry analysts predict that based on one RT6 carrying four Hesai AT128 lidars, each car equipped with a Hesai AT128 lidar is estimated to cost around 20,000 yuan. The scale of the lidar order for the 100,000 unmanned vehicles will be as high as 1.5-2 billion yuan. This may be the largest order for the Robotaxi lidar market.

Baidu's 6th generation self-driving car, "Quick Run Carrot", is undergoing road tests in Wuhan.

Hesai AT128

Leading the global L4-level lidar market with a 74% market share

With the development of autonomous driving technology, lidar has gradually become one of the most core perception components.

It is generally believed that L4-level autonomous driving requires more than 10 times the safety requirements of a human driver, so higher requirements have been put forward for the performance, system safety, and robustness of perception sensors. Lidar, because of its active emission characteristics, can perceive well regardless of changes in environmental light, and has perceiving ability beyond human drivers in dark and dazzling weather. At the same time, faced with rain, snow, fog and other harsh weather, lidar can also significantly outperform cameras, millimeter-wave radar and other sensors. It is precisely because of this that lidar has been widely regarded by the industry as a necessary perception sensor for L4-level autonomous driving.

Currently, global leading autonomous driving manufacturers, including Baidu, Waymo, and Cruise, are actively promoting research and development and road testing. These companies' self-driving vehicles are generally equipped with multiple lidars to improve driving safety and reduce manual intervention.

Hesai has been committed to providing high-performance lidar products, and its product performance and quality have been fully validated by the market. As of April this year, Baidu Apollo's total mileage of autonomous driving has exceeded 0.1 billion kilometers, with a record of zero major casualties. According to data from the past two years, the actual vehicle accident rate is only 1/14 of human drivers.

It is worth mentioning that the company is not only a long-term strategic partner of Baidu, but also collaborates with Baidu to achieve the commercial landing of manned operation scenarios. In fact, its lidar products have been widely used in the global autonomous driving field.

As of the first quarter of this year, Hesai's cumulative shipments of automotive lidar has exceeded 0.38 million units. In the ADAS pre-installed mass production market, AT128 helps domestic top new forces such as Ideal and Xiaomi to create a variety of hot-selling models of all-scenario intelligent driving systems. At the same time, Hesai also empowers top autonomous driving customers such as Baidu Apollo, Meituan, Momenta, Haomo Zhixing, Wenyuan Zhixing, Xiaoma Zhixing, and Qingzhou Zhixing in the L4 automatic driving market.

In the global Robotaxi main lidar field, Hesai maintains close cooperation with almost all top autonomous driving players at home and abroad. Among the top 10 L4 autonomous driving companies in the world, 9 use Hesai's high-performance lidars, and well-known companies such as Cruise, Zoox, Aurora, and Nuro are among them.

According to the latest report on the 2024 automotive lidar market released by the internationally authoritative organization Yole, in the global L4 autonomous driving lidar market in 2023, Hesai ranked first with a market share of as high as 74%, demonstrating its strong market competitiveness.

The autonomous driving boom in Wuhan reflects the public's expectations and breakthroughs in understanding of intelligent driving. Previously, Baidu announced that Luobo Kuaipao will soon achieve profitability in a single city, allowing the industry to see the profitability prospects of L4 autonomous driving for the first time, indicating that the industry is moving towards a new development stage. In this process, Hesai is expected to continue to provide safe and reliable lidar products to accelerate the closed-loop of autonomous driving business model.