Tang Rui, founder and CEO of Zongmu Technology and Cancong Robotics, delivered a keynote speech at the 16th China Automotive Blue Book Forum

The 16th China Automotive Blue Book Forum with the theme of "Imagination" was held in Beijing from June 14 to 16. As one of the main guests, Tang Rui, founder and CEO of Zongmu Technology and Cancong Robotics, was invited to attend the opening ceremony on the morning of the 14th and delivered a keynote speech entitled "Drop'nGo

 

 

Tang Rui reviewed the development process from Zongmu to Cancong from several aspects, including "L4 Robotaxi may still be far away from us", "L4 AVP may be the closest, but it is still far away", "The biggest leap from L2 to L4 is not in technology but in business model - from product to service", "AVP's two core service products: ZEALOUS & ZATLAS", "Iteration and evolution of Drop'nGo", "From Zongmu to Cancong", "Zongmu + Cancong - ecological partners of OEMs in the era of intelligent driving", and "Reject involution - go out hand in hand". He elaborated on the dual-wheel drive strategy of "autonomous driving + mobile energy" composed of Zongmu + Cancong, expressed the vision of truly becoming an ecological partner of OEMs in the era of intelligent driving, and hoped for further cooperation and win-win results to create a better future for the world.

 

 

The following is the content of Tang Rui's keynote speech: Thank you very much for the opportunity to share some of our thoughts with all the colleagues in the automotive industry. Today's theme is "Imagination". At the beginning, President Jia also clearly opposed internal circulation. In the past, General Manager Yu, General Manager You, and General Manager Qin discussed more from the perspective of car companies how to reject internal circulation and create value in today's era of internal circulation. Zongmu Technology has always been a label in the domestic intelligent driving industry. Today I have two identities: as the founder and CEO of Zongmu Technology, I am also the founder and CEO of a new business - Cancong Robotics. Below, I will use these two identities to talk about how to reject internal circulation and use imagination as an intelligent driving company.

 

 

There has always been a strong perception in China that Zongmu has done a great job in low-speed autonomous driving and parking. At the launch conference of Wenjie M5, Mr. Yu praised our parking system for being very good. We have also been building a low-speed autonomous driving brand called Drop’n Go, so the title of my speech today is "Drop’n Go-Being the Ecological Partner of OEMs in the Era of Intelligent Driving". In today's highly involuted environment, there are many discussions and analyses in the industry on how to create value? How to avoid the zero-sum game between intelligent driving companies and OEMs, because this is a very unhealthy state in the industry. Why do we call the intelligent driving stack Drop’n Go? Because we want to push L4 to the point of large-scale mass production. Today, the level of intelligence in the industry is gradually improving, and my country has also issued L3 test licenses. L4 has always been the highest goal of the entire industry. In the past few years, the most important crown jewel pursued by the industry is L4 Robotaxi, but how far is it from realization? Now there is actually a lot of controversy. Some people think it is very close, and there are indeed commercial trial operations in various places, but I think there are also many challenges. Tesla's Musk recently announced on Twitter that Robotaxi will be launched on August 8. Many people are waiting to see whether L4 Robotaxi can really be launched on August 8 on a large scale? A month ago, Automotive Business Review published a compilation article, which was well translated and very interesting. The views in it are also worth sharing: In fact, compared with Waymo, Tesla Robotaxi Business is at least four years behind. When Tesla started recruiting remote operators, we knew they were serious about Robotaxi.

I personally hold a relatively conservative view on whether L4 Robotaxi can be commercialized on a large scale soon, because I think it is not just a technical issue, but also a lot of legal and social issues. Today, online ride-hailing drivers are often the most important safe haven for unemployed people before finding their next job. It is hard to imagine what the consequences will be if Robotaxi is commercialized on a large scale and such jobs are taken away from society.

I think that today's AI needs to help us replace some tasks and make them easier, rather than replacing some of our jobs. This view is also borrowed from what Fei-Fei Li talked about in a previous AI forum. AI should help make our work, life and tasks simpler, rather than replace our jobs. The implementation of L4 has always been the goal pursued by the entire automotive industry. Our view is: it is possible and highly likely that L4 will be realized first in the scenario of passenger cars in closed parks. Because compared with highways, urban areas and closed parks, closed parks have two characteristics and are most likely to be transformed into L4. The first point is: closed parks are indeed unlikely to have fatal accidents, because fatal accidents are prone to occur on highways and urban areas. It is difficult for OEMs to have a strong desire to upgrade from L2 to L3 or even L4, which means taking the potential fatal risks on their shoulders. Usually, many OEMs have a more conservative view that the speed of closed parks is relatively low and accidents are less likely to occur. The second point: When we arrive at the closed park, we have actually reached the final point of the journey. This is different from highways and urban areas. The person behind the steering wheel cannot be released. Instead of spending a long time looking for a parking space in a closed campus, it is better to drop off the car and go away to your destination, whether it is to work, go to the movies, eat, or go out for entertainment. We named the technical protocol stack of the L4 closed campus Drop’nGo, which is also the direction we are tirelessly promoting and progressing.

The biggest leap from L2 to L4 is not in technology, but in the change of business model. L2 often sells a product, which may be the intelligent driving system sold to the OEM, or the OEM sells a car to a passenger car customer. L2 is basically the business model of the product. However, once it enters L4, the responsibility is transferred from the user of the product. Whether it is the Robotaxi model or the autonomous valet parking model in the park, it requires continuous service, because only through continuous service can it be truly transferred, and can it be truly responsible not only to the car owner, but also to the participants in the traffic road.

 

 

Let me give you two examples. When some companies wanted to make Robotaxi, they needed remote dispatchers. They had no way to handle very complex game scenarios. How could they move these cars away through remote driving? In fact, on public roads, this kind of remote operation can sometimes be very inefficient. I once read a report that in San Francisco, a Waymo car was suddenly stuck in the middle of the road. Could the remote system move the car away in a timely and effective manner? In fact, it was a very painful thing, so L4 may not be that fast.

Similarly, in parking lots, whether today's AVP can truly achieve L4 is also strongly dependent on operation and maintenance, because without the help of operation and maintenance in such extreme situations, solving problems such as moving cars and getting out of trouble, AVP also cannot be mass-produced. This is the result of our thinking in the past few years. As early as 2019, we were thinking about solving the two most complex service products for AVP landing scenarios: without operation and maintenance, AVP is not that fast, even if it will be much faster than Robotaxi on public roads. From the first generation of Drop'nGo in 2017 to today, many car companies have released autonomous valet parking products, but can we really have the confidence to buy a car in a very short time and use the AVP function in 80%-90% of parking lots in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen? I don't think this day will come so soon. We need to solve two problems. First, realize the transfer of responsibilities through operation and maintenance; second, generate maps of mixed parking lots efficiently and at low cost.

 

 

In view of the fierce competition in the industry today, I have made some strategic adjustments to the development of the company and the thinking of the entire industry. As I said just now, we released the first generation of Drop’nGo technology in 2017. In Beijing's underground parking lot, we have demonstrated that we can achieve autonomous valet parking or remote summoning in a well-lit parking lot using AI neural network technology based on surround view cameras. In 2019, we released the second generation of Drop’nGo technology based on surround view cameras and 4D imaging millimeter wave radar, which can also achieve AVP when it rains or the camera is blocked. At the beginning of this year, we released the new generation of Drop’nGo technology of BEV Transformer + OccupancyNet. In the process of technological development, in addition to the iteration of technology, I think more about how to further upgrade and evolve the Drop’nGo service.

What we want to create is an L4 experience, which means that you can Drop Off and then Go Away, and the things that follow should be worry-free and seamless for consumers. Autonomous valet parking is one of the very important functions, but the connotation and extension of Drop’nGo can be further extended. From the connotation of Drop Off and Go Away, letting the car park itself, it has evolved to providing parking services for many car owners, including grabbing parking spaces, automatic position calculation, and after-market value-added services such as mobile charging. In this way, we hope to avoid direct head-on competition with car companies in the intelligent driving industry. Today, many people are very anxious. Is there room for independent intelligent driving companies to exist? There are many articles in the industry that are anxious for us. In fact, more often, we should think about how to become truly complementary with car companies, rather than a simple game of value. Therefore, we want to do something different and provide value to car companies by continuously exploring the ecology and services of parking lots.

 

 

Based on this, at the end of 2022, we founded Cancong Robotics. The earliest thought was to solve the problem of mobile charging for cars in parking lots. In the past, the utilization efficiency of charging piles was very low, and cars had to find piles. Today, our mobile charging robots can provide charging services for any car. At the end of 2023, we conducted commercial trial operations and achieved quite good results. Our energy robots can not only charge new energy vehicles, but also store energy for the park. We finally found that the essence of this matter is that it can provide a more effective combination of autonomous driving + energy storage technology in today's distributed energy structure to form a new type of energy or power transmission and distribution method. Its applications include charging new energy vehicles, industrial and commercial energy storage for parks, and many temporary and emergency electricity uses. On January 18 this year, we held a relatively large mobile energy Internet innovation forum and product launch conference, and invited many leaders in the government and industry of France, Hungary, and Singapore to witness the product launch with us. In April this year, our products officially went offline for large-scale mass production. During the May Day holiday, the first large-scale mobile charging carnival in human history was held, with about 100 energy robots - Lightning Robots - deployed at the Shanghai Disney Resort to provide charging services to tens of thousands of car owners.

On May 22, we went abroad to Europe and North America. Some of these pictures are in North America, and some are in Hungary. We participated in the Hungarian GreenTech exhibition. The Hungarian Minister of Energy said that our Lightning Bao is the most innovative product form in the entire GreenTech exhibition. From Zongmu to Cancong, what we hope to do is to truly become an ecological partner of the OEM in the era of intelligent driving. After rolling off the production line in April this year, new energy charging robots have been deployed in many parks in Shanghai in May. In this process, we will provide charging services, map services, etc. Our goal next year is to provide mobile charging services in 5,000 large parking lots in first-tier cities.

 

 

Zongmu and Cancong are actually one company. We have business that cooperates with OEMs. We hope to continue to empower OEMs as an intelligent driving system, whether it is a parking system or a parking-driving system. But most importantly, we hope to provide Drop Off and Go Away SDKs to provide car owners with a large number of value-added services in parking lots, including On Demand mobile charging, motor vehicle parking spaces, car search, reverse car search, AR navigation, etc. We will map all the major large commercial centers, office parks, and above-ground and underground maps in first-tier cities, and use this digital map to do value-added business, which will derive many new business models. Cancong Robot is actually doing two things: it can provide charging services for new energy vehicle owners through the Cancong robot itself. At the same time, when deploying a comprehensive solution, it will also deploy a lot of high-power bidirectional energy gateways FlashBase, which can not only provide bidirectional charging and discharging for our Cancong energy robot, but also provide up to 100kW bidirectional V2G services for future new energy vehicles. These things allow us to connect a series of actions such as automatic parking and charging in all parking lots, and provide a network for deeply penetrated first- and second-tier commercial real estate, which can continuously create better user experience and higher value.

Finally, I would like to say that I agree with Dr. Jia Ke's words. This era requires a little imagination, we need to reject involution, and we need to go out hand in hand. Not only the Zongmu intelligent driving business, we also have the mobile charging business. We really hope to establish a very strategic partnership with the OEM. As mentioned earlier, we have been penetrating multiple markets around the world since April this year. We also noticed that in the process of new energy going overseas, the biggest pain point encountered many times is the imperfection of the energy replenishment network. I would like to end my speech with a few short stories: In the picture, there is a new energy Mercedes-Benz truck that specializes in providing rescue services at the GreenTech exhibition in Hungary. As a result, this rescue truck ran out of power and needed our energy robot FlashBot to rescue.

 

 

Another photo shows that during the charging process, a local Kia agent couldn't find a charging station anywhere. After using our service, he said that it was good because one of the very important reasons for not selling electric cars was that there was no way to charge quickly. In fact, whether it is the OEM or the smart driving ecosystem, everyone is indeed facing great pressure. At such a time, we should, as President Jia called for, use our imagination and refuse to simply roll up some low-cost, valueless things that cannot bring positive value to consumers and the industry. Instead, we should think about how to truly go out and create better things for the world. The China Automotive Blue Book Forum is an unofficial automotive forum hosted by Automotive Business Review. It is known for its long history, large scale, high-end grade, sharp topics and strong influence. It is one of the well-known dialogue platforms in the automotive industry. According to the organizer, this year's theme is "Imagination" because the solution to every problem begins with imagination, and many problems occur because they are beyond imagination, or because of our "failure of imagination." The organizer said that since the 21st century, we have experienced a leap-forward change from following traditional cars for a century to leading new energy intelligent networked cars to a certain extent. But looking around the world today, if China's new cars want to truly gain a foothold and move to a higher level, they need to engage in a real major reflection and a carnival of imagination.

This year's Blue Book Forum has set up 6 keynote speeches, including "Styling Design", "Drive Route", "Intelligent Driving", "Intelligent Cockpit", "Future Investment", and "Marketing Trends", as well as "Will automotive opportunism defeat long-termism?", "Does Chinese automotive design pay tribute to classics or originality?", "Will pure electric vehicles still have no stamina after crossing the chasm?", "Will the energy ecosystem undergo disruptive changes?", "Has the commercialization prospect of Robotaxi been presented?", "Has the winner of high-level intelligent driving been determined?", "Has the intelligent cockpit experience stagnated in evolution?", "Can trinity ecological car companies succeed?", "Should Chinese cars go overseas to Europe and the United States?", "Is the new automobile industry still a good investment track?", "Should car companies build their own X-sk?", "Can AI big models change China's automobile marketing?" and other 12 major issues, including peak debates. More than 100 heavyweight automotive leaders either gave speeches or participated in the debate sessions on the above topics. The collision of imaginations of industry leaders has formed a forward-looking thinking, providing constructive reference and direction for the rapid and healthy development of the industry.