The Future of Intelligent Driving Insights from Momenta's CEO
TapTechNews July 10th news, 'Late Auto' released an interview with the founder and CEO of autonomous driving company Momenta, Cao Xudong, last night, touching on a series of topics such as industry competition, FSD's entry into China, and end-to-end related technologies.
Cao Xudong believes that there may only be 3 to 4 intelligent driving Tier1s (TapTechNews note: Tier 1 suppliers, the most powerful suppliers in the automotive industry chain) in the world in the future. Because this is an industry with high barriers and strong economies of scale - the performance evolution brought by end-to-end technology will continue to strengthen the advantages of leading companies.
Cao Xudong put forward the 'Moore's Law of Intelligent Driving': the software experience improves 10 to 100 times every two years; the hardware BOM cost (raw material cost) reduces by half every two years. He believes that the final surviving leading company is likely to be in the vertical integrated intelligent driving software and computing platform Tier1 form, and only then it is possible to 'urpass' the Moore's Law of Intelligent Driving in terms of reducing costs and improving performance. But Momenta does not currently master the computing platform, which is a weakness and also a space for the next stage.
Cao Xudong said that Tesla's FSD may enter China by the end of this year, a bit like Tesla being introduced to Shanghai, with good currency driving out bad currency. 'Previously, the level of Chinese electric vehicles was uneven, but after Tesla came in, automakers that can benchmark against the Tesla experience are the only ones that may survive. The arrival of FSD in China will also intensify the competition, at least to drive the value, the consumers' word-of-mouth and perception to a high enough level so that they are really willing to pay.'
When asked about 'within the scope of China, including self-developed automakers, who are in the first echelon of end-to-end high-level intelligent driving' and 'who is the most concerned opponent', Cao Xudong's answer is Huawei. 'We have had customers evaluate that in Shanghai and Shenzhen - the two cities where Huawei does the best, we are on par. But in other cities, such as Beijing, Baoding, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou, our product experience and generalization ability is better than Huawei's.'
According to TapTechNews' previous report, GAC Toyota and Momenta jointly announced the launch of an end-to-end full-scenario intelligent driving solution in late June this year, supporting intelligent driving in urban and highway scenarios and intelligent parking, with an end-to-end intelligent driving large model based on Momenta's algorithm 5.0, and without relying on high-precision maps.