The 100 billion market of commercial autonomous mining vehicles will be opened in 2022

"The soil we have eaten is our barrier." Mines, because most of them are in remote areas and the working environment is harsh, the people who do mine automatic driving laugh at themselves with this sentence. It is also because of this that in recent years, the recruitment and management of mining car drivers has become more difficult. At the same time, the relatively closed environment is more suitable for the operation of autonomous vehicles, and the mine has almost become one of the scenes with the strongest need for autonomous driving, and a number of enterprises have entered the game in recent years.

What is the specific market space of unmanned mining vehicles? Which companies are at the top? What's the business model like? On March 30, Chen Tao Capital released the "Mine Autonomous Driving Track Research Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report"), which responded to the above problems one by one.

"The soil we have eaten is our barrier." Mines, because most of them are in remote areas and the working environment is harsh, the people who do mine automatic driving laugh at themselves with this sentence. It is also because of this that in recent years, the recruitment and management of mining car drivers has become more difficult. At the same time, the relatively closed environment is more suitable for the operation of autonomous vehicles, and the mine has almost become one of the scenes with the strongest need for autonomous driving, and a number of enterprises have entered the game in recent years.

What is the specific market space of unmanned mining vehicles? Which companies are at the top? What's the business model like? On March 30, Chen Tao Capital released the "Mine Autonomous Driving Track Research Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report"), which responded to the above problems one by one.

At the same time, mining transportation is faced with difficulties in recruiting workers, management and high safety risks. The landing and application of autonomous driving technology is tangential to these core pain points.

Therefore, it is not difficult to understand what the report says: mining areas are one of the most suitable scenarios for the commercial landing of autonomous driving. After all, it is closed, slow, right-of-way free and highly mechanized. And solve the problem of driver shortage, and reduce the cost of personnel recruitment and management difficulty.

Chen Tao Capital said that because the post-80s and post-90s are not willing to do relevant work, the cost of mining car drivers in 2019 rose by 50% compared with 2016, while the cost of labor is rising, the cost of sensors is declining, and once the two reach the intersection, it will truly realize commercial operation.

The mining driverless industry is just getting started

Although there is a market, there is demand, but with foreign countries mainly by the OEM to provide autonomous driving solutions, the domestic driverless solution providers are mainly startups, participants include Tage Zhixing, Huitou intelligent, easy control intelligent driving, Xidi intelligent driving, Yue Xin intelligent, etc., the market as a whole is still in its infancy.

The reason why domestic Oems have not been deeply involved is very simple: the mine unmanned transportation solution is a complex system engineering, which not only requires automatic driving technology, but also requires scheduling and fleet management, vehicle networking communication and other technologies. Therefore, large equipment companies tend to cooperate deeply with driverless startups, and themselves focus on the research and development and testing of front-mounted autonomous vehicles, such as drive-by-wire chassis and sensor integration.

Or benefit from this, in the past five years, domestic startups have been able to quickly delve into the development and operation of mine autonomous driving solutions, and each company has begun to conduct small-scale fleet testing. From the perspective of commercialization progress and technology maturity, three head enterprises have been formed, namely Tage Zhixing, Huituo Intelligence, and easy control intelligent driving.

However, although a number of enterprises have obtained commercial orders for mining unmanned vehicles, most of them are pilot projects and have not yet participated in the normal production and operation of the mine, and the work efficiency of automatic driving can not be equal to that of manual driving, especially the night operation has not achieved normal operation.

Tage Zhixing and easy to control intelligent driving performed better, reaching the level of manual driving efficiency of 80%-90%, and conducted night driving tests. However, most startups deploy less than 35 vehicles, and there is still some distance from large-scale commercial use.

In terms of financing, the mine self-driving track did not receive much attention early on. At present, mining autonomous driving companies are mostly in the early stage of development, financing rounds are mostly A to B rounds, most companies have completed 2-3 rounds of financing from angel to Pre-A and A rounds, with the total financing ranging from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of yuan, and the head company's valuation has not exceeded 2 billion yuan.