Author: Xu Xiaoqian
After entering autumn, Yangquan is blessed by the blue sky, but one can still feel the imprint left by heavy industry.
The well-known local coal enterprise Yangmei No.2 Mine is located in the mining area of Yangquan City. The huge slogan "Long live the miners" standing on the office building projects the glory of the previous era.
Yangquan, located in the central eastern part of Shanxi Province, is known as the "Coal City" with 53 coal mines throughout the city. It governs two counties, Pingding and Yuxian, as well as three districts of urban, mining, and suburban areas, and an economic and technological development zone. It is the least populous and smallest prefecture level city in Shanxi province. The area is less than 4600 square kilometers and the population is less than 1.3 million people.
Photo by journalist from Yangquan Second Mining Times Weekly located in the mining area
The entire city of Yangquan is located in the northeast of the Qinshui coalfield, with unique coal resources and a coal reserve of up to 10 billion tons, mainly composed of high-quality low ash smokeless coal. It is difficult for the life of the people in Laoyangquan to bypass Yangmei Group (renamed Huayang Group after transformation). From schools, hospitals to factories, this leading enterprise that supports the Yangquan coal mining industry has penetrated into every aspect of local people's lives.
Another business card of Yangquan is "The Three Body Problem". The writer Liu Cixin once worked at the Yangquan Niangziguan power station. Since 2007, with the transformation of the economic structure, power plants have gradually shut down, and three cooling towers still stand tall above the factories. The form of future cities in Liu Cixin's works always inadvertently reveals the figure of Yangquan.
Regardless of objective reality requirements or subjective development needs, the "coal city" can no longer meet and define Yangquan, and the green and low-carbon transformation is imperative. In recent years, Yangquan's sense of science fiction is no longer just hidden between the lines of novels, but has also begun to appear on the streets and alleys of the city. Robin Lee, the founder of Baidu "all in AI", is a native of Yangquan. He has long focused on his hometown. From big data to automatic driving, Yangquan has always been connected with cutting-edge technology industries.
Yangquan is leading the way in the field of autonomous driving - it is the first prefecture level city to fully open up autonomous driving and the first city in Shanxi to enter the "era of autonomous driving". Walking on the main road of Yangquan High tech Zone, autonomous vehicles with small hats on their heads shuttle back and forth. At the end of August, a reporter from Time Weekly opened Baidu's Apollo Go app at the automatic driving landing point at the west gate of Beishan Park. Within three minutes, a red flag car stopped on the right side of the road. After entering the last digit of the phone, the vehicle automatically starts, turns, makes U-turns, slows down... until it reaches its destination.
Old industrial cities take the lead in starting
Li Wei (pseudonym) used to be a worker at a large coal factory in Yangquan. Ten years ago, the efficiency of the factory was gradually declining, and she had to jump out of the production line and find another way out. Running a small business and having worked as a shopping guide in a mall, Li Wei eventually joined the ride hailing team with a monthly salary comparable to that of a factory.
Individual circumstances often blend with urban transformation, and Yangquan also faces the test of turning around. From 2013 to 2015, due to the significant decline in the coal market, the economic growth rate of Yangquan gradually slowed down. In 2013, the total economic output of Yangquan reached 61.18 billion yuan. Two years later, this indicator fell back to 59.885 billion yuan.
With coal as the core driving force, Yangquan City has formed an industrial structure dominated by one coal and one enterprise. Coal accounts for as much as 80% of the city's industrial added value, and the high dependence on coal mining resources restricts the speed of Yangquan's industrial upgrading.
In 2012, Baidu Asia's largest data center landed in Yangquan, undertaking the task of running various Baidu applications. This was Yangquan's first deep collision with cloud computing and big data, and also gave the local government the confidence to undergo digital transformation.
Another factor that has pushed Yangquan towards the crossroads of transformation is its geographical location. Yangquan is located in the crevice between the Taihang Mountains and the Lvliang Mountains, and its complex terrain provides rich scenarios for the testing, validation, and application of autonomous driving technology.
In 2018, Yangquan signed an agreement with Baidu to promote the integration and application of cutting-edge technologies such as autonomous driving and intelligent transportation in Yangquan. Afterwards, Yangquan started working at full capacity and established a connection with autonomous driving.
On January 22, 2019, 22 autonomous vehicles equipped with Baidu Apollo platform appeared on the Wuyun Expressway section. They crossed numerous obstacles such as tunnels, bridges, toll stations, etc. and successfully completed a historic autonomous driving experiment, which is regarded as the starting point of Yangquan's journey towards the city of smart cars.
One year later, autonomous driving test vehicles appeared on Dalian Street in Yangquan Economic and Technological Development Zone, driving from a closed highway to urban sections, and Yangquan City officially began road adaptation development testing.
Intersection renovation is an unavoidable step in the layout process of Yangquan's autonomous driving system. It requires the installation of perception units, computing units, and communication units composed of cameras and radars on existing traffic poles, which can cooperate with autonomous vehicles to scan the city 360 degrees in a static and dynamic manner.
Baidu's Apollo Go has been operating on the main road of Yangquan. Photographed by the reporter of the Times Weekly
A 'smart' car also needs a 'smart' path. After years of infrastructure renovation, the interwoven mountain city roads have evolved into the "Road of Wisdom". Autonomous vehicles drive out of the high-tech zone one after another and conduct autonomous driving tests and trial runs on an open road with a total length of about 200 kilometers in both directions in Yangquan City.
Chasing the gap between ideals and reality
There are peaks and valleys in industrial development, and the same goes for autonomous driving. According to incomplete statistics from 21 Tech, there were a total of 126 investment events in the domestic autonomous driving industry in 2022, with a cumulative disclosed financing amount exceeding 20 billion yuan, a decrease of 60 billion yuan compared to the financing amount in 2021.
Unlike the ups and downs of the capital market, Yangquan City has always been committed to promoting the implementation of autonomous driving projects. Supporting facilities such as urban data resource operation centers, artificial intelligence experimental bases, and autonomous driving industrial parks have sprung up.
Wang Yifei, the head of the Standards Department of Yangquan Data Bureau, introduced to Time Weekly reporters that Yangquan has a clear layout for autonomous driving. As early as the planning stage, collaborative effects were formed among departments such as public security, transportation, and big data. On January 1st of this year, the "Management Measures for Intelligent Connected Vehicles in Yangquan City" were officially implemented.
This local legislation clarifies issues such as global openness and mutual recognition of testing, providing a legal basis for supporting the commercial operation of intelligent connected vehicles. Wang Yifei said that by the end of 2023, 14 Apollo Go vehicles operating in Yangquan City had reached 2.1 million kilometers.
The construction of Checheng Network is still in progress, and only by matching the city's infrastructure with the pace of intelligence can autonomous driving be truly implemented, "said Wang Yifei.
At the end of 2019, Leading Technology, wholly owned and controlled by Yangquan Economic Development Zone, was established to connect with the implementation of the vehicle road collaboration project. In the past three years, the job responsibilities of Qiao Binliang, General Manager of Navigation Technology, have been almost filled with "autonomous driving".
Speaking of Yangquan's autonomous driving, Qiao Binliang couldn't hide his pride and excitement. In his view, top cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Wuhan have played a demonstrative role nationwide, while the success of Yangquan has even more replicable value. It sends a positive signal to other eager cities: even in small and medium-sized cities with inadequate infrastructure, autonomous driving technology can find its place.
In fact, in the process of promoting the implementation of new technologies, the Navigation Technology team has also taken some detours. They once attempted to apply autonomous driving to the last mile of express delivery transportation, but the final pilot results fell far short of expectations.
At present, it is completely impractical. The delivery vehicles arriving at the bottom of the unit building, whether the user is at home, and the pickup time are uncontrollable factors, resulting in low efficiency in implementation. The number of delivery orders in a day is very few, and the efficiency is not high. "Qiao Binliang told Time Weekly reporters," The current autonomous driving technology is still in the early stage of development and cannot be placed in an environment with many uncertain factors to cope with complex and changing situations
Therefore, large places such as express distribution centers and transfer stations have become more reasonable destinations for autonomous delivery vehicles. After the Yangquan Logistics Distribution Project started operating, its service scope covered more than 30 postal express stations in urban areas, mining areas, and high-tech zones, with daily delivery of over 10000 parcels from branches to end stations.
Autonomous driving technology is also adapting to local conditions to transform the industrial cluster in Yangquan.
At the mining site of Yangquan Jidong cement limestone mine, unmanned mining cars are no longer a new species. Within a closed operation area of one square kilometer, unmanned mining trucks are carrying out loading, transportation, and unloading operations in an orderly manner at a speed of 25 kilometers per hour in the mining area.
By utilizing '5G+' unmanned technology and coordinating management through an intelligent cluster scheduling platform, unmanned driving can be achieved. After the entire mine is unmanned, labor costs can be reduced, production safety can be improved, and the risk of accidents and casualties is close to zero, "said Li Yangyang, the head of the Smart Mine Operations Department.
Shi Qinjun, the head of operations at Navigation Technology, witnessed the transformation of the main transportation intersection in Yangquan. In the early stage, she was busy coordinating the processes of multiple departments such as transportation, traffic police, and highways, and saw that the autonomous driving project quickly ran from 0 to 1 through various scenes in her hometown.
We utilize intersection data from Checheng Network and equip it with a signal control service platform to provide intelligent optimization strategies such as adaptive control and dynamic green waves for traffic police departments, "said Shi Qinjun.
After implementing light control optimization and green wave strategy, the average delay rate of vehicles on Dalian Street decreased by 34%, and the number of parking times decreased by 49%. At present, 36 key intersections in Yangquan city have implemented intelligent optimization strategies such as adaptive control and dynamic green waves, and 5 main roads will also basically achieve "green wave traffic".
The industrial chain is the most important puzzle
Yangquan took the lead in starting on the autonomous driving track and had multiple considerations.
The enormous industrial economic value hidden in autonomous driving is enough to excite all cities. According to a report by the Forward looking Industry Research Institute, the market size of China's intelligent connected vehicles is expected to exceed 5 trillion yuan by 2030, and the market size related to "vehicle road cloud integration" will exceed 14 trillion yuan.
Each tier city is moving together, competing to deploy autonomous driving. Urban leaders are well aware that autonomous driving is at the core of the upstream and downstream industrial chains, and can drive the development of related industries such as chips, sensors, the Internet of Things, and urban infrastructure. When autonomous driving leaves the pilot zone, how to move towards scale and commercialization has become the focus of current urban competition.
With Pilotage Technology Company as the center, within 2 kilometers, Internet, electronic technology, new energy, automatic driving and other companies have introduced. In just five years, the once sparsely populated eastern suburbs of the high-tech zone have transformed into a modern hub for the digital economy industry.
Photo by a reporter from the Times Weekly of Zhongdian Yangquan Digital Economy Industrial Park, where Leading Technology is located
Starting from Navigation Technology Company, walking 1.3 kilometers is Shanxi Zhichuang City No. 7. As early as 2021, the leading unmanned car startup company Neolithic has set up its branch here.
Subsequently, the National Security Monitoring Center and the Labeling Center successively settled in Yangquan High tech Zone, responsible for supervising the new stone unmanned vehicles driving on the road nationwide, collecting road data and road condition information, etc.
There is a lot of room for imagination in the upstream and downstream of the autonomous driving industry, including data annotation, sensing equipment, and application landing. The agglomeration effect of the autonomous driving industry in the high-tech zone will become increasingly evident. "This is Shi Qinjun's vision for future development.
In early July, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and five other ministries jointly released the list of pilot cities for the "vehicle road cloud integration" application of intelligent connected vehicles, with 20 cities (consortia) including Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Chengdu, and Ordos selected. Major pilot cities have started bidding for design proposals, with a total announced investment scale of over 30 billion yuan.
Wuhan has become the city with the highest number of open test roads in the country; Several autonomous driving companies in Guangzhou are accelerating their capitalization process, with recent news of IPOs from Wenyuan Zhixing and Xiaoma Zhixing; Shenzhen has taken the lead in introducing local regulations allowing L3 level autonomous vehicles to be driven on the road, and defining the rights and responsibilities of L3-L5 level autonomous vehicles.
Yangquan has not been included in the list of 20 pilot cities, which naturally adds a sense of urgency. Wang Yifei admitted to a reporter from Time Weekly that Yangquan's top priority is still to find a differentiated path, rather than just staying in the testing stage. It needs to attract top enterprises in the industry chain, such as a production line or research and development center of an automobile manufacturing company, in order to truly drive the takeoff of the autonomous driving industry.