Chinese startup Nullmax said on Tuesday that its latest generation of autonomous driving hardware and software package, allowing cars to navigate complex urban environments autonomously with features such as lane changing, will cost users as little as “several thousand RMB.” 

Why it matters: Shanghai and Fremont-based Nullmax is among the few players in the self-driving vehicle space claiming that cars will be able to function by themselves in urban scenarios without maps and lidar. Instead, the company said artificial intelligence models can be used to enable cars to navigate from points A to B.

• This makes its system even more cost-competitive on the Chinese market compared with Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, chief executive Xu Lei told reporters in Shanghai. Tesla has reportedly partnered with Baidu to leverage the latter’s lane-level navigation and standard definition mapping services, as part of its push to localize its most advanced driver-assistance software (ADAS) in the country.

Details: Xu told a press conference that his company is advocating a “pure vision” and “end-to-end” approach, as Tesla has been doing and many are following its lead, which involves deep neural networks, using cameras only to perform autonomous driving functions (our translation).

• The car could complete the highway on-ramp to off-ramp maneuver and drive through a construction zone in Chinese urban areas with affordable hardware of 7-11 cameras and a computing platform that can handle roughly 100 trillion operations per second (or TOPS), according to Nullmax.
• Xu expects some car models equipped with the technology to come to market in 2025, without saying more. Nullmax, with roughly 300 scientists and engineers, has been developing more safety-based ADAS functions for domestic automakers SAIC, and Chery, among others, TechNode has learned.
• Cars powered by Nullmax’s tech have traveled a combined 10 million kilometers (6.2 million miles). Xu added more actual driving data is required to provide cars with point-to-point navigation on city streets, while the company is training the ADAS system via simulation with AI-generated data.

Context: Chinese EV startups led by NIO, Xpeng Motors, and Li Auto have been ramping up efforts to transition from “rule-based” designs to an “end-to-end” autonomous driving method. Meanwhile, traditional car manufacturers are tapping into the power of AI by working with tech giants such as Huawei and NVIDIA, as well as startup unicorns like Horizon Robotics and Momenta.

• “What we see in the future is that the (AI-defined) AV stack will become an end-to-end model and will be trained in the cloud with massive data. More importantly, it will be validated in the cloud with simulation capabilities as well,” said Wu Xinzhou, NVIDIA’s vice president of automotive at its annual developer conference GTC in March.
• The US chipmaker in late 2021 released a system called “Omniverse Replicator” to facilitate the training of autonomous vehicles in the virtual world, Reuters reported. Chinese major EV makers, including BYD and NIO, are building their ADAS upon its DRIVE Orin computers, each of which offers 254 TOPS of performance.
• Nullmax was co-founded in 2016 by Xu Lei and Justin Song, both of whom spent time at Tesla. Xu worked on Tesla’s Autopilot computer vision team in 2015 and 2016, after leaving a senior engineering role at Qualcomm, while Song was responsible for engineering the Tesla Autopilot and car infotainment system from 2012 to 2015, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

READ MORE: Former Tesla engineer shares thoughts on end-to-end autonomous driving at WAIC 2024

Editor’s note: ‘Landing AI’ is a series of special reports focusing on the field of Artificial Intelligence curated by TechNode. By investigating the development of AI landing in China and the behind-the-scenes stories of the industry, we’re going to dive deeper into everything that’s possible under the new wave of AI.