I rented a car today and drove from Shanghai back to my hometown in Ningbo. Yesterday I happened to catch that autonomous driving test video by DongCheDi - closed highways, real city traffic conditions, over 30 popular “smart driving” models tested - basically a complete wipeout, with Tesla being the only one that held up. After that episode aired, all the nearby Teslas at rental agencies were booked out, so I ended up with a gas car. Will have to try the Tesla experience next time.
This DongCheDi video came at the perfect time, saving me from any decision paralysis - I’ve already decided that if I’m buying an EV, Tesla it is. As a no-nonsense tech guy, I don’t care about fancy car seats, built-in refrigerators or luxury interiors - I just want to skip the exhaustion of being the driver myself. Killer autonomous driving is the core product value.
I think this show got everyone Excited! They went straight for a closed highway test that immediately exposed all the snake oil in autonomous driving - as they say, let’s see if it’s a mule or a horse by taking it for a ride. And they even brought in CCTV for a joint release, leaving the “far ahead” crowd speechless (“no comment”), which was truly satisfying.
Update: CCTV chickened out and removed the word “joint” from their coverage. https://www.sohu.com/a/917915599_133588
After watching the show, I had only one thought: When will foundational software, especially “domestic databases/operating systems/cloud computing/LLMs”, get an equivalent public evaluation with the same scale and intensity? (Of course, we’d need some institution with backbone to back it up)
The domestic database industry has reached the point where there are too many scammers and not enough suckers to go around. The marketing tactics and promotional strategies of many domestic database vendors are as bad as, if not worse than, these “smart driving” cars. They talk a big game but what they’re actually doing is shady stuff - castrating open source projects and negative optimizations.
When will the localization/domestic database/operating system/LLM space (or cloud computing) get a “DongCheDi demolishes autonomous driving” style show that drags all these charlatans and big talkers out for a real test run to see what they’re really made of?
Of course, these things need the right timing: autonomous driving’s false advertising has caused many accidents and deaths, triggering this show to put the brakes on these malpractices. Perhaps the foundational software Great Leap Forward will also need a few nationwide catastrophic failures like autonomous driving before triggering a real reckoning.
But if we could set up a “closed highway” comprehensive evaluation for databases, clearly defining the boundaries of “functional/usable/good/production-ready”, maybe we could avoid paying the price of real production disasters.
Of course, this is just a rough idea from me. Maybe when I have time I can think about whether to give it a shot. Maybe not just domestic databases, but cloud computing too, haha…
Image prompt: Please draw a Ghibli-style illustration for this article, aspect ratio 3:2, on a highway, a Tesla Cybertruck crashes through a group of Chinese domestic electric vehicles, parts flying everywhere, spectacular flames, and drives away triumphantly.