In the autumn of 2016, on a rainy night at the Chenghu Smart Car Future Challenge, an unmanned racing car without a name rushed off the track. Lu Zhixing, a control algorithm engineer, squatted beside the car and figured it out for the first time - to make the car turn on its own, it was not about writing a piece of code, but about taking the steering wheel from the person's hand, millimeter by millimeter.
From the tracking car of the Intelligent Car Club of North China Institute of Mechanical Engineering, to the unnamed test car at Nanling Automotive Research Institute; from soldering the first capacitor to the motherboard, to the closed-loop data of 100 million kilometers on the mass-produced car - it took him ten years to write the six words "hands off the steering wheel" into lines of verifiable code. In the past ten years, he has lost races, lost money, been pointed at by old engineers and scolded for not knowing how to drive, and also met the Japanese translator who spoke a fair word for him at the judging meeting.
Waiting for the day when the car really turned on its own, he understood the words on the track pad next to the instructor's door: first learn to let go, and then you can hold the direction.
The ten years of a control algorithm engineer are a journey for China's intelligent driving from the competition arena to mass production. To everyone who has ever put their hands on a steering wheel and decided to hand it over.
