Header image source | Euler official
Because of the staged "stealing beams for pillars", Euler was recently pushed to the cusp of public opinion.
As a brand under the Great Wall, Euler has always regarded itself as a "car brand that loves women more" and successfully occupied the champion position in the market segment. However, in early November, a Ms. Zhou in Shanghai, after buying an Euler good cat, found that the central processing chip on the car was an Intel A3940 quad-core processor chip, not the Qualcomm SA8155 octa-core chip that the official had previously claimed.
This made her unable to accept the original Qualcomm 8-core car chip, and what caused the uproar was undoubtedly the operation of the brand side to "steal the chip".
A stone stirred up a thousand waves, and this discovery quickly attracted the attention of other car owners. In the following month, on the "Car Quality Network", a platform for collecting information on defective automotive products, the complaints about euler's car machine chip discrepancies with propaganda topped the list with 557. On December 6 and December 7, CCTV Finance and Economics continuously reported that Euler Automobile concealed consumers from secretly changing the core and reducing the allocation.
After Euler issued several statements, on December 9, Great Wall Motors gave a solution on this matter: before December 31, 2021, the owner of the Euler Good Cat model was ordered to give away a 7200 yuan "Like a Tiger" rights package. At the same time, the owners of the pre-car and the next order on the date of this announcement will enjoy the blessing rights.
Source: Screenshot of the relevant complaint platform
However, the solution of apologizing, investigating, and sending rights and interests is not accepted by car owners. Ma Yue, the owner of the Euler good cat, told Future Auto Daily that most car owners do not recognize the official solution. "This involves false publicity, and the main demand of car owners is to recall and replace the latest chips." Some car owners even put forward the demand for "apology, compensation, refund".
Future Auto Daily contacted Great Wall Motor Euler, and the relevant person in charge said, "The incident is being handled, and no more replies will be made before the results come out." ”
The performance of the two chips is very different
After seeing the news that the chip was stolen on the Internet, Ma Yue felt relieved, and she finally found the reason why the intelligent system of her car was frequently "out of state".
Prior to this, the car's intelligent interaction system experience often made her feel overwhelmed, "Xiaoou voice function often can not wake up, wake up and then randomly execute commands, the fault tolerance rate is extremely high, the car machine is often not even connected to the Internet and can not move the line." She had to send the car to the after-sales service, but checked it several times and the problem never solved.
The reason is that Euler's good cat's intelligent system will behave like this, which is directly related to the Intel A3940 chip it is equipped with.
From the most intuitive product data, the Intel A3940 chip was released in October 2016, the overall use of 14nm process, cpu with 4 core design, GPU using Intel HD graphics 500, computing power of 187GFLOPS.
The Qualcomm 8155 chip previously announced by Euler Good Cat is the world's first mass-produced 7nm process car machine chip, and the AI computing power of the entire chip can reach 8TOPS, using an 8-core design, and the GPU computing power can reach 1000GFLOPS.
A chip practitioner told Future Automotive Daily that the 8155 chip, as the world's first 7nm smart cockpit chip, is one of the most powerful cockpit SOC chips that can be selected for mass production vehicles, "equivalent to the performance of mobile phone flagships." The Intel A3940 chip is relatively old, the technology is relatively backward, and it is difficult to be compatible with some mainstream applications on the market. ”
The above-mentioned person further introduced that the disparity in performance means that the response speed and function of the entire system will vary greatly. In addition, because of the X86 architecture, the A3940 chip cannot use a large number of Android car applications, and it is far inferior to the Qualcomm 8155 chip with arm architecture in terms of application ecology, which can run the Android system, which also means that its App variety is more abundant.
Source: Euler official
When the truth that led to performance defects surfaced, car owners also turned into rights defenders and began to play games with brands.
Euler also responded to the matter four times. However, to the disappointment of the owners, the official attitude from the beginning of the tough, to the follow-up "word game", eventually led to the contradiction between the user and Euler was intensified step by step.
In multiple responses, Euler stressed, "The Qualcomm chip refers to the communication module MM9628. ”;“ The Euler good cat model currently on sale, the car machine has indeed not been equipped with Qualcomm 8-core chips. In the plan, this configuration was originally intended to be installed on future models. ”
In the fourth response, Euler reiterated, "The intelligent service processing platform shown in the parameter configuration table includes a decentralized independent control architecture for Qualcomm, Intel, Renesas, and many other chips." Among them, the Qualcomm chip in the parameter configuration table is the chip used in the remote control module. ”
At the same time, Euler tried to calm the anger by providing compensation services to car owners. However, whether it is to upgrade the gift package, upgrade the lifetime warranty of Sandian to the lifetime warranty of the whole vehicle, or give the first owner of the car a charging right of 10,000 yuan, in the eyes of the car advocate, "Euler is evading responsibility." ”
She told Future Automotive Daily that her ultimate appeal is to solve the problem of on-board system caton caused by the core change. In its view, although the official has given various solutions, they cannot fundamentally solve the problem of car owners. "The system is not well repaired, what is the use of me wanting two years of free traffic?"
Can the chip still be replaced?
As the Qualcomm 8155 chip with the most outstanding performance and technology on the market, since last year, whether it is the GAC Aean LX, Geely Xingyue L, Great Wall WEY Mocha, WM W6 and other models that have been released and listed, or the upcoming Weilai ET7, Zhiji L7, independent brands have almost without exception set their sights on the chip.
When the lack of cores becomes more and more intense, Euler's "core replacement" staged this time can not help but make people speculate whether they are trapped by chip shortages.
In October this year, the sales of The Star Yue L were only 4,092 units, and Geely Automobile once explained that due to the impact of the epidemic in some areas, coupled with the shortage of chips such as 8155 for the first time of the model, sales were less than expected.
But in fact, although this strongest cockpit chip is highly sought after by car companies, it does not seem to be out of stock.
On November 10, the relevant person in charge of Qualcomm's marketing department said that the shortage of Qualcomm 8155 chips was a misreading, and stressed that Qualcomm 8155 was not out of stock.
Previously, Meng Zhu, chairman of Qualcomm China, said, "Since the end of last year, the global semiconductor industry has faced the problem of tight chip supply, but Qualcomm's automotive chip supply has not been affected too much, and Qualcomm has not affected the manufacturing plans of any car manufacturer." The relevant person in charge of WM Automobile told Future Auto Daily that the chip supply of WM W6 is also in a normal state.
Li Jian, who is engaged in research and development in traditional car companies, believes that the performance specifications of the two chips are very different, and the research and development process of software and control systems is also different. "Maybe Euler Good Cat did not intend to use Qualcomm 8155 chips in the early stage, and then loaded it into the car with the later mid-term redesign."
Nowadays, the core change event is still fermenting, and how to give a satisfactory solution to consumers has also become a test that Euler must face.
In March last year, Tesla was exposed to the problem of "chip reduction" because of supply chain problems, and it mixed the autopilot chips H2.5 and H3.0 on the domestic Tesla MODEL 3, and finally tesla gave the solution is to replace all H2.5 chips with H3.0 for free with the recovery of the supply chain.
Some insiders told Future Auto Daily that if the centralized recall of Euler good cat products, replacing qualcomm 8155 chips for them will be a big project. "Tesla is a self-developed chip, and if it is upgraded, it only needs to make small changes to the vehicle." However, the gap between the two chips before and after Euler is too large, and if the Intel A3940 chip is upgraded to a Qualcomm 8155 chip, the vehicle system and the chip will need to be rematched. ”
On the one hand, there is a crumbling market reputation, and on the other hand, there is a huge remediation project. Between the two dilemmas, Euler is bound to make a choice.
The author | Su Peng
Edit the | Wang Yan