In April 2019, at the "Fifth International Automotive Key Technology Forum", Xu Zhijun, Huawei's rotating chairman, delivered a speech on "Welcoming the Integration of the Automotive Industry and the ICT Industry", and clearly stated that "Huawei does not build cars, (but) focuses on ICT technology to help car companies build good cars, and Huawei is committed to becoming an incremental component supplier for intelligent and connected vehicles." ”
At the Huawei Winter Flagship New Product Conference on December 23, 2021, in addition to releasing the Folding Screen Mobile Phone Huawei P50Pocket, which still can only use 4G chips - "Huawei P50 Treasure Box", Yu Chengdong, Managing Director of Huawei, CEO of Consumer Business, and CEO of Smart Car Solution BU, spent more than an hour at the conference to highlight the AITO M5 smart car, which it called "intelligent terminal with wheels". The crappy name ATIO is actually an abbreviation for Adding Intelligence to Auto.
AITO is not manufactured by Huawei, it is affiliated with the smart electric vehicle brand Xilis, positioned at the high end. The strange Cerris is the electric vehicle brand under Dongfeng Xiaokang.
When it comes to Dongfeng Xiaokang, the image of the car presented in everyone's mind is generally like this:
As a brand with a status comparable to Wuling in trucks and vans, Xiaokang has always appeared in the eyes of the public with a thick and honest image, and the image of fashionable fashionable electric vehicles cannot be beaten. In the first four months of 2021, Dongfeng Xiaokang ranked second in the domestic mini truck market share, second only to Wuling, and is a well-deserved national truck brand in the delivery industry.
With the rapid development of the domestic electric vehicle market, Xiaokang Automobile seems to see the opportunity to turn itself around, and founded the Celis brand around 2016 and 17, specializing in intelligent electric vehicle manufacturing, and wants to compete with Tesla and Wei Xiaoli. Of course, Xiaokang's electric vehicles are not self-made, and their strength lies in their strong teammates - Huawei, who just wants to enter the field of intelligent electric vehicles, an all-round big man in the ICT industry.
Huawei, which does not build cars this time, uses Huawei's full set of intelligent electric vehicle related technologies to arm AITO to the teeth. Let's take a look at what technologies Huawei has injected into AITO.
1. The operating system is Huawei's Hongmeng intelligent cockpit. Hongmeng operating system is currently the underlying operating system of Huawei's full range of mobile phones, tablets, and smart home appliances, and the use of Hongmeng's AITO can be linked with all Huawei intelligent devices that are also equipped with Hongmeng.
That is to say, in AITO, the smart home in the home can be controlled through a large screen or intelligent voice assistant, and AITO can also be controlled by Huawei mobile phones or smart bracelets to unlock and close locks, power and oil volume display, trunk remote control opening and other functions.
Therefore, AITO has completely turned itself into a mobile Hongmeng console by embedding itself in Huawei Hongmeng.
2. The electric drive system uses Huawei's DriveONE. The electric drive system of electric vehicles is similar to the gearbox and engine of fuel vehicles, which is the core device that provides power to electric vehicles, and its basic principle is to convert the energy of the power battery into the kinetic energy of the wheels through the electric motor and controller.
In addition to ensuring the normal operation of the vehicle, the electric drive system of the electric vehicle is the core factor that determines the acceleration ability of the car's mileage and the maximum speed per hour.
Therefore, for electric vehicles, the electric drive system is crucial and can be regarded as the heart of electric vehicles. It is precisely because of the criticality of the electric drive system for electric vehicles, the electric drive system has high technical requirements and strong speciality, the vehicle factory is very strict about the certification of the electric drive system, and the third-party enterprises with long-term research and development experience and good reputation can enter the supply system after certification, and some electric vehicle companies with strong research and development capabilities generally choose self-developed electric drive systems directly.
As an ICT company with no prior experience in the automotive market, Huawei has been able to develop an electric drive system to enter the commercial market, which is really rare.
3. The car audio is Huawei's HUAWEI SOUND. Unlike most car companies that choose to cooperate with top audio brands, AITO even uses Huawei's own products for the audio system.
Huawei has not been in the audio field for a long time, in fact, it does not have any accumulation in the early stage of the audio field, so Huawei combines its advantages in the field of algorithms and electronics (audio itself is a set of electronic systems) + joint design and tuning with the French high-end audio brand DEVIALET, with the same routine as the mobile phone imaging system that was originally cooperated with Leica, starting to face the high-end market.
And this time Huawei simply made its own audio system in the car, to know that the car audio system is one of the configurations that users, especially high-end users care about the most, which is enough to see how confident Huawei is.
4. The charging system uses Huawei's SuperCharge. HUAWEI SuperCharge is a super fast charging technology developed by Huawei, which supports up to 66W wired fast charging and 50W wireless fast charging. This time, AITO integrates Huawei's super fast charge directly into the car, which is more like creating a mobile living room for the Huawei ecosystem.
5, even the charging pile is Huawei's. AITO provides users with HUAWEI home charging pile, supporting 7KW fast charging, 45 minutes can make the power from 20% to 80%, and slow charging can make the power from 20% to 80% in 5 hours.
Although it is standing in front of the stage in the image of AITO, a high-end electric vehicle brand owned by Xiaokang Automobile Ciris, after watching Yu Chengdong's conference, people will have a feeling that this is a completely Huawei car.
Whether it is Huawei's hard work of publicity, or the car is equipped with almost all of Huawei's intelligent electric vehicle related core software and hardware systems, AITO has filled its own HUAWEI logo, and Yu Chengdong claims that it brings together Huawei's industrial design, engineering technology, system software and Hongmeng ecological advantages. If this is not a car made by Huawei, it can only be said that Huawei has redefined Huawei manufacturing.
And Yu Chengdong is also full of expectations for AITO, and his praise for AITU is even a bit drifting: he describes that AITO, which has a maximum of 320,000, has a "Million Luxury Car-level Experience", benchmarks a variety of luxury SUVs including Porsche Macan, Mercedes-Benz GLC, Audi Q5L and so on, and believes that AITU's performance crushes all fuel vehicles, and also exceeds many electric vehicles.
However, the capital market does not seem to think so, and it is not optimistic about the sales of AITO. AITO's parent company Xiaokang fell for two consecutive stops after the AITO conference, and the market value evaporated by 17.6 billion. Perhaps even the capital market feels that the emergence of AITO has made the sense of existence of the well-off disappear.
However, no matter how much AITO actually performs and how many units can be sold, the AITO that Huawei has painstakingly created this time does make people see the real strength of Huawei in the field of smart electric vehicles that only stayed at the PPT level before.
At present, Huawei, which still has not solved the problem of mobile phone chips, may only be able to fight to the death on the next generation of smart electric vehicles.