In 2021, the driverless commercial track presses the acceleration button.
On December 29, Geely Holding Group announced that it has reached a cooperation with Waymo, a world-renowned driverless technology company: its high-end intelligent electric brand Extreme Kr will provide exclusive vehicles for the Waymo One driverless fleet and put it into commercial operation in the United States. The model is based on the KR intelligent mobility platform SEA-M (SEA-M) architecture, designed and developed by the Krypton European Innovation Center (CEVT).
Shortly before that, Waymo had just completed a $2.5 billion financing, which was a critical period for its driverless commercial landing, and An Conghui, CEO of Extreme Kr Intelligent Technology, said: "This time, Extreme Kr and Waymo have become strategic partners to jointly develop driverless exclusive vehicles for the Waymo One fleet, which fully proves the technical research and development strength and commercial expansion potential of Extreme Kr. ”
In terms of Extreme Kr, relying on Geely's scientific and technological ecology, Extreme Kr is committed to the research and development and layout of forward-looking technologies, and has a strong technical reserve, and the cooperation with the unmanned "first brother" Waymo is also opportune.
Complementary advantages, coordinated development, under the common goal of unmanned commercial landing, Extreme Kr and Waymo cooperation reached.
1. The joint layout in the critical period, the strength of extreme kr technology research and development has been affirmed
With a new round of industrial revolution and scientific and technological revolution, the automobile industry has also undergone changes, the automobile is moving to electrification, networking, intelligence and sharing of the "new four modernizations" transformation, the boundaries of the automobile industry have been subverted, online, offline highly integrated "super intelligent mobile terminal" has become the main direction of automobile development.
Extreme Kr is an important part of Geely's layout of intelligent travel. As a high-end intelligent electric brand under Geely, JiKr focuses on the intelligent electric travel ecology, from the forward-looking layout of intelligent technology, to the cooperation and integration of the industrial chain, to the comprehensive insight of future travel consumption, that is, the integration of industrial ecology and user ecology, and also to expand the industry boundaries with user thinking and co-creation concepts, and accelerate the global layout with the original Krypton model.
Therefore, under the need to build an ecological system, When choosing an ecological partner, Extreme Kr pays more attention to the ecological advantages created by the ecological partners in their respective fields, as well as the imaginary space co-created with Extreme Kr, which is refined into the field of unmanned driving, and needs a determined pioneer.
When it comes to driverless driving, Waymo is an unavoidable company, Waymo was first a driverless car program launched by Google in 2009, and in December 2016, it was independent of Google and became a subsidiary of Alphabet.
In 2018, Waymo CEO John Krafcik released an internal letter announcing the official commercialization of driverless services, and Waymo One became the first commercial ride-hailing service to serve passengers. As soon as this matter was released, it caused shock in the industry and was called a moment of witnessing history.
But the reality is that the thunder and rain are small, and the Waymo One at that time did not achieve true driverlessness, but equipped each car with a safety driver, and was repeatedly stormed with safety accidents during the experience. Since then, the driverless market has calmed down, but Waymo One still insists on the research and development of driverless cars.
Last October, the Waymo One commercial project was restarted again, and Waymo One removed the safety driver and finally opened to the public. In June this year, Waymo completed its second financing, raising $2.5 billion, which is enough to see its strength and determination to accelerate the commercialization of driverless vehicles. Waymo chose to cooperate with Extreme Kr at this time, which also proved its optimism about the research and development strength of Extreme Kr technology from the side.
2. Haohan-M architecture: The first intelligent mobility architecture developed for unmanned driving scenarios
In the field of unmanned driving, architecture is a key element, which directly determines the stability and reliability of subsequent systems, and the cooperation between Waymo and Extreme Krypton is also the ability of the Extreme Krypton-Vast-M architecture.
How to build a comprehensive and diversified intelligent architecture has always been a difficult problem in the field of unmanned driving, geely has invested a lot of money in recent years to focus on the construction of intelligent architecture, and has also achieved certain results.
At present, Geely has four intelligent architectures for different models in different scenarios, BMA, CMA, SPA and SEA. Among them, the SEA Haohan architecture is specially built for pure electric models. Unlike the hardware-based traditional car-making, with technological innovation, the era of software-defined cars has arrived. The architecture is the result of Geely's five years of research and development, with an investment of more than 20 billion yuan, with the world's largest bandwidth and the world's most efficient intelligent electric vehicle solution, which can shorten the development cycle of vehicle software by 50% and quickly respond to user needs.
At present, there are more than 8 brands cooperating with SEA Haohan Architecture, and more than 16 models have been developed, and the luxury hunting coupe ZEEKR 001 is the first product based on SEA Haohan architecture, which has excellent performance in terms of space, performance, handling and intelligent driver assistance.
The latest Vast-M architecture is the latest evolution of THE SEA Vast architecture for the driverless era, and M stands for Modular Mobility Architecture. Based on the technology and experience accumulation of SEA Haohan architecture, the architecture aims at the market trends and needs of the driverless era, breaks through the limitations of traditional car manufacturing, and is committed to building a sustainable and extended mobility service system in the driverless era through the integration of the hardware layer + system layer + ecological layer. The Vast-M architecture is designed and developed by the Krypton European Innovation Centre (CEVT) and is open to global ecosystem partners.
It is reported that the Haohan-M architecture is the world's first intelligent mobility platform developed for unmanned driving scenarios. From the vast SEA architecture for the era of intelligent electric power to the vast-M architecture for the era of unmanned driving, the technical accumulation and capabilities of Extreme Kr are extremely forward-looking, which is also not available to new forces at present. It is not difficult to imagine that through the pilot commercialization pilot of the first cooperation with Waymo, the Haohan-M architecture can also feed back into the passenger car market in the future, thereby enhancing the competitiveness of the krypton brand industry. From this point of view, it is also a forward-looking performance of the Krypton brand for future business thinking.
Regardless of the shape and function, the design of Haohan-M considers to be different from traditional car building, but at the same time, as always, it follows the user's thinking, adopts the design concept of passenger-centered, pays more attention to passenger preferences, and highlights the comfort and convenience of the ride experience.
In terms of cockpit design, it can support two types of driving control mechanism and no driver control mechanism and a variety of seat layouts. In terms of appearance, the capsule design is adopted, the floor height from the ground is only 370mm, which has the characteristics of low stepping on the car and flat floor shape, while the B-pillar design adopts the door opening design; the A-pillar area is a straight-line design, and the passengers entering and leaving the car are not easily affected by the tilt angle of the A-pillar. Create ample head and legroom for passengers for a more convenient boarding and disembarking experience.
According to the plan, after the delivery of the model, it will be equipped with Waymo Driver's unmanned driving solution.
3. Geely's ecological layout of the whole industry chain boosts the intelligent transformation of intelligent vehicles
In the automotive industry chain, Geely as a veteran car company has its ecological advantages, in the past two years, with the development of intelligence, Geely is also creating its own world-wide integration of intelligent three-dimensional travel technology ecosystem, from new energy technology, The Internet of Vehicles, autonomous driving, low-orbit satellites, on-board chips, operating systems, mobile phones and other business layout of the entire industrial chain, these "joints" will become the help of smart cars in the future.
In the field of smart cars, autonomous driving with broad prospects is the focus of the direction. Despite the heavy task and high investment, Geely did not give up this fertile land, Geely said that it is necessary to achieve full-stack self-development in the core technology fields such as intelligent energy, automatic driving, intelligent networking, and intelligent cockpit, and to "build the best, safest and most responsible" autonomous vehicles. It is planned to commercialize L4 level autonomous driving by 2025 and fully master L5 level autonomous driving.
At present, Geely's autonomous driving research and development has achieved certain results, in 2020, Extreme Kr and Mobileye cooperated, ZEEKR 001 became the world's first model equipped with Mobileye SuperVision system, using the latest system integration chip (SoC) EyeQ5, to provide consumers with a higher level of driving assistance system. In 2021, Geely will establish a global R&D center for intelligent driving in Suzhou. In 2022, Geely will serve as the official automobile service partner of the 19th Hangzhou Asian Games, and jointly help the Hangzhou Asian Games with various technologies such as automatic driving, environmental protection power, and intelligent networking, and at the same time highlight the high-level event reception and manufacturing level with L4-level autonomous driving demonstration vehicles and related series of new models.
With the improvement of the integrated technology ecology, Geely's technology moat will become more and more stable, and its brands will rely on this ecology for development in the future. It is reported that in the next three years, Kr will launch 6 new models; by 2025, Kr will rank among the top three in the world in the market share of high-end electric vehicles, with sales of 650,000 vehicles.
Text/Liu Chang Editor Song Yuting Proofreader Chen Diyan