[Introduction: At the end of the year, when the old and the new alternate, China and the United States, which have been in love and killing each other, have gained a beautiful marriage in the automotive field. Geely's electric vehicle brand Extreme Kr has reached a cooperation with waymo, a world-renowned unmanned driving technology company in the United States, and Geely's 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. 】
Written| by Zhang Chi and edited by | Kang Qiao
Extreme Krypton, once announced to the public that it hopes to increase its annual sales to 650,000 units in 2025, and reach the top three in the global market share of high-end electric vehicles. To achieve such sales results, there is still a lot of pressure to rely solely on C-end consumers. But if we can actively explore the mobility market, the pressure to achieve this goal is much less. The new car, operated by the Extreme Krypton European Innovation Center (CEVT), can not only be supplied to the Waymo One driverless fleet, but also can be put into Cao Cao Travel's umbrella to compete in the domestic mobility market.
A preview for entering the mobility market
If you carefully analyze the car that JiKr manufactures for Waymo, it can be found that whether it is from the vehicle platform or from the design of the body interior and exterior, it is a preview for entering the mobility market in the future.
In terms of the most critical driverless mobility, the SEA-M architecture is the latest evolution of the SEA-M architecture for the era of unmanned driving, creating a layout suitable for the trinity of the intelligent electric era. This architecture fully takes into account the installation of driverless-related sensors in the later stage, and plans in advance at the hardware level, even if The krypton does not use Waymo Drive's technical solutions in the future, it can also use its own driverless solutions. In addition, in addition to the driverless solution, it also plans a manned driving solution, which means that when the driverless /Robotaxi is immature, this model can also quickly enter the current traditional mobile travel market, directly and Didi D1 models PK. But from the appearance and positioning point of view, the extreme krypton model will be much higher than the Didi D1.
In terms of interior and exterior design, this car will not only have a flexible seat layout, but also make the head and leg space more spacious due to the cancellation of the B-pillar design, combined with low-stepping boarding and flat floor shape, etc., which will make it more convenient for passengers to get on and off the car. It is believed that with the official launch of this model in the future, there will be many designs focused on mobile travel. After all, Geely's Cao Cao Travel has accumulated massive data to support the design.
Geely and Waymo Rio Tinto have their respective circles of friends
As an autonomous driving technology company invested by Google's parent company, Waymo is relatively technologically advanced, but it has not been able to promote the commercialization of products, and these have shown certain disadvantages compared with other OEMs/parts companies that run in small steps and continue to iteratively update the model. To this end, Waymo has changed management this year and has accelerated the pace of demonstration operations of its fleet. Through operations similar to Robotaxi, on the one hand, it can show its actual capabilities to investors and lay the foundation for subsequent continuous financing; on the other hand, it can also accumulate more practical operational experience and data to continuously optimize its own driverless solutions.
Therefore, Waymo is also actively expanding its circle of friends and getting more low-cost prototypes in order to install its own self-driving kit in the future. In fact, before cooperating with Extreme Kr, Waymo has already reached a cooperation with Volvo, which is a kind of connection with Geely Group. But since the official announcement, we have not seen much substantive cooperation between Waymo and Volvo. However, this cooperation with Extreme Kr will directly purchase the Extreme Krypton model developed by CEVT for its own driverless demonstration fleet, which will become a landmark event. In addition to the Geely Group, Waymo has established similar collaborations with Stellantis, Jaguar Land Rover, Daimler and Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi. As autonomous driving technology gradually lands, Waymo also needs to prove its capabilities, and the new SEA Haohan architecture is one of waymo's best platforms to build a new generation of driverless vehicles. From another point of view, outside of Robotaxi's business, selling complete solutions for autonomous driving for OEMs should also be one of Waymo's main sources of profit in the future.
Welcome the era of overseas market 3.0
Chinese cars going out has always been a hot topic of discussion among all parties. Unlike SAIC, Great Wall, Chery, etc., which focus on vehicle exports, Geely's focus is more on the output of technical capabilities.
If the domestic automobile conquest of overseas markets in the 1.0 era, mainly to the overseas market export of vehicles; the 2.0 era is to build factories overseas, through localization production to increase sales; as for the 3.0 era, it is to complete the export of technology and even system capabilities. Previously, geely, through Proton, has introduced Boyue models and subsequent leading technologies into it, helping Proton to re-emerge in Malaysia and even the entire ASEAN market. On the Smart brand, Geely completely took over the engineering development and led the overall operation of the Mercedes-Benz brand.
In particular, it is worth mentioning that as a new generation of electric vehicle platform built by Geely, the first model of THE SEA Haohan Architecture unveiled in China, the Extreme Krypton 001, was also high in China and was sought after by many consumers. In addition to Geely's own use, Jidu, a joint venture with Baidu, Mercedes-Benz's Smart brand, and Volvo, have all reported news that they will use the SEA architecture. Now Waymo has also chosen SEA-M derived from the SEA architecture as a platform for driverless fleet vehicles, which has further expanded the territory of SEA. From the R&D level, the continuous increase in production can undoubtedly dilute the previous large R&D costs to the greatest extent and exert great synergies. But for Geely, its continued global reach is even more surprising than the increasing number of customers.
Comments
Geely and Waymo have reached a cooperation to not only expand Geely's circle of friends, but also continue to increase the number of customers of THE SEA Haohan architecture. At the same time, Waymo adopts the Extreme Krypton model, which is also of great benefit to the Extreme Krypton brand in the future expansion of overseas markets. More critically, if Extreme Kr can enter the global high-end mobility market through Waymo, it will be beneficial to Extreme Krypton in terms of sales volume and brand awareness.
(This article is the original of "Heyan Reading Car", without authorization, it may not be reproduced)