Compared with CES 2022, which is in full swing in the United States, the domestic new energy vehicle circle at the beginning of the new year is somewhat uneventful.
In addition to the "routine" announcement of 2021 sales results by domestic manufacturers during the New Year's Day, there seems to be nothing that can really make people shine with new cars and new technologies.
I don't know if you remember, at the beginning of 2021, what was the hottest topic in the industry?
By the way, it is "electric car range of 1000 km".
At that time, at the 2020 NIO DAY, Weilai took out the first pure electric car ET7. In addition to lidar, thousands of TOPS super computing power and other new technologies that are too advanced, the most stirring of the actual consumer's heart of this new car is still the 1000 km long endurance supported by a 150 kWh battery pack.
Subsequently, the topic of "electric vehicle range of 1000 kilometers" continued to be hot, and many manufacturers followed up, announcing that they were developing electric vehicles with a range of 1000 kilometers.
The climax of the topic was triggered by the following promotional poster released by GAC Aean.
"8 minutes full of 80%", "NEDS range 1000 kilometers do not have to wait until next year" and other explosive slogans instantly ignited public opinion, and the stock price of GAC Group rose sharply.
Immediately after, a war of words between the big guys followed:
First of all, at the Forum of the China Electric Vehicle Hundred, Ouyang Ming, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and vice chairman of the China Electric Vehicle Hundred Association, said highly: "If someone tells you, this car can run 1000 kilometers, can be fully charged in a few minutes, and it is safe and the cost is very low." With current technology, he must be a liar."
Subsequently, Gu Huinan, general manager of GAC Aean, replied at the same forum: "This year (2021) 1,000 km of endurance cars will definitely come out, fast charging is also bound to come out, 8 minutes full of 1,000 km, theoretically it is possible."
More than a year has passed, and the past disputes have gradually been forgotten by people. However, I believe that there are many people who have the same melon mentality as me, and want to see whether the cake painted by GAC Aean, "1000 km endurance electric vehicle in 2021 will definitely come out", can be cooked.
Although it has not caught up with the last month of 2021, it seems that GAC has fulfilled its promise.
No, just yesterday, the GAC AION LX Plus, which has a maximum clinging range of 1008 kilometers, was really on the market.
Thousand mile range, expensive
Friends who are familiar with GAC Aean must have the impression that this is a company with some "radical" technical paths and marketing methods - a few years ago, when battery technology was not as safe as it is today, and the battery life of electric vehicles generally did not reach 500 kilometers, AION S was the first to try the "crab" of the 811 battery, with a nominal endurance of more than 600 kilometers.
Later, a series of negative events such as virtual endurance, spontaneous combustion, and power locking were also continuously exposed around this model.
And if you watched the conference of the AION LX Plus last night, I believe that you will inevitably sigh in your heart: "GAC Aean, or the GAC Eian who liked to operate in the past."
Whether it is using a virtual image as the host of the online conference, daring to advertise itself as the "world's first meta-universe cloud conference", or a variety of dazzling "black technology" words, it makes people have the illusion of "greatly shocked, but..."
Even, the model information revealed at the press conference also showed some obvious hard injuries. For example, the acceleration time of the vehicle from 100 km to 100 has been emphasized many times by the authorities, which is 2.9 seconds.
But whether it is in the data sheet for the media or in the official website of GAC Aeon, the fastest acceleration of the AION LX Plus is 3.9 seconds...
Far from it, let's get back to the point. If a consumer is really "very anxious" about the endurance of an electric vehicle and wants to buy a pure electric vehicle with a range of 1000 kilometers, how much does it cost?
THE ANSWER GIVEN BY GAC AEAN WITH AION LX Plus: RMB 459,600.
AION LX Plus has a total of 80 Zhizun Edition, 80D Ultimate Edition, 80D Max Edition and Qianli Edition, with prices of 286,600 (after subsidies), 329,600, 409,600 and 459,600 yuan respectively.
It is worth mentioning that unlike the common electric vehicle top-mounted models that are four-wheel drive dual-motor versions, the AION LX Plus entry-level version and the most expensive 100-mile version are single-motor two-wheel drive models with an acceleration time of 7.8 seconds; the two models in the middle price segment are dual-motor four-wheel drive, with faster acceleration of zero hundred kilometers, reaching 3.9 seconds, at the cost of CLTC's working life of only 600 kilometers.
In addition to using a single motor and sacrificing performance for endurance, the most effective means of increasing the mileage of electric vehicles is still to install a battery with greater energy.
This is evident in the AION LX Plus 1000 Mile Edition, which has a staggering 144.4 kWh of power battery capacity, which is probably the main reason why it is so expensive.
Of course, the ridicule is ridiculed, and the power battery on the AION LX Plus Thousand Mile Edition is ultimately a condensation of the wisdom and painstaking efforts of GAC Aean engineers - sponge silicon anode chip battery technology.
In order to have a longer battery, install a larger battery on the electric vehicle, which sounds easy, but it is actually very difficult to do. Under the same volume, it is not only necessary to increase the energy density of the battery, but also to consider the impact of the battery pack on the battery life after the battery capacity is increased.
Previously, in order to improve the energy density of the battery, manufacturers generally made efforts on the cathode material of the battery. Taking ternary lithium as an example, the proportion of ni nickel element linked to energy is increased in ternary lithium cathode materials. 8 of the 811 batteries refers to nickel, which accounts for more than 80%.
However, although the nickel element in the positive electrode can bring more energy to the battery, it will also cause the positive electrode structure to be unstable, and the root cause of the 811 battery's easy fire is this.
In addition to increasing the nickel content of the positive electrode to increase the total energy of the battery, another technical path is to increase the energy density of the negative electrode, so that the negative electrode material can "store" more lithium ions to increase the energy of the battery.
At present, basically all lithium battery anode materials are graphite, that is, carbon. However, the energy that this anode material can hold has encountered a bottleneck, and the industry is generally trying to replace it with a silicon anode material that can store more energy.
The lithium ion capacity of the silicon anode material can theoretically reach more than 10 times that of graphite, that is to say, the same battery, using silicon as the negative electrode, the energy can exceed the graphite battery by 10 times.
However, silicon materials as electrode materials have a fatal injury, that is, the expansion rate. Graphite does not expand more than 10% during the battery charge and discharge cycle, while silicon can expand by up to 360%, which is not safe to think.
GAC's self-developed sponge silicon anode chip technology, to be precise, is a reasonable ratio of carbon and silicon in the negative electrode of the battery, so that it can not only have the advantages of high capacity of silicon anode, but also restrain the expansion of silicon through the stability of graphite.
This technology covers the fields of materials, binders, pole pieces to manufacturing, including "nanocomposite silicon technology", "self-healing adhesive technology", "gradient composite coating technology" and other technologies.
These technologies can make the silicon anode inside the battery soft and elastic like a sponge, so that the expansion and contraction of the silicon during the charge and discharge process is limited and buffered, and will not break. At the same time, it can also absorb water like a sponge, so that the silicon anode can exert the advantages of large capacity and store more energy.
Based on this technology, the AION LX Plus 1000 Mile Edition carries a power battery with an energy density of more than 205 watt hours / kg. Under the same power situation, the power battery cell has been reduced by 20% in size and 14% in weight.
All of this ultimately supports CLTC's 1008 km endurance performance.
The question is, technology is indeed ahead of its time, but in the face of a price of 450,000+ dollars, how many consumers will really pay for a thousand kilometers of battery life?
Thousand miles and wisdom can not be combined?
With a range of 1,000 kilometers, it's not the only highlight on the AION LX Plus. At the press conference, the official repeatedly emphasized that the positioning of AION LX Plus is "Zhixing Thousand Miles".
With a thousand mile endurance, how does "Zhixing" manifest it?
The answer is not unexpected – lidar.
However, in the relevant introduction, GAC Aeon still played a lot of word games. Here, let's talk about the highlights first, and then talk about the slot points.
Specifically, the AION LX Plus body is equipped with 35 high-performance sensors, including 6 mmWave radar, 12 ultrasonic radars, 8 autopilot HD cameras, 4 surround view cameras, 2 independent high-precision positioning modules and 3 second-generation intelligent zoom lidar.
Among them, the most eye-catching lidar, one is arranged on the roof, and the other two are installed on the front wheel brow tops on both sides of the body, which can achieve cross coverage detection of the 300 ° field of view in front of the car, and the longest detection distance reaches 250 meters.
In the urban congestion scene, this lidar environmental perception refresh rate can be dynamically adjusted from 10 to 30Hz, the detection frequency of milliseconds, and can quickly identify unexpected situations such as plugs and ghost probes; in high-speed scenarios, it can realize intelligent regulation with vertical resolution between 0.2 and 0.05 °, accurately capture long-distance cone barrels, bumpy pavements, etc., predict risks at ultra-long distances, and slow down and change lanes in advance.
In addition to these sensor hardware, GAC AE has also equipped the AION LX Plus with an intelligent driving computing platform with 200TOPS hashrate to enable a variety of autonomous driving assistance functions.
The point is that the autonomous driving assist function on the AION LX Plus can be roughly summarized as follows:
1, high-speed NDA: This function is basically the high-speed pilot auxiliary function that has been installed on Tesla, Xiaopeng and other manufacturers. In the closed highway section, vehicles can realize auxiliary functions such as automatic acceleration, automatic lane change and overtaking, and up and down ramps according to navigation information and combined with high-precision maps.
2. Over-the-horizon summoning parking & ; Hd Map Autonomous Parking: Similar to the memory parking function that has been installed on Xiaopeng and Weima models, once the route is memorized, 6 fixed parking spaces or autonomous parking spaces can be realized through mobile phones or car machines, and the length of the memory route is 150m. High-precision map autonomous parking will be able to realize the vehicle to fully automatically find a parking space, automatic parking.
3, urban NDA: in the urban traffic conditions, can achieve traffic light intersection straight, autonomous lane change overtaking, traffic light left and right turn, U-turn and roundabout traffic and other functions - when I saw this, I was shocked, Xiaopeng is still testing the city NGP, actually made by GAC Aean first?
Should urban NDAs be features that will only be available with subsequent OTA upgrades? With such a question, I went to the GAC Aeon official website to check the vehicle configuration table.
Who knows or not to check, a check is shocked, the model configuration table does not have a related statement about the city NDA, only the "urban road intelligent driving assistance system" this item, and did not add the symbol "*" that indicates the need for subsequent OTA upgrades.
What is even more surprising is not this, but the above sensor configurations and automatic driving assistance functions, in the 1008-kilometer range of the thousand mile version, are not equipped: no lidar, no intelligent driving assistance systems, and even the entry-level version is standard millimeter-wave radar...
Therefore, if it is really impossible to buy an AION LX Plus that has both a thousand-mile endurance and a "fully equipped" autopilot assistance system as expressed by GAC AE.
To have a three-lidar AION LX Plus, you can only choose the 80D Max version that costs 409,600 yuan and has a range of 600 kilometers.
In addition, in addition to endurance and automatic driving at the press conference, at the bottom of the picture of the ADiGO smart cockpit, which was emphasized by the official, there was also a line of small words that were quite interesting.
The last noteworthy detail is the "second generation" that GAC Aean also emphasized when promoting these three lidars.
Is this referring to the second-generation lidar developed by GAC Group itself? The answer is no.
After some network search, we can find that the supplier of AION LX Plus lidar is Sagitar Juchuang RoboSense, and this manufacturer also supplies lidar for other domestic automakers.
So it's not hard to understand how the lidar on the AION LX Plus is arranged in such a familiar way. In October last year, WM unveiled a new pure electric sedan, the Weima M7, using the company's lidar solution.
So the question is, the price of the AION LX Plus 80D Max equipped with three RoboSense lidars has reached the 400,000 level, and WM, which has always taken "technology inclusion" as its slogan, will price the M7?
Write at the end
According to the official data of GAC Aean, the annual sales volume of 2021 exceeded 120,000 units, an increase of 119% year-on-year. However, according to the data of the Association, its main sales model is still the AION S with a price range of 150,000 to 180,000 yuan.
For AION S, I believe that many readers can also perceive that many of its sales are digested by the B-end online ride-hailing market.
Therefore, the price of AION LS Plus in the 270,000 to 460,000 levels can provide how much help for GAC AEAN's sales, we still have to put a question mark.
It cannot be denied that behind the eye-catching parameters such as 1,000 kilometers of endurance and three laser radars, it is the result of the continuous investment of GAC Group in scientific research and innovation and the continuous efforts of engineers. From these technologies, we can also get a glimpse of the development prospects of future smart cars.
But it is still the question, how much practical significance does the great leap forward in technology that is divorced from the actual needs of consumers and is too expensive have?
The same problem, we have seen on the Polar Fox Alpha S Huawei HI Edition, and now, there is another AION LX Plus.
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