Wen | Sun Guangxin
Editor| Zhang Yi
On January 4, in the first working day of 2022, Xiaomi car manufacturing has a new dynamic.
According to interface news reports, Zeng Xuezhong, senior vice president of Xiaomi Group and president of the mobile phone department, said that Lei Jun requires the mobile phone department to become a technical middle office at the level of Xiaomi Group, which can incubate and drive some innovative businesses, one of which is to transport talents and technology to the automotive business.
Zeng Xuezhong said, "Xiaomi Mobile Phone Department is conducting monthly multi-dimensional technical exchanges with the automotive team, involving batteries, imaging, software, and supply chain teams. In 2022, the mobile phone department will import a part of the software technology talent to the automotive team. At the same time, Xiaomi's mobile phone department also hopes to benefit from it, such as using the advancement of car battery technology to feed back mobile phones and major appliances. ”
It can be seen that the car industry chain is huge and complex, and software is the first problem that Xiaomi wants to solve through internal talent transportation.
Under the trend of "software-defined car", software is becoming the core competitiveness of smart cars, Xiaomi wants to strike later, and software is indeed a breakthrough.
(Lei Jun has announced in a high profile that Xiaomi will invest more than 100 billion yuan in research and development in the next five years)
All this is to achieve the Flag set by Lei Jun a few days ago - Xiaomi car will be mass-produced in 2024.
Based on the "technology middle office", mobile phones and car manufacturing are linked
This time, Xiaomi passed on a number of information about car-making to the outside world through Zeng Xuezhong, two of which are very important points, one is to solve the talent and technical problems of car-making more through itself in the future, and the other is to send talents and technology to the automobile business through the mobile phone department.
Forming a team is one of the most core matters since the announcement of Xiaomi car.
So, why is software first?
First of all, with the acceleration of the development process of smart cars, the position of software in the car is becoming more and more important. Therefore, the software is also an important breakthrough for Xiaomi, a new player, to seek a breakthrough.
The development of China's automobile industry is relatively late, so whether in the era of fuel vehicles, or in the gradual popularization of electric vehicles, foreign companies still occupy a great advantage in hardware equipment. However, with the advent of the era of "software-defined cars", even internationally renowned car companies such as Volkswagen and Toyota, their specialized software departments or subsidiaries have only been established in recent years, and automotive software has become an important inflection point for domestic car companies to overtake in curves.
However, the current automotive software talent is insufficient, but the competition is becoming increasingly fierce, which is no longer a problem that can be solved by simply high salaries.
Xiaomi is not without thinking about reorganizing a separate automotive software development team. On the official website of Xiaomi Recruitment, at present, auto-related positions are still being recruited, and it is shown that they are all "urgent moves". However, the recently released new jobs involve "system platform", "smart cockpit", etc., especially the smart cockpit. This is very different from the first half of this year, the recruitment positions involved data platforms, in-vehicle infrastructure, millimeter wave algorithms, front-end platform development and other positions related to autonomous driving.
From the rhythm of talent recruitment, it can also be seen that the focus and progress of its car manufacturing business are changing.
At the same time, in November 2021, it was also revealed in the recruitment circle that Xiaomi Automobile had collected 20,000 resumes, but only more than 300 successful entrants.
Due to the complexity of automotive software, although there are many software talents, it is very difficult to find people who understand both cars and software. At the moment of the shortage of automotive talents, enterprises also need to bear a large number of talent training costs.
As a latecomer, Xiaomi has to speed up the cultivation of talents. However, in this regard, mobile phone manufacturers have a natural advantage. From the perspective of development history, mobile phones and cars are undergoing a transformation from mechanical definition to hardware definition, and then to the common definition of software and hardware. Because smartphones and smart cars have a common part in software, compared with developers in other software fields, people with mobile phone software development backgrounds are also easier to cross over to automotive software.
Therefore, Lei Jun thought of using the mobile phone department as a way to make a technical middle office to quickly migrate the general capabilities.
As early as 2019, Xiaomi regarded the middle office as an important means of informatization, including three major parts: business middle office, data middle office and technology middle office. Among them, the business is the foundation, the data is the core, and the main task of the technology middle office is to improve the development efficiency. In simple terms, the business and data middle office is mainly responsible for the rapid response and support of the front office business, while the technical middle office provides highly modular parts for the middle office service, shortening the construction time of the business middle office. The specific way to achieve it is to sink through technology and precipitate standardized things.
That is to say, Xiaomi should achieve high efficiency and low cost of new business development through the technology middle office.
With the deepening of Xiaomi's business middle office strategy, at the end of 2020, Xiaomi officially established a business middle office, but there is no clear department on the technology middle platform to assume corresponding responsibilities. Mobile phone is Xiaomi's main business, in Xiaomi's internal is the most technologically perfect business, so want to establish a technical middle office department to solve the problem of technology development, the mobile phone department is the most suitable choice for Xiaomi at present.
Therefore, Zeng Xuezhong believes that it is a "natural thing to let the mobile phone department send talents to the automotive business, which is the sharing of technology."
Self-developed or OEM?
If you want to build a car successfully, you must learn from the experience of successful people, take its essence, and remove its dross.
Which piece of self-research, which piece of OEM, presumably Lei Jun has already reached most important conclusions in the exchange with the new forces of domestic automobiles, and in the route research of Tesla and Apple.
Tesla created a precedent for smart cars, at the beginning of its product launch, Lei Jun said after experiencing the Model S that the difference between Tesla and other cars is the difference between mobile Internet applications and stand-alone local applications.
Tesla's biggest disruption is not just a change in the power system, but a reshaping of the car's "brain" - electronic control system.
(Source: Tesla official website)
As the car becomes more and more functionally rich, the number of ECUs (electronic controller units) in the car is also increasing, which leads to the bus getting longer and longer, and ECU centralization has become the consensus of the automotive industry.
Tesla pioneered the reinvention of ECUs, proposing the concept of "domain" based on function. The 2012 Model S divides the ECU into power domain, chassis domain, body domain, and body low-speed fault domain, controlling the on-board wiring harness within 3 kilometers, and the 2017 Model 3 simplifies the domain divided by function to three major parts, further reducing the length of the on-board wiring harness to 1.5 kilometers. In Tesla's previous plans, the model Y's final harness length would be only 100 meters (of course, it has not yet been achieved).
The shortening of in-vehicle wiring harnesses is not just a hardware change. With the change of hardware structure, the software of each ECU is also centralized under the central computing module for unified deployment, not only the number of ECUs is greatly reduced, but also the centralized ECU makes it easier to upgrade OTA, providing higher computing power for the car, supporting a more flexible and high-speed communication network, and providing support for the further intelligence of the car.
This also makes intelligent enterprises more and more dominant in the automotive industry chain. In the past E/E architecture, Tier1 (a tier-1 supplier of car factories) has more dominance, directly providing car companies with cost controllers including programs, and with the emergence of Tesla, Tier1's role in design and research and development has weakened. It is precisely for this reason that more and more car companies are beginning to learn from Tesla and set up or invest in software-related projects and companies.
Tesla's advantages are not only in the electronic control system, but also include high-performance chips, autonomous driving systems and other intelligent core functions of self-research capabilities.
The two millets currently choose to acquire + self-research + investment in the way of multi-line parallel, but they are not overnight. However, through the software system, it is possible to achieve the fastest completion, and even overtake in curves.
The car is also one of Apple's research and development projects, although the two are different in positioning, products, services, etc., but Xiaomi's strategy of focusing on software this time of talent and technology also has similarities with Apple, which is also a mobile phone manufacturer.
Apple's stepping stone into the automotive space is software. In 2013, Apple first launched The IOS in the Car, the predecessor of CarPlay, and in 2014, Apple launched the "Titan" plan to enter the smart car track.
According to the research report of Soochow Securities, Apple Automobile may adopt a similar production model to mobile phones to build cars, the on-board operating system and automatic driving system are completely self-developed, chips, chassis, motors, etc. will be solved by self-research and OEM, and battery and vehicle manufacturing will be solved by seeking partners.
At the end of 2020, Apple and trade union, Heqin, Tomita and other auto parts manufacturers put forward stock requirements, and plan to produce the first pure electric vehicle in 2024.
(Source: Soochow Securities Research Report)
Such car-making routes can concentrate on the advantages of mobile phone manufacturers in software systems, coordinate with ecological partners in vehicle manufacturing, avoid the risk of huge hardware research and development costs, and achieve relatively lightweight car manufacturing.
Moreover, this mode is also the "handy" way to play xiaomi mobile phones.
Every step of the way to build a car is not easy
Although Xiaomi announced that the car is in 2021, before that, Xiaomi has participated in the new energy automobile industry through investment, and Weilai and Xiaopeng in the new car-making forces have accepted Xiaomi's investment. In addition, Xiaomi has also invested in many other smart car-related fields to layout, and has accumulated certain auto-related patents.
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After Xiaomi officially announced the start of car manufacturing, Lei Jun has successively withdrawn from some Xiaomi-affiliated companies, and it seems that he wants to concentrate on car manufacturing.
By the end of 2021, Xiaomi has made substantial progress in some car manufacturing fields. In August 2021, at the Xiaomi Group earnings conference call, Xiaomi Group President Wang Xiang said that he had formed a team of about 300 people, and in September, the number of the team increased to 500 people; in addition to increasing investment, Xiaomi also acquired the self-driving enterprise Deep Motion Technology DeepMotion; later, Xiaomi also decided to build a Xiaomi automobile headquarters base and sales headquarters and research and development headquarters in Beijing Yizhuang; in terms of vehicle manufacturing, Xiaomi plans to build a vehicle factory with a total production capacity of 300,000 vehicles in two phases, the first phase The production capacity of the second phase is 150,000 units, respectively.
In addition, Xiaomi has also negotiated cooperation with traditional car companies such as FAW, but the results are not ideal, which may be one of the reasons why Xiaomi finally decided to build its own production line.
However, in addition to the software mentioned this time, smart cars have two core problems waiting for Xiaomi to solve, smart cockpit and automatic driving.
At present, although many companies such as Huawei already have the ability to provide relevant products and solutions for automobile companies, many traditional car companies are still reluctant to use their products, the reason is that these technologies are the core technologies that distinguish traditional cars and smart cars, and once they need to rely on third parties to solve, their competitiveness and brand value will be greatly reduced.
Guojin Securities also said in a research report that automatic driving is the core technology of the era of intelligent cars, and firm self-research is the only way out for Xiaomi, through the acquisition of a company with a high level and excellent team in automatic driving technology, it can quickly make up for the shortcomings of Xiaomi's automatic driving field.
In May 2021, Xiaomi released a large number of recruitment information for autonomous driving-related positions, formed its own autonomous driving research and development team, and then increased the recruitment of automatic driving research and development. In August, Xiaomi acquired Shendong Technology for another 500 million yuan.
Compared with automatic driving and software systems, smart cockpits may be more able to open up the gap between smart cars on the consumer side, although the capital market is not so interested in smart cockpits, but consumers feel more intuitive about smart cockpits, and the demand is more direct.
Before Xiaomi announced the car, Xiaomi has obtained a lot of patents related to smart cockpits, and in 2021, Xiaomi has acquired a number of smart cockpit-related companies.
It can be seen that the difficulty of building a car is much greater than that of mobile phones, and Xiaomi is gradually breaking through from all aspects of the industrial chain.
epilogue
Most of the tech giants choose to "retreat to the hidden rivers and lakes" and devote themselves to grand topics such as life sciences or human survival. However, Lei Jun, a "veteran general", chose to stay on the front line.
"I decided to lead the team myself, and it was the last major entrepreneurial project of my life. I know what it means to make a decision, and I am willing to put on all the accumulated records and reputations in my life to fight for xiaomi cars. Lei Jun once expressed his original intention and determination.
The mobile phone department and the car manufacturing business dream linkage, can the achievements of Xiaomi mobile phones continue in the automotive field?
The ending of the story is difficult to predict, after all, in the new car market where the gods fight, "there are wolves in the front and tigers in the back". However, relying on Lei Jun's firm attitude of "All in" and the resources of Xiaomi's ecological power, Xiaomi Automobile is bound to become an important spoiler in the new forces of car manufacturing.