For chassis manufacturers such as Yo-Pao, the concept and vision they put forward at the current stage, the technical ability to integrate breakthroughs is not weaker than a complete new car manufacturer, in order to promote this concept, they need to convince buyers at both the two levels of car concept and product completion. For this model, the smart driver jun actually has an immature idea, since the skateboard chassis can make any object intelligently move, it is better to focus on things, create a promotion of the advent of the era of intelligent driving of all things, and take the entrepreneurial direction of multi-form robots. Cooperate with car companies to develop a full range of intelligent mobile robots, and enter a broader field than cars.
Wen 丨 wisdom driving network Huang Huadan
West Young Master's Shell
In 2021, Salty and car manufacturing, Sino-US capital set off a new round of car-making movement.
Entering 2022, the popularity of skateboard chassis in the capital market is further lowering the threshold for car manufacturing.
Yupao Technology, founded by Li Peng, who has been immersed in 9 months since the departure of Great Wall Motors, today launched two major products, "UP Super Chassis" and "UP SPACE Super Cabin".
Car building can really be said to have entered the era of building blocks.
The soul is completely separated from the shell, and there are ambitious entrants.
The professional reference to the skateboard chassis is the integrated digital wire control chassis, which is called the skateboard chassis because it looks like a skateboard.
The yo-yo launched two products at the same time, the chassis product and the smart cabin, and the two core parts of a car have products that can be sold.
Li Peng said that we do not build cars, we empower everyone to build good cars.
In November 2021, american electric vehicle company Rivian was listed on the NASDAQ, and its market value exceeded 100 billion US dollars on the first day, surpassing Ford and setting a record for the largest IPO of the US stock since 2014.
When less than 200 new cars were delivered, its market capitalization had become the world's fifth-largest car company, and Musk, who was at the top of the ladder of wealth, was also sour on Twitter.
Is the "skateboard chassis" a subversive model of car building? Will it once again make the traditional automotive industry face the pain of transformation like electric vehicles?
Obviously, the capital market's pursuit of Rivian is not empty, and Li Peng, the founder of Yo-Run, has obviously sorted out the business model and prospects of the skateboard chassis.
The UP super chassis is an upgraded skateboard chassis in Li Peng's interpretation.
The skateboard chassis has the ability to integrate the traditional body-in-white, which can concentrate the most important elements of the electric vehicle on a standardized chassis module, including three electric, suspension, braking, steering, electric drivetrain, suspension and so on.
The use of wire control technology to achieve vehicle up and down decoupling, so that the chassis and the top control end no longer have any mechanical transmission hard connection, and then can freely adjust its size and space structure, bringing a chassis can be diversified applications and reusable advantages.
Moreover, while realizing the integrated design, it also has the ability to integrate intelligent software and hardware such as sensors, computing platforms, and various service applications.
Its advantages can be summarized as: complete freedom of vehicle topsuit design, greatly shortened bicycle development cycle, minimal space occupancy, and adaptability to various models.
In short, a skateboard chassis is a universal chassis that can meet the needs of different models with the same frame.
As a standard part of the software and hardware integration, the UP super chassis integrates five areas such as chassis, three electricity, thermal management, passive safety, electronic and electrical architecture, etc., and achieves hardware standardization, which can achieve "both upper and lower separation and decoupling, and can also be carried up and down together".
Being able to achieve upper and lower loads is obviously one of the advantages of the UP Super Chassis.
In terms of shortening the development cycle of new models, Li Peng said that car companies that use UP super chassis only need to develop the upper body on the basis of the standard chassis, and the car manufacturing cycle can be shortened by 6-12 months.
Last year, due to Huawei's entry into the new car, SAIC Chen Hong issued a statement to defend the "soul" of the company.
If a business model like a super chassis is successful, it means that car companies will lose half of their shells, or the most profitable half at present.
Smart Driver Jun believes that the biggest disruption of the skateboard chassis for the automobile manufacturing industry comes from two decouplings:
First, in the body structure, the upper and lower decoupling is realized and the connection is safe;
Second, the soft and hard decoupling has been realized at the frame control level, ideally allowing the car to show any form, thus releasing the limitations of automobile design and laying the foundation for the birth of intelligent electric robots.
Before we introduce this super chassis to open up a new realm of car manufacturing, let's take a look at how Li Peng defines his super chassis products and the new ideas it brings to the industry.
Since steering and braking are fully in-line, the UP Super Chassis is not limited by traditional mechanical steering.
▲The chassis is equipped with lidar and antenna
Moreover, because the electric drive system, thermal management system, battery, etc. are arranged under the upper cover of the skateboard chassis, the space occupied by the suspension is also greatly reduced, so that the upper body design has sufficient space, and the layout of the driving position in the car has also undergone a complete change, and the use of space in the car is more flexible and free.
Li Peng believes that based on this, the wheelbase parameters of the fuel vehicle era will also lose their meaning.
The cabin space acquisition rate developed on the basis of the UP Super Chassis has increased significantly, and is no longer limited to the effective space between the wheelbases.
In addition, the power, suspension, braking, and steering on the UP Super Chassis can be software adjusted, making it easy for OEMs to digitize driving styles and users to edit their own driving patterns.
In the future, if a consumer buys a car of about 300,000 yuan, he can even experience various types of supercar driving styles, and only need to download a driving mode APP authorized and developed by the supercar brand.
At the development end level, based on the hardware standardization, the UP super chassis has made hardware interface standardization in the VIU area, thereby realizing the software platform, so as to decouple the soft and hard, can realize asynchronous development, open up the intelligence of the whole vehicle domain, and finally provide users with a personalized experience.
This makes vehicle development more flexible and efficient.
On the other hand, the UP super chassis will adopt CTC (Cell to Chassis) technology, through the direct integration of the battery cell inside the chassis frame, integrated with the chassis design, can achieve a high degree of integration and modularization, battery compartment space utilization can be increased by 10%. Compared with models of the same length, the endurance can also be increased by 10%, and the longest range can reach 1000 kilometers.
At present, many electric vehicle companies and battery manufacturers are using CTC technology, and the integrated design of the UP super chassis uses CTC technology as the most reasonable technology, but obviously its success does not depend on yo-yo, but on the stability of battery production enterprises.
Based on the same UP Super Chassis, Yo-Yo designed five different styles of upper body, including sedans, MPVs, SUVs, pickups and vans, covering passenger and commercial vehicles with a variety of heights such as low-top, mid-roof and high-roof.
At this conference, Youyou Tooko officially displayed three of the concept cars, up SPACE 01 super sedan, UP SPACE 02 super MPV and UP SPACE 03 super SUV.
In addition to the equally futuristic shape of the three concept cars, there is also a common feature, with ample space.
Without the traditional firewall and front compartment, the front of the UP SPACE 01 can be pressed very low, making the entire model simple and elegant and dynamic. The huge glass canopy runs from the very short front hatch to the rear of the car, providing perfect curves while providing ample head and legroom in two rows.
The UP SPACE 02 Super MPV is similar in length to the Golf, but in terms of interior space layout, it achieves three rows of occupant seats.
The fore compartment of the UP SPACE 03 Super SUV can be set up according to functional needs, such as the possibility of tucking an electric energy kitchen into the front trunk to unlock a new camping mode.
As a company that was first launched in April 2021, Yo-Tro was able to launch three concept cars in a short period of time, and the efficiency of Yo-Run is very high.
The three concept cars launched by Yo-Run should be three concept cockpits, which is intended to declare that Yo-Run has both digital wire-controlled chassis technology and can also provide vehicle solutions.
So Li Peng's claimed UP super chassis opens the era of new car building 2.0, is this door easy to open?
Li Peng's personal thinking is that in such a trend, the traditional car companies are huge, there are certain transformation difficulties, and some of the newly influxed car-making forces have a certain degree of lack of strength.
But obviously at the moment, the hardest part is how to convince them.
Not all car companies need to build a car in their own completeness, which is actually the industry consensus, but give the most core part to a supplier, and let them accept that the chassis is no longer the core technology of the car company, obviously every OEM will have a lingering feeling in the face of such a proposal on the one hand, and on the other hand, it will worry about its own profits.
In 2021, Li Peng said on a forum that in the era of new car manufacturing 2.0, car companies that still regard the chassis as a housekeeping skill will be eliminated.
This statement has caused a heated discussion on the Internet.
Yesterday, Li Peng responded at the media interview: "It is not that the chassis is not important, on the contrary, the chassis is very important, but it does not have to be produced by the main engine factory itself." ”
His explanation is that the emergence of the skateboard chassis can help car companies standardize and modularize the chassis architecture, improve development efficiency, and reduce costs, and the main engine factory can spend more energy on the personalization of the vehicle and provide users with more personalized services.
When asked if he would build a car, Li Peng said that the three complete concept cars have shown that Youpao can build cars, but Youpao will not do 2C brand, in other words, Youpao's business model is 2B:
"At this moment, our business strategy is determined, and we do not do C-end brand operations. Because China may not be so short of a new brand that we do, but it lacks a low-level ability to do a good job of safety and car regulations for everyone, so that more people can achieve what they should do. ”
Based on this, Li Peng said that at present, Youpao is negotiating with partners at all levels in the industry.
The UP Super Chassis is expected to reach mass production in 2023.
At present, there are more than 150 members of the yo-yo team, and the chassis adopts the OEM mode, which is jointly developed and produced by Kaiyi Automobile.
A new round of financing is also on the way.
Skateboard chassis, yo-yo is not the first, in addition to the star enterprise Rivian, foreign companies such as Arrival, Canoo, REE and other enterprises, traditional supplier giant Schaeffler, Chinese OEFar Dongfeng Motor have similar products.
There is also a company called Pix Moving in China.
Everyone has similar ideas, but obviously in China, the efficiency of running is higher.
Although Li Peng has always emphasized being a slow company, Yo-Run is indeed running forward.
He said: "At present, the skateboard chassis is not the mainstream, but I believe that our industry has the brave, the wise, dare to face the value of users." ”
In 2021, Huawei has triggered the industry's vigilance, and the emergence of the skateboard chassis model will actually trigger tension in car companies, and even the most core chassis cannot be held in the hand. If you rely on personalization and rely on software services to create profits, it is obvious that such transformation is one step more difficult than electrification, because their own advantage is not software capabilities.
For chassis manufacturers such as Yo-Pao, the concept and vision they put forward are not weaker than a complete new car manufacturer at the current stage, and in order to promote this concept, they need to convince buyers at both the two levels of car concept and product completion.
This is sometimes more difficult than making and selling your own car.
For this model, the smart driver jun actually has an immature idea, since the skateboard chassis can make any object intelligently move, it is better to put the imagination space more larger, do not have to focus on the car, but focus on the object. Create a pioneering direction that promotes the advent of the era of intelligent driving of all things and takes the entrepreneurial direction of multi-form robots.
Cooperate with car companies to develop a full range of intelligent mobile robots, compared with the rooted in the field of automobiles have a broader imagination space.
Looking at the idea of a modern car presented in the video number below, the two ideas can actually be unified.
【Pay attention to the video number of intelligent driving, pay attention to the frontier of intelligent driving】