In 2021, after Tesla has led alone for many years, the smart car track has finally gradually ushered in a new situation of a hundred flowers.
When consumers choose models, the intelligent technology level of the car has also become an important reference basis.
In the new round of competition, in order to make advanced technology get on the car faster, hardware embedding and software upgrades have become the intelligent layout methods generally recognized by many car companies nowadays.
Affected by this trend, high-performance hardware such as large computing chips and lidar has become a "fragrant food" in the supply chain.
According to the data released by authoritative media, Sagitar Juchuang won more than 40 front-loading mass production orders for more than 40 models in 2021 with solid-state MEMS lidar, which is almost unique among Chinese technology suppliers.
Behind the fixed-point "burst order" of mass production models, what did Sagitar Juchuang do right?
01
Front-loading fixed-point Grand Slam: over 40 models,
Covers cars, SUVs, sports cars, and heavy trucks
The Guangzhou Auto Show in November 2021 kicked off the mass production of lidar models.
According to rough statistics, there are 9 brands of 11 exhibited models equipped with lidar at this year's auto show. According to the heart of the car, Sagitar Juchuang has an exclusive supply of 6 models.
In Q3 2021, the research data of yole Développement, a well-known consulting organization, has shown that the share of Sagitar Juchuang's lidar vehicle front-loading market ranks first in China and second in the world.
Yole estimates that the lidar market will maintain a compound annual growth rate of 111% from 2020 to 2026, and reach $2.3 billion by 2026.
However, according to our observation, China's lidar front-loading in-vehicle market will grow by more than 111% this year and next year, and may even grow by dozens of times.
Taking Sagitar Juchuang as an example, according to its published data, by the end of 2021, Sagitar Juchuang has obtained a total of more than 40 fixed orders for models.
At present, in the automotive front-loading market, this should be the Chinese lidar company with the largest number of fixed-point models.
We do not fully count the relevant cooperation:
Lucid Air。 In September 2020, Lucid Motors, a new american car manufacturer, released Lucid Air, officially disclosing that the intelligent driving system of this model is equipped with a lidar equivalent to 125 lines. Combined with the information of the 125 line, we think that this lidar is basically Sagitar's MEMS lidar M1. The following year, the official news of Sagitar Juchuang also disclosed that the M1 began to be delivered to the North American market in Batches in June of that year. This point also coincided with the eve of the delivery of Lucid Air's first vehicles.
In October 2021, WM's first pure electric sedan M7 was released, which is equipped with 3 Sagitar Juchuang M1 lidars.
In November 2021, at the Guangzhou Auto Show, Xiaopeng released the G9 medium and large SUV, which is equipped with 2 Sagitar Juchuang lidars.
On January 5, 2022, GAC Aion LX Plus was officially released, of which its 80D Max version priced at 409,600 yuan is equipped with 3 Sagitar Juchuang M1 lidars, known as "Erlang Shen of the Automotive Industry";
In April 2022, deliveries of the Zhiji L7 will begin, and this model will be available in the future with lidar. At the same time, the LS7, the second car of the car, will be equipped with 2 laser radars, and it is said that the price of this model will be more than 600,000 yuan.
More high-end models are still on the road, and in 2022 Lotus will be an E-class pure electric SUV Type 132, which will be delivered in 2023 and is said to be a million-dollar ultra-luxury flagship model. The car will be equipped with 4 lidar on the car, and Sagitar Juchuang is also one of the suppliers of this car.
In addition, Sagitar Juchuang also reached a strategic cooperation with Extreme Kr Intelligent Technology and BYD in early and late December 2021, respectively, of which the cooperation between BYD and Sagitar Juchuang also included strategic investment. Obviously, whether it is extreme krypton or BYD, there is a high probability that sagittarius lidar will be used in the follow-up.
The above is mainly orders in the passenger car field, and sagittarius juchuang also has a lot of orders in commercial vehicles.
In November 2021, Zhitu Technology and Sagitar Juchuang jointly announced that FAW Jiefang's intelligent driving heavy-duty truck will be equipped with the MEMS LiDAR M1 provided by Sagitar. This heavy-duty truck model may be the Jiefang J6.
In 2022, Ingen technology will mass-produce L3-level autonomous driving heavy trucks, and Sagitar Juchuang is the supplier of its long-range main lidar selection.
Even from the currently public model information, whether it is for emerging car companies or traditional independent brands, whether in the field of passenger cars or commercial vehicles, Sagitar Juchuang almost won the Grand Slam this year.
02
The most mature lidar:
The 2016 layout of MEMS took more than 5 years to polish
Behind the enviable order volume, sagitar's success in MEMS lidar is partly related to its early strategic choices.
Around 2016-2017, many domestic autonomous driving companies at that time were still mainly using mechanical lidar for research and development tests, and Sagitar Juchuang forward-looking suspended the development of high-line mechanical radar after launching 16-line and 32-line products, tilting most of its energy to vehicle-grade solid-state lidar.
Mechanical lidar through the stacking and rotation of laser transceivers to form 360° point cloud information, the common problem of this type of lidar is that it is difficult to mass production, the cost is difficult to reduce, and it is not easy to pass the vehicle specification verification.
Therefore, Sagitar Juchuang began to lay out the research and development of MEMS micro-galvanometers internally, and probably hoped to use micro-galvanometers to replace the rotating components in traditional mechanical lidar.
One of the proofs is that in 2018, Qiu Chunxin, founder and CEO of Sagitar Juchuang, mentioned in his speech that solid-state lidar is the future direction, and among the three schemes of MEMS, Flash and OPA, MEMS (technical route) has the highest feasibility as the mass production of the main radar vehicle gauge, and its advantages lie in high resolution, long distance, vehicle specification level, easy mass production and low cost.
Then, during CES in January 2018, Sagitar juchuang came up with an early version of the MEMS solid-state lidar M1, which subsequently won two consecutive CES Innovation Awards in 2019 and 2020.
For more than 5 years from 2016 to 2021, in addition to multiple product iterations, Sagitar's MEMS LiDAR M1 has also undergone a rigorous vehicle-level verification process, including IP6K9K, vibration, salt spray testing, etc.
In addition to DV/PV validation, M1 also completed winter and summer tests.
The modular design of the M1 not only enables it to pass the vehicle specification level certification, but also greatly simplifies the production of lidar.
In March 2021, Sagitar Juchuang announced the completion of the first domestic vehicle-grade solid-state lidar production line, and when the media visited its production line, it was found that the final assembly process of M1 was very simple, "basically 5 small mirrors, 5 laser modules, 1 galvanometer module and several circuit boards into a small box".
With the completion of the production line, in June 2021, M1 began to deliver in batches to North American car companies.
Now, even in 2022, there are still a few lidar products on the market that meet the vehicle specification level, and lidar products that can meet the vehicle specification level, high performance and reasonable cost are even more scarce.
After all, the product development and vehicle specification verification of lidar and other components have their own laws, and Sagitar Juchuang can be said to have eaten a wave of forward-looking dividends with early layout.
Sagitar Juchuang's breakthrough in 2021 with MEMS LiDAR M1 is not only the early strategic focus, but also closely related to its continuous polishing and improvement of M1 around the customer's real test scenarios in the past few years.
According to the official introduction, M1 can ensure the safety and reliability of point cloud data quality in various driving scenarios through a series of patented technologies, eliminating the industry's thorny problems from the product side.
In addition, M1 also has built-in smudge detection, intelligent cleaning, intelligent heating, performance detection, power management, network management and other supporting functions to achieve ASIL-B functional safety level to help the vehicle perception system achieve ASIL-D functional safety design.
In addition to polishing high-performance, vehicle-grade hardware, Sagitar also has a unique hardware and software innovation - MEMS two-dimensional scanning chip technology gives M1 a "gaze" function that can intelligently zoom, which means that M1 can arbitrarily change the scanning speed of horizontal and vertical directions to change the scanning form, and can be switched in the next frame after receiving the command.
This function is similar to the zoom technology of the camera, which can adjust the scanning mode according to the driving scene, focus on the key sensing areas that the driver cares about at any time, improve the lidar perception ability, and help enhance the performance of automatic driving.
This is currently a unique product function in the same field, and perhaps it is also a major reason why Sagitar Juchuang has won the fixed point of 40+ models.
Another unique feature of M1 is that perception software can be integrated within its products to simultaneously output 3D point cloud data and target-level environmental awareness results.
Sagitar's point cloud AI awareness software RS-LiDAR-Perception supports advanced autonomous driving "point-to-point" full-scenario environment awareness, which can be deployed both inside M1 and in vehicle domain controllers, and supports OTA upgrades.
Looking back at the product history of M1, we can see that if a product wants to become a sought-after commodity in the market, in addition to excellent product performance, reliable product quality, and unique product functions that are close to the real needs of the market, it is also necessary to grasp the right point in time - these are inseparable from accurate strategic prediction and persistent research and development innovation.
03
Enable large-scale delivery:
Million units of production capacity ready in 2022
If the 2017 Audi A8 equipped with Valeo is the embryonic period of lidar on the car, and the 2021 Polar Fox Alpha S and Xiaopeng P5 promote the test period of lidar on the car, then 2022 must be the outbreak period of lidar fully on the car.
Among the top three new cars, the Xiaopeng P5 has been delivered, and the delivery of the medium and large flagship SUV G9 will start in the second half of 2022.
The G9 will be equipped with 2 Sagitar Juchuang M1 and support the XPILOT 4.0 intelligent driving system, allowing users to turn on the pilot assistance function in urban conditions.
NIO's ET7 and ET5 will also be equipped with Innovusion lidar to achieve intelligent driving capabilities similar to urban conditions, of which ET7 will be delivered at the end of March 2022.
The remaining ideal will also be to launch the X01 large and medium-sized luxury SUV equipped with lidar in the middle of the year.
Obviously, the head companies of the new forces have high sales expectations for these models, and after the models are listed, they will also drive a large number of lidar shipments.
In addition, traditional car companies have also entered the game. Great Wall Motor's Sharon Zhixing and Changan Automobile's Avita Technology will deliver high-end smart cars with multiple lidars in 2022.
It is rumored that BYD and Extreme Kr will also launch a new model or a remodeled model equipped with lidar, in addition to the spy photos of BYD Han equipped with lidar on the network for testing, the official news that the two car companies have reached strategic investment and strategic cooperation with Sagitar Juchuang can also be considered as circumstantial evidence.
New domestic car companies have entered the game, traditional car companies have accelerated their transformation, and major car companies are intensifying intelligent competition in the Chinese market. This kind of fierce confrontation in a short period of time will often further consolidate the leading position of the head supplier.
Just as the Ningde era occupies half of the domestic automotive market in the field of power batteries, Sagitar Juchuang has obtained a large number of fixed points and successfully achieved mass production delivery, which has also enabled the company to achieve a rapid lead in the track of smart auto parts and become a leader in the lidar industry.
At present, Sagitar Juchuang has also carried out extensive cooperation with industry companies at the technical level, in the field of passenger cars with BYD, GAC Aian, WM Motors, Extreme Kr Intelligence, Lotus, Lucid, etc., in the field of commercial vehicles with Yingche Technology, Zhitu Technology, etc., in the field of Robotaxi with Xiaoma Zhixing, Momenta, Yuanrong Qixing, Zhixing and other head autonomous driving companies, in the field of commercial robots with Gao Xian, Kuwa, Kandra, etc., in the field of unmanned logistics with Ali Cainiao, JD.com and other leading enterprises have reached strategic cooperation. In the supply chain, Sagitar Juchuang has also reached strategic cooperation with Texas Instruments and Luxun Group.
It is worth mentioning that through industrial supply chain cooperation with companies such as Luxun, Sagitar Juchuang is rapidly establishing large-scale mass production capacity internally and externally. At present, it already has its first automated production line; by the end of 2022, after the completion of the currently planned production line, its annual production capacity will reach one million units.
Large-scale mass production orders and large-scale mass production deliveries will also further promote the maturity and stability of lidar products, and provide greater cost exploration space.
At the market level, earlier delivery also means seizing the "virgin land" of the market one step earlier than competitors and sitting on the head position.