The Heart of the Machine is original
Author: Yu Lei
"Embracing change" and "leading change" are two concepts.
At the Shanghai Auto Show in 2021, "Embracing Change" set the tone for the entire 2021 Chinese auto industry. Huawei, Horizon, Bosch and even DJI vehicles that have just announced their entry, these are not cool, nor are there any booths for conferences, and they are crowded. Every experience item at Huawei's booth was full of people, and the explainers didn't even have time to drink water. The trend of automotive intelligence is irreversible.
In this process, vision solutions, multi-sensor fusion solutions, V2X, chip computing power, centralized electrical and electronic architecture, FOTA... A variety of technical routes and professional vocabulary in the field began to be familiar to everyone. Until the final answer is reached, there is no right or wrong, only insight into the needs. But "embracing change" has become the main theme of the entire industry.
At this stage, the industrial demand for smart cars has undergone a significant change, and the intelligent functions based on semiconductors are surpassing the core technologies in the traditional sense and becoming the most important competitiveness of car companies and products.
"Every successful past can trip up the future. If we don't see the subversive changes, it must be us who are being subverted." Wei Jianjun already expressed such feelings in his speech two years ago. Standing at a new starting point of intelligent competition, Great Wall Motors also laid out early and actively participated in more forward-looking, more comprehensive and more representative technological changes.
If a car company can create an ecology, or a car company can represent the demand for travel technology, then we can glimpse the epitome of the entire intelligent car industry from its development route.
An intelligent route that goes further than the "frontier"
In terms of market trends, 2021 is the year of accelerated penetration of smart cars. The cumulative sales of new energy passenger cars reached 2.989 million units, an increase of 169.1% year-on-year, and the penetration rate of vehicle networking and L2 driver assistance reached 61% and 27.7% respectively. The automotive industry also basically reached a consensus in this year, the new energy vehicle electrification industry chain is maturing, and then it is bound to develop to a more high-end technology - from the first half of electrification to the second half of intelligence.
In 2021, Tesla, Weilai and other new car-making forces that focus on intelligence have released the next stage of high-integration chassis or intelligent driving technology.
In the past year, Great Wall Motors has released technologies that comprehensively cover all aspects of smart cars, and even reconstructed smart cars. In June last year, Great Wall Motors released Coffee Smart 2.0, which includes intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, intelligent services, and a centralized new electronic and electrical architecture equivalent to the torso of future intelligent cars and unveiled technologies such as super smart wire control chassis. These are almost all aimed at the final form of autonomous driving technology above L4 level, like a complete self-subversion.
With the current industry layout panorama, like the Great Wall Motor Coffee Intelligence 2.0, the comprehensive layout is still relatively rare, most car companies have chosen to focus their resources on high-perception technology that can be mass-produced in the short term, hoping to continue to supply blood to enterprises through market commercialization, promote the next step of research and development, and expand their influence.
This is because there is a big problem behind the transformation: intelligence leads to an exponential increase in the research and development tasks of car companies. In order to alleviate the pressure of research and development, some car companies are also exploring a new cooperation model with Tier 1, car companies only do upper-level research and development, and give the bottom layer to Tier 1. There is even a Tier 0.5 in the middle of the two, suppliers for the car companies to purchase parts and integrated research and development, directly provide complete solutions such as electric drives, chassis, etc., the car companies are only responsible for the final result presentation.
Tier 0.5 cooperation model, although the resources are concentrated on short-term mass production technology, more research and development tasks to Tier 1 or Tier 0.5, may slow down the overall R & D process or let their iteration speed, the right to speak is subject to people, but for the sake of survival and development, some car companies still have to choose this way. In fact, this also provides great convenience for new car manufacturers, allowing them to make full use of supplier resources and quickly launch products.
The Great Wall Motor's layout coffee intelligence 2.0 is to master all the intelligent core technologies that are almost the epitome of the entire intelligent automobile industry in the future. The fundamental reason for this is that Great Wall Motors is not following the passive transformation of the times, but in the competition stage of the first half of electrification, it will raise the intelligence to an unprecedented height in advance, actively guide the development of the times, and complete the accumulation of technology and talents.
Two years ago, Wei Jianjun publicly expressed his determination to "break the boat" at the technology brand launch, announcing that Great Wall Motors will transform from a traditional automobile manufacturer to a global technology travel company: "It is to achieve complete self-subversion... Transformation may die, but it is at the expense of it."
Up to now, Great Wall Motors has developed a global R&D layout in seven overseas countries and ten places, and four intelligent organizations: product digital center, Millima Zhixing, Xiandou Intelligence, and Nuochuang Technology. At the same time, it is planned that the R&D personnel will increase to 30,000 people in 2023, the software team will reach more than 10,000 people, and the cumulative R&D investment in 5 years will reach 100 billion yuan.
This is also the key to Great Wall Motors' ability to lay out the coffee intelligence 2.0 upgrade, master the self-developed new electronic and electrical architecture, self-developed cockpit system and intelligent ecology, self-developed global capacity-efficient automatic driving computing platform IDC 3.0 and other intelligent core technologies, with comprehensive research and development capabilities from the underlying hardware to the upper layer software.
Dimensionality reduction mass production + back feeding research and development
As an intelligent technology route pointing to the future, it is a multi-dimensional and all-round layout. Even for Great Wall Motors, which has already accumulated sufficiently, it is not a small amount of work.
But in fact, only about half a year since the release of Coffee Smart 2.0, there have been a number of technologies landing: IDC 3.0 for the demand for L4 autonomous driving was released last year and is expected to be put into mass production this year; the first GC-OS intelligent cockpit system was launched last year.
It can be seen that some of the technologies here are not the final form of coffee intelligence 2.0, but they are more suitable for product applications at this stage. This is also a kind of research and development idea of Great Wall Motor Coffee Intelligence 2.0, the technology and solutions are directly based on the final goal, but at the same time, the product is reduced in stages, so that the overall research and development progress is not affected, and at the same time, the mass production model can continue to remain competitive.
For example, IDC 3.0 can expand the computing power according to the demand, the veneer computing power of 360TOPS can be expanded to up to four boards, and the computing power can be upgraded to 1440 TOPS; the electrical and electronic architecture gradually reduces the "domain", from 4 domains, transitions to 2 domains + central computing, and then moves towards a centralized architecture with only one central brain.
Although this is similar to the route from low-level to high-level technology replacement, there are multi-level products, but the product performance and research and development logic of the two are completely different. Great Wall Motor's coffee smart 2.0 dimensionality reduction landing products are more like the epitome of future smart cars, rather than upgrading based on mass production technology. For example, the self-driving algorithm of Coffee Smart 2.0 and the IDC 3.0 computing platform both come from L4 level requirements.
At the same time, the R&D route of Great Wall Motor Coffee Intelligence 2.0 has always been unified, but the R&D plan it has formulated has the consideration of landing in the middle and adapting to the current product, but this can not only ensure that the R&D direction and goal remain unchanged, and do not affect the overall process, but also because the products landed in the middle are also the same technical architecture as the future plan, and the data collected can be used to feed back the research and development, forming a closed loop of data accumulation and algorithm optimization.
Taking the driving automation process as an example, by December last year, Weipai Mocha had only been on the market for half a year, but it had accumulated more than 4 million kilometers of HWA high-speed driving assistance mileage. At the end of December, the NOH Intelligent Pilot Assisted Driving System was also officially launched. At present, 90% of Great Wall Motors' models support L2 level intelligent driver assistance functions, and 100% of the newly launched vehicles are equipped with the Internet of Vehicles. All of this will help Great Wall Motors accelerate the iteration of driving automation software and hardware, as will other dimensionality-reducing technologies.
Great Wall Motors wants to do this not only rely on R & D strength, but also have sufficient industrialization experience. This is the stage of initially formulating the technical route, making this kind of thinking that can reduce the dimension of technology and make low-level data effective.
At present, a lot of low-level assisted driving and camera data, because of the difference in installation location and specifications, can play a limited role, and the high-level automatic driving function also needs to be tested independently. However, through the technical solution of dimensionality reduction, Great Wall Motors can obtain massive data in a short period of time, thereby reducing data costs and improving iteration speed.
The era of comprehensive competition of intelligent vehicles
Different technical routes, in the end, must return to the market to decide the winner or loser. Like all commodities, the future of intelligent car competition will be a competition in all fields, technology can only be counted as the foundation, mass production is only the first step, but also depends on the comprehensive strength and experience of enterprises. A previous report on the commercialization trend of self-driving cars by navigant, an American consulting firm, also evaluated a combination of multiple aspects.
When ranking self-driving companies, the agency ranks a total of nine different dimensions, including technology, marketing strategy, production strength, endurance, sales, marketing and distribution. However, the result is different from the conventional impression, Tesla and Apple, which have a high voice, are only in the third echelon, and traditional car companies with rich car manufacturing experience are generally higher than the two.
But at the same time, the transformation of electrification and intelligence is also changing the competitive landscape. Changjiang Securities pointed out in the special research report on intelligent vehicles that automotive intelligence is not only an increase in functions, but also a huge change from products to user experience. The intelligent ability of car companies requires r&D investment, talent introduction, organizational structure changes and other aspects of transformation, to achieve the transformation from manufacturing enterprises to technology enterprises.
For Great Wall Motors, Wei Jianjun set the goal of transforming into a global intelligent technology company two years ago. At present, it is more focused on electrification and intelligent technology innovation and global development, deepening category innovation and user operation, and improving system strength and ecological construction.
Not only technology, but also other aspects of Great Wall Motors are also taking the future trend as the standard, steadily expanding the global R&D, production and marketing network, continuously broadening the circle of capabilities through mergers and acquisitions and incubation, and completing the transformation ahead of schedule, which is also the key to the epitome of the entire intelligent automobile industry.
At the current historic moment of vehicle electrification and intelligent transformation, great wall motors' positive transformation has made it continue to benefit.
In 2021, Great Wall Motor sold more than 1.281 million units in the whole year, an increase of 15.2% year-on-year and 11.8% of the market growth. Great Wall Motor's cumulative sales of new energy vehicles are 137,000 units, accounting for 10.7% of the total sales. According to the plan, Great Wall Motor plans to achieve an annual sales target of 4 million vehicles in 2025, of which 80% will be new energy vehicles.
Great Wall Motor's category innovation and user operation have also achieved better results, with Haval's annual sales of 770,000 units in 2021, an increase of 2.64% year-on-year; Euler's annual sales of 135,000 units, an increase of 140%; Weipai's annual sales of 58,400 vehicles, with a cumulative user exceeding 450,000; tank 300 annual sales of 84,600 units, with a market share of more than 50% in the domestic off-road vehicle market; and pickup truck sales of 233,000 units, an increase of 3.6% year-on-year.
The core competitiveness of car companies in the second half of intelligence has undergone qualitative changes, and the level of intelligence is not only its own technical level, but also needs to have a complete set of systems to support from talent introduction to organizational structure. In the face of huge pressure, Great Wall Motors is still determined to transform into a global intelligent technology company, master all intelligent core technologies, aim at the future intelligent coffee intelligence 2.0, and create a small ecology equivalent to the epitome of the future intelligent automobile industry.
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