Author| Utada
| Tiger Sniff Technology Group
The cover page comes from the web
About a month and a half ago, we learned the fact that Su Jing was leaving Huawei Auto BU, and at that time, his whereabouts and the restructuring of Huawei Auto BU were under negotiation and rapid change
The technical expert, who has served as the chief architect of the terminal and the director of Huawei's intelligent driving product department at Huawei, is known in the industry for being "straight and dare to say", but he is also on standby in July 2021 by Ren Zhengfei at the same time as signing the dismissal order.
Today, after the news of Su Jing's departure was made public and officially recognized by Huawei, there was actually a "rumor" about his whereabouts: he would serve as the CTO of the autonomous driving company set up by Volkswagen in China. He will lead a team of 400 to 500 people from Huawei to join volkswagen.
Some sources revealed to Tiger Sniff that in fact, this is also a foreign transaction of Huawei, and there are some similarities with Honor and X86, but not all. As a top technical expert and an "old man" with a certain degree of leadership and combat effectiveness, Su Jing's team may be more like a chip for Huawei to survive.
However, it is also true that Su Jing's inappropriate remarks were criticized internally and externally, after all, there will be internal power struggles in large companies. In the process of personnel struggle, it also promotes the ups and downs of the expansion and contraction of different business departments.
Former Director of Huawei's Intelligent Driving Products Department
Is the rhetoric really inappropriate?
In fact, we believe that most of the so-called inappropriate remarks made by Su Jing are not at all problematic, and even in private, they will clap their hands and applaud. For example—
Referring to the Tesla accident, he said: "The L5-level intelligent driving system cannot be done for a long time, and the introduction of a high-level intelligent driving system will increase the probability of traffic accidents. ”
"All companies that target Robotaxi as their business are doomed."
"In the next hundred years, the IQ of machines will not exceed that of humans, and fully autonomous driving will be difficult to achieve in this lifetime." Huawei will try its best to let the industry smoothly through the dangerous period of the next 5 years, otherwise Huawei may be the 'sinner' of history. ”
……
There are also many blunt remarks. Personally, I think that in addition to the content of the obvious advertisement for Huawei, most of the remarks can't help but want to explode every time they see it: "TND is too right." The words are not rough.
It's just that in the 2B market of the automotive supply chain that needs to be "good at playing round, not making mistakes" and "ganging up", being too blunt and straightforward will definitely suffer losses. At home, the industry still needs more partners, not enemies.
However, Huawei's actions to do Tier 1 and the sound of being over-rendered by the media are obviously completely contrary to the Psychological Contradictions of Chinese car companies that have been living in the shadow of Tier1 and want to fly themselves too much;
Internally, the ADS automotive full-stack solution team led by Su Jing clearly has some business and philosophy conflicts with the Huawei team, including MDC. (If you are interested, you can see my other article "Huawei Enters, this industry is about to be bloody", which mentions some actions of the two departments in lidar)
The former emphasizes providing automakers with a software-hard integration "family bucket" solution, while the latter is to maintain a self-developed autonomous driving computing platform (for example, Nvidia's Xavier), calling friends and creating an ecosystem of algorithm partners all over the world.
In addition, because Huawei's automotive BU is relatively "young", the structural adjustment in the past two years has changed very quickly, in fact, many small teams have been established and disbanded (it is said that a team related to the electrical and electronic architecture... And in the software world, if you've been paying attention to autonomous driving, you know that there are three things that are most normal—"incompatibility," "departure," and "re-entrepreneurship."
The helplessness and new challenges of the Chinese market
In fact, from Caijing's exposure in November to Huawei's former R&D minister of autonomous driving, Chen Qi (Su Jing's colleague, some people say deputy) joining Extreme Kr, to Huawei's "Smart Vehicle Solution BU Ecological Conference" held in Suzhou in December, all indicate some subtle power changes in various business lines within Huawei's automotive BU.
In December, at the "media briefing" held by Huawei's Su Research Institute for automotive BU, we saw the names of technology partners on the wall. Here, Huawei's three functions are particularly prominent - "underlying platform", "intelligence", and "networking".
Of course, although they still say that the "full-stack solution" and the "local solution" are advancing in parallel, it is clear that including the autonomous driving computing platform and lidar are being put in the spotlight. Whether it is hardware or "pulling the industry chain brothers together to do it", it belongs to MDC.
In other words, compared with Tier1, Huawei seems to have chosen a "retreat to advance" approach in the relatively special Chinese 2B2C car market - returning to the algorithm and technology circle and returning to its own underlying functions.
However, we have always believed that whether it is the high-end autonomous driving market above L4 or the automobile supply chain market, if you want to firmly grasp the era of automatic driving in your hands, it is definitely sensors such as "computing platform" and "lidar" that cannot be let go.
And these Huaweis have.
So someone said before that Huawei will abandon lidar, personally I think this is not very credible, because it is unwise.
Huawei's sensor hardware solution
Speaking of some ADS led by Su Jing, it is very likely that it will reappear in front of us in the future as a new identity of a car company, which is actually the least resistance way to quickly put Huawei's full-stack technology into the car.
It is rumored that groups such as Volkswagen, in the current special international environment and taking into account the security of big data, actually need to have a special, independent automotive intelligent hardware and software system program in China. And good choices, in fact, there are not many.
Of course, since it is a consumer-grade market, it is not too late to brag and comment on Huawei's technology for many days, or when the real product is launched and opened to the road.
And Huawei's remaining car BU, which still consists of thousands of people, can break out of the big ecological route of the automobile market. We only learned that they are welcomed by a lot of "relatively weak" Chinese technology companies, many of which are also newbies and disruptors of the auto market.
Sincerely, in the Chinese auto market, there is not necessarily how good Huawei can be; but without Huawei, it really has no meaning at all.
Write at the end
In fact, looking at Huawei's "survival" in the past two years, it is not difficult to see that Huawei has been choosing the way of "retreating to advance" -
Back to the traditional and relatively heavier industries, such as steel, coal, here huawei's previous communications are the best at 2G business models;
In the automotive 2B market, where the supply chain interests are extremely complex and cast into an iron wall, from a strong entry to the "communication" and "software" layers that are good at, a group of little brothers are pulled together to fight against the "old forces".
Grasp the most indispensable part - "data" up is the cloud, down is the sensor and chip, this is a real closed-loop advantage.
Maintain cash flow by divesting assets and lines of business, but without weakening R&D at all. In fact, it is resolute not to cut back on research and development.
In short, I wish Huawei's choice and Su Jing's future. Free commercial market, there are catfish to have fun.