Another new force of car-making has come into force! On the 26th, Jidu announced that it has obtained a new round of financing of nearly 400 million US dollars, and the investor is still an old shareholder.
Jidu Automobile is a smart car company established by Baidu and invested by Geely Group, founded in March 2021, the start time is relatively late, so far less than 1 year, after a new round of financing will continue to accelerate the process of research and development and mass production, can be described as the high efficiency to the extreme.
The CEO of Jidu Automobile is Xia Yiping, who was the co-founder and chief technology officer of Mobike.
Geely has been deeply involved in the automotive industry for many years, and it is no accident to build any car.
Baidu, an Internet company that does search, what car does it build? Burdened by its early fame, many people overlooked that Baidu was also a serious technology company.
As we all know, car manufacturing is a money-burning war, a protracted war, which requires a strong ability to integrate resources, and the concentration can also be regarded as a rich second generation with roots and seedlings, and there is no shortage of capital and technology.
At the capital level, the left-hand head technology Internet company, the right-hand vehicle manufacturing top brand, from the beginning of its birth, Jidu contains a golden spoon, just established to obtain more than 300 million US dollars of start-up capital, CEO Xia Yiping shouted That Jidu Automobile plans to invest 50 billion yuan in the next five years, determined to be ambitious, not bad money, recruited BMW, Lexus, Weilai, Ford and other well-known car companies executive team.
Unlike other new forces, Jidu aims the core of competition at intelligence and strives to create "automotive robots".
Jidu automobile robot concept car; image source: Jidu
As Robin Li said: the future car will become a "car robot", and the future "robot" will look like a car.
At the technical level, relying on Geely's leading pure electric architecture - Haohan SEA intelligent evolution experience architecture, it uses a mature vehicle platform to carry the "soul" of Baidu's automatic driving and intelligent cockpit.
In the era of unmanned driving, the ultimate battle is ecological competition, which has high requirements for high-precision maps, automatic driving, and cloud computing power.
Baidu Apollo system in the field of automatic driving is a world-class technology giant, can support complex driving domain, and has the ability of vehicle-road coordination, test mileage in the industry far ahead, but suffering from unable to land. The same is true of AI capabilities.
Xia Yiping said that when the first car robot lands, it will directly have L4 level automatic driving capabilities, the chip gathers Nvidia Orin and Qualcomm SA8295P, plus Xiaodu car, Baidu map and other technology empowerment, ideally this will be a smart partner for young people who can "grow themselves", we are still worth looking forward to.
At present, the three brothers of new energy vehicles, Weilai, Ideal, Xiaopeng Automobile mixed up, the old BYD sells the best is also new energy, and then Sony, Xiaomi, Apple, South Korea's LG Electronics, large technology companies around the world have followed the "Tesla" to join the melee, the car-making threshold continues to rise, beginners still have a long way to go.
The "Matthew effect" in the market will screen out the best players for us, where can the set go?
See!