Electric living
In recent years, cross-border car building should be one of the hottest topics around us. There are Apple and Amazon abroad, and there are Ali and Baidu at home. These giant companies have made their own layouts on the road of car building. But is only car building the only way for these Internet masters to enter the automotive field? Let's take a look at what the Internet giants that don't build cars have done to cars.
Microsoft's focus is on autonomous driving
Let's first take a look at what is the attitude of Microsoft, as a global software "brother", in the face of cross-border car manufacturing.
Microsoft car hypothetical diagram
In June 2016, Peggy Johnson, Microsoft's head of commercial development, said she wouldn't spend billions on cars.
In 2018, Shen Xiangyang, Microsoft's global executive vice president, said: The top management decided not to do cars.
At the fourth CIIE in November 2021, Wei Qing, chief technology officer of Microsoft (China), said: There is no car-making plan.
It can be seen that Microsoft did not have the idea of building a car from beginning to end. The phenomenon we observed from the market also shows that Microsoft is indeed not interested in offline car manufacturing. In addition to investing in some car companies, Microsoft has very little news in the automotive industry. But don't be deceived by this appearance. Although it does not build cars, how can Microsoft, which has a market value of more than $2 trillion, let go of the automotive field. Autonomous driving is its starting point.
Why did Microsoft enter the automotive space on autonomous driving? The reason is that Microsoft has powerful smart cloud technology. It is also the only vendor in the world that covers the three major cloud service models of IaaS-PaaS-SaaS, and can provide the most complete public cloud services.
Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform
The most important product in Microsoft's cloud computing business is Azure. It enables automakers, suppliers, and mobility service providers to accelerate the delivery of autonomous driving solutions by providing comprehensive cloud, edge, IoT, and AI services, as well as an open ecosystem led by partners.
Microsoft invests in Cruise
Microsoft invested in Cruise, a self-driving subsidiary of General Motors, last year. It said it would use its cloud computing platform Azure to power Cruise and would become Cruise's preferred cloud service provider. Not only that, in order to standardize the development route of its own cross-border autonomous driving field, Microsoft has also proposed three principles.
1. Be a partner of the entire industry. Not engaged in automobile manufacturing or the provision of terminal mobile-as-a-service business.
2. Believe that data should be owned by customers, because data insights will become a new driver of revenue in the automotive industry. No monetization from customer data.
3. Enhance and expand the unique brand experience for automotive companies to expand relationships with customers.
In addition to using Azure, Microsoft has also released the Microsoft Connected Car Platform to assist in autonomous driving technology. It combines advanced cloud and edge computing services with a robust network of partners, so automotive companies can build connected driving solutions from in-vehicle experience and autonomous driving to predictive services and connectivity. At present, Volkswagen and the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance, as well as LG, Faurecia, cubic Telecom are using the platform to build related in-vehicle applications.
In addition, through Microsoft's patent, we can also find out how much emphasis it attaches to autonomous driving. According to wisdom bud data, as of now, Microsoft and its affiliates have more than 17,000 directly related patent applications for automobiles in 126 countries/regions, while in the above fields, there are more than 4,000 patents related to autonomous driving technology and automotive intelligence, which shows its importance.
In summary, it is not difficult to find. Microsoft, which does not build cars, is not ignoring the automotive industry. On the contrary, it is actually necessary to rely on the layout in the field of automatic driving and go deep into the automotive field. Compared with Apple, which can build cars in a closed loop, Microsoft, which has strong computing power, chooses to enter the automotive market from the perspective of auxiliary car manufacturers, which is indeed a good decision.
Samsung does not build cars specializing in parts research and development
Samsung Group is currently the largest consortium in South Korea. As we all know, its best area is electronics manufacturing. But what many people don't know is that Samsung has also been developing in the automotive field for nearly 30 years.
Samsung cars
In 1994, Lee Kin Hee, then president of Samsung Electronics Group, founded Samsung Auto. However, due to the economic depression caused by the global financial crisis at the time, Samsung Automobile has become a non-performing asset of Samsung Group since the beginning. But fortunately, Renault bought a 70% stake in Samsung for $512 million, which is why Samsung has survived to this day.
Although the brand is still there, if you still have a little illusion about Samsung cars, then last year's news will completely wake you up. Samsung officially announced the sale of a 19.9% stake in Renault Samsung In 2021, which means completely spinning off the auto manufacturing business from the group. So is Samsung really abandoning the big cake of the automotive industry?
In fact, on the contrary, letting go is to have better. The technology, resources and capital investment required for vehicle manufacturing are too large. After abandoning this business, Samsung will shift the focus of its automotive business to the development and supply of parts. It has done a good job in new energy batteries, in-vehicle infotainment systems and automatic driving chip FOUNDRies.
First of all, in terms of new energy batteries for vehicles, Samsung SDI's subsidiary Samsung SDI has done a very good job in battery research and development, and it also has a very deep technical accumulation in emerging battery technologies such as solid-state batteries, graphene batteries, and hydrogen fuel cells. In recent years, Samsung SDI's actions have been very frequent, building factories in Hungary in 2012, Xi'an in China in 2015, and large-scale expansion in Europe and the United States from 2018 to 2020. So so far, Samsung has become one of the world's indispensable battery suppliers.
Samsung Digital Cockpit
Samsung has also invested heavily in the supply of automotive infotainment systems, and Samsung's $8 billion acquisition of HARMAN in 2016 was the beginning of its development in this area. The digital cockpit of the cooperation between the two shined at the 2018 CES conference. By 2021, this digital cockpit (Samsung Digital Cockpit) has also completed the evolution of upgrades, from fully intelligent entertainment functions, health information detection and 360-degree monitoring, AI +5G and other technologies, which can point out the direction for future in-car infotainment systems.
Exynos Car
In terms of autopilot chip OEM, Samsung started late. It only launched the automotive semiconductor brand 'Exynos Auto' in 2018. But this does not affect its cooperation with major car companies. For example, in the same year as the brand was released, Samsung signed a contract with Audi to provide autonomous driving chips. In addition, the autopilot semiconductors currently designed by Tesla are also oem at Samsung Electronics' U.S. factories. It can be said that although Samsung did not enter the in-car chip market for the first time, its electronic manufacturing heritage can make it easily shine in this field.
From the above, we can see that although Samsung can no longer build its own car. But the automotive field is still a market that Samsung will not give up, but Samsung is also using its own good way to gain a place in the automotive industry.
FACEBOOK is using AR/VR technology to impact the cars of the future
People who are familiar with FACEBOOK know that it is an entrepreneurial company with only 10 years of development history. Although called "teenager" by many established companies, this young man is now the fourth largest Internet giant in the world by market capitalization.
Sheryl Sandberg, CHIEF OPERATING Officer of FACEBOOK
As early as 2017, FACEBOOK has begun to relate to the topic of car intelligence. At that year's Frankfurt Motor Show, FACEBOOK was also involved. But Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, came up and said, "We're going to be the only company in Silicon Valley that doesn't build cars." But in fact, people have quietly infiltrated the automotive industry by ar/VR technology.
Although we all know that Facebook's specialty is a huge base of users (about 2 billion), and the huge amount of information data generated by these users. But we may have overlooked another area of its expertise – AR/VR technology. Many people may be a little confused about what spark AR/VR can produce with cars. But FACEBOOK has shown us the way, for example, before the car leaves the factory, VR can enable consumers to experience the car, and even help factory workers and service technicians repair the vehicle. Facebook believes that in the near future, consumers can participate from the first day of car design by car suppliers through AR and VR, to the development and manufacture of cars.
Although at present, FACEBOOK only has a basic route for itself to enter the automotive field. But in fact, in today's digital and intelligent car, FACEBOOK, as the "forerunner of social experience", is still very easy to interact with car owners. Facebook is rumored to be working with Digital Hub Mobility, which focuses on the future of urban mobility, and FACEBOOK has also said that it will provide it with its core AI technical support, but everything is still in the confidential stage. I believe that the day when FACEBOOK comes up with car-related products should not be too far away.
epilogue:
The intelligent revolution of the automobile is unstoppable, and the vast majority of Internet companies in the world are participating in the automotive industry in the way they are best at. Compared with building a car from start to finish, it is obviously much more rational to tackle a certain content of the car. I don't know what Internet companies we know well in the days to come?