Produced by | Tiger sniff car group
Author | Zhang Bowen
Header image | IC Photo
On September 28, 2021, Hubei Xingji Times Technology Co., Ltd., founded by Li Shufu, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone, officially announcing that it will invest 10 billion yuan to specialize in the high-end mobile phone market. In January this year, there were rumors that Geely's mobile phone company was in contact with Meizu to negotiate an acquisition and was conducting due diligence.
Yesterday, there was news that Weilai Automobile is also preparing a mobile phone team, which will be led by Yin Shuijun, former president of Meitu Mobile Phone, to take charge of Weilai's mobile phone business. The company is recruiting a large number of BSP engineers, communication test engineers, imaging chip design engineers and other mobile phone-related positions of talents, the future business line office will be located in Shenzhen.
For this rumor, Weilai did not explicitly deny it, but said that there is no information to disclose at present, and further information will be communicated with everyone.
Xiaomi's car manufacturing, Huawei-empowered car companies, OPPO, DJI have all had car-making rumors, and the exposure of Apple's car-making has also been intermittent for several years. When successful digital manufacturers began to take out a lot of real money and silver, they went down to build cars. Car companies took out a part of the cost and began to build mobile phones, which are generally seen as a defensive act of revenge.
After all, for car companies like Geely and Weilai, if you want to build mobile phones, invest 10 billion yuan, it is not a big money, compared to cars, the production difficulty of mobile phones is also much simpler, and there are precedents in the industry, such as BYD has a foundry mobile phone business, accounting for a large piece of the company's revenue.
On the other hand, everyone knows that the Internet of Everything will become the most important future trend in the field of smart devices, and mobile phones and cars, as the two most important terminal devices in the lives of ordinary consumers, the need for interconnection is very clear. Car companies make mobile phones, which also meets the hard demand of making their own mobile phones smoother and their own models.
But after a communication with the industry, I found that car companies make mobile phones, there is not so much impulse and revenge, and in the short term, there is not so-called huge vision of realizing the Internet of Everything, but to solve some of the most practical problems.
This industry insider once worked for a domestic car company specializing in smart car machines, and his company had also considered making mobile phones, so he told me a set of fairly simple and direct business logic.
At that time, the reason why they wanted to make mobile phones was very simple, because from the hardware and technical level, it was not difficult to make a smooth car standard central control screen, but in order to make this screen carry better content, the negotiation process with content providers became the biggest difficulty.
They negotiated with a well-known video platform in China, hoping that this video platform can be stationed in the car machine, so that the car machine can also play the video of this platform, but the condition proposed by the video platform is that each video member on the car machine needs a membership fee of 16 yuan per month, because the car company has many models, the size of the car screen is also very large, and the video platform is not willing to undertake the adaptation work.
Because for the video platform, it can not make much money in this cooperation, but also has to take a lot of human and technical costs to adapt, the gain is not worth the loss. No matter how much a car company sells smart cars, the volume is still very small for mobile phone users.
The technical threshold of mobile phones is far less high than that of cars, and now the homogenization of products launched by mobile phone manufacturers is also very strong, and car companies want to make a mobile phone with good appearance online, smooth system and good function, which will not be too difficult. Compared with mobile phones, the consumption unit price of the car is very high, often the whole family decision, the user's sense of trust in their own car brand, the probability will be much higher than the mobile phone brand used for themselves. Because of a car, it is possible for the whole family to change the mobile phone to the brand of the car.
That is to say, as long as the mobile phone is built well, for car companies, in the negotiation with the content platform or software developer, there is a user volume that is several times higher than that of the simple car machine, and the initiative and bargaining power are suddenly improved. The car screen also has the opportunity to carry more Internet content.
Let the car screen really play a role, will become a large number of car companies in the short term in the creation of intelligent electric vehicles and even new fuel vehicles, need to consider the problem, now some car companies will integrate various functions through Tencent small scenes, but the process of selecting a function by multiple clicks, is particularly unsuitable for driving This use scenario, to solve the user's mobile phone end to the car machine end of the content presentation, will become all the intention to highlight the intelligent car companies, will do.
Of course, for car companies, improving bargaining power and optimizing ecological deployment are only a small part of the purpose of making mobile phones.
Because inspired by Tesla, as long as there are manufacturers who intend to improve the driving assistance function of their own models, they will generally turn on the sensors in the user's car, collect road and driving data, and then upload a large amount of real data to the cloud to optimize their own high-level assisted driving algorithms. This function is called shadow mode in Tesla, and the car in the hands of each consumer will help Tesla accumulate real road conditions through the way of background self-opening, under the premise of ensuring user privacy.
However, there is a very realistic problem for car companies that the amount of data in the auxiliary driving part is very large, and the traffic cost of data uploading will be very high. Therefore, Tesla's strategy is to deploy some specific scenes in the shadow mode, only if a specific scene is triggered, the vehicle will choose to upload this part of the road conditions, and the user's daily driving behavior will only have about 4% of the data left to be uploaded. Most domestic car companies have similar strategies.
With the increasing number of users in car companies, these traffic used to optimize the assisted driving algorithm will also become a significant cost. What most people don't know is that operators charge car companies for traffic, which is much more expensive than the traffic prices used by ordinary people on mobile phones, and even now every time car companies update their own models, they need to consider their own traffic costs.
If the car company has its own brand mobile phone, and the user will use the mobile phone and his own brand car at the same time, the actual road data used to optimize the auxiliary driving on the car can be uploaded to the user's mobile phone through a private protocol, and when the user goes home or arrives at the company, the mobile phone is connected to Wi-Fi, and then the data is uploaded to the car company's server.
This operation mode will not have any impact on the user's use behavior, and can save a lot of costs for car companies. However, this model is difficult for car companies to cooperate with mobile phone manufacturers, and they must make their own mobile phones to achieve.
Another advantage of self-made mobile phones is that car companies can understand users more.
Although most new cars are now equipped with a large screen, equipped with more or less networking functions, even if the user drives and commutes for a long time every day, the real operation of the large screen in the car is very small. In addition, with the popularization of intelligence, the country's very strict privacy regulations, it is difficult for car companies to collect user preferences and improve the level of intelligence through a simple car. After all, now, or even in the next decade, the smart terminal that is most closely connected to users is most likely a smartphone.
After creating a mobile phone from the brand, the car company can completely use the user operation means to use the app owner points exchange method to hand over the mobile phone to the consumer at a low price or even for free, as long as the consumer uses it, the car company can harvest a huge amount of data that far exceeds the car can collect, and provide more humanized intelligent functions after in-depth understanding of the user.
So even now, car companies to make mobile phones, if the fierce competition in the mobile phone industry has become a situation in the Red Sea, simply selling mobile phones to make a profit in business logic, is very unwise. But when considering the overall situation, all ambitious smart car manufacturers, self-made mobile phones, a high probability will become a necessary road.
At the beginning of the establishment of Weilai, the founder Qin Lihong once said such a sentence when he was interviewed: In the past, car companies were in addition to products, compared to delivery and channels. In the future, car companies will have more contact points than who are users.
After a few years, this methodology has gradually been recognized by more and more companies in the car industry, and in the future, the competition for user contacts will most likely continue to the user's life and family in addition to mobile phones.