The opening words of the corporate bigwigs when they met 10 years ago: "Hey, did you make a mobile phone?" ”
Now it's like, "Hey, did you build a car?" ”
After 10 years of change, intelligent and cloud interconnection on mobile phones have begun to slowly be reflected in cars. Those big guys with huge capital have also begun to shift the focus of investment to "cross-border car manufacturing". However, although they are all building cars, the way everyone enters is completely different. Some big guys focus on vehicle manufacturing, and some focus on driverless development. It can be said that eight immortals cross the sea and show their abilities.
So starting today, let's count what these crossover big guys have done to the car.
Tencent
Among the three giants of BAT (Baidu, Ali, and Tencent), I chose Tencent as the beginning. Maybe the reason is because it's the company that has been with me the longest. About all the years of my youth, almost all of it has its shadow.
Officially registered and founded in 1998, Tencent has since slowly created a miracle in the Chinese Internet (with 1.2 billion active users)
Today, Tencent has become a multi-dimensional group giant. In many fields, we can find its presence. Therefore, Tencent's involvement in the automobile track is not unexpected.
Tencent's earliest big move in the automotive industry can be traced back to 2013. At that time, Didi Dache created a new Internet travel mode, and Tencent was moved by the wind and successively invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Didi Dache. Although Didi's performance has since gone up, after some twists and turns, Didi," which was listed last year (with a market value of nearly $20 billion), did not bring much revenue to Tencent (Tencent accounted for 6.4% of the shares).
Tencent's investment in Didi can only be seen as a capital operation of a company in the field of travel. In 2015, its cooperation with Foxconn and Harmony Automobile can clearly see that Tencent wants to do something in the car.
On March 23, 2015, Tencent, Foxconn and Harmony Automobile (domestic luxury car dealers) signed the Strategic Framework Agreement on "Internet + Smart Internet Electric Vehicles" in Zhengzhou. The three parties announced that they will jointly invest 1 billion yuan in a 3:3:4 ratio to build a new generation of intelligent electric vehicles.
Founded by three companies, Harmony Fortex first founded FMC (Future Mobility Corp), and the quality of its executive team is amazing.
CEO: Bi Fukang, former vice president of BMW Group. (Responsible for the BMW i8 project)
COO: Dai Lei, former general manager of Dongfeng Infiniti.
There is also the development of the electric drivetrain of the BMW i series, the main designer of the i series and the product manager of the i series.
The high-tech work team and the financial support of the big guys have made FMC confidently position its products as high-end electric vehicles, and vowed to make the first car debut in 2017. It seems that everything is moving towards the best possible situation. But actually...
FMC's brand - Byton
In 2017, Tencent and Foxconn successively withdrew from the project. Before announcing this result, Tencent and Foxconn both said at various press conferences that the success rate of car manufacturing is too low, and they will no longer invest in vehicle projects. After that, FMC struggled to support and launched its own brand - Byton. But after several concept cars were unveiled in a few years, FMC went bankrupt and restructured.
In response to This time Tencent's shallow taste of car-building actions, we can see that Tencent has the intention to build cars, but it knows that vehicle manufacturing is not the right way to enter. So Tencent resolutely stranded the project and released other people's pigeons...
After going around, Tencent finally found the direction of entering the automotive industry after various attempts - playing soft, not hard. Simply put, Tencent will avoid the fact that its hardware manufacturing capabilities are weak, and instead develop autonomous driving and the Internet of Vehicles that require soft computing. According to Zhong Xiangping, vice president of Tencent, "From the perspective of the industry, there is no shortage of new car-making forces, but it is more necessary to have a digital network." It can connect the upstream and downstream partners of the travel industry chain, open up the digital channel of the whole link of the industry, connect the whole life cycle of users, and form a circulating and flexible growth 'net'. ”
Tencent autonomous driving
In 2017, Tencent began to develop an autonomous driving simulation platform, TAD Sim, which has three core competitivenesses. First, based on Tencent's powerful game engine capabilities, the sensor modeling and calibration can ensure that the simulation of its three-dimensional scenes and the simulation of the sensor have industry-leading realism and accuracy. Second, the TAD Sim scene generation system supports a variety of scene sources, in addition to the more common scene editor and playback type roadmender data simulation, you can also use a large number of roadmeal data to train traffic flow AI, generate high-realism, highly interactive scene AI, for closed-loop simulation, greatly improving the utilization rate of roadmeal data. 3. Based on Tencent Cloud Service, TAD Sim can deploy test scenarios both locally and in the cloud.
Tencent TAD Sim
At present, TAD Sim has been iterated to version 2.0. In July 2019, it prompted Tencent and BMW China to collaborate on the industry's first autonomous driving development cloud project. Nowadays, Tencent has completed the high-precision map collection and data production of expressways and highways in key cities across the country. In the near future, it will also promote the application of autonomous driving solutions in high-speed scenarios.
Tencent Car Alliance TAI
In terms of the Internet of Vehicles, Tencent released the Tencent Car Alliance TAI in order to integrate the ecological resources of entertainment content, social networking, and travel services. At the 2021 Tencent Ecosystem Conference held recently, Tencent Car Tai has been updated to version 4.0. In order to create a more humanized smart cockpit for users, Tencent has fully linked the functions of connecting the smart driving map with WeChat, immersive in-car entertainment, and rich service ecology.
As of today, Tencent Car NetworkING TAI has carried out in-depth cooperation with 35 car companies, with a total of more than 7 million vehicles.
Write at the end:
Nowadays, Tencent has not only launched products that serve the vehicle itself, but also invested in the automotive industry. For the current "three national treasures" of Weilai Automobile, Tencent has accounted for 16.3% of the shares after several rounds of investment. (Weilai market value of 37 billion US dollars) Even Renrenche and UxinPai, which serve the auto aftermarket, have also received investment support from Tencent. It can be said that at present, in addition to the vehicle manufacturing project, Tencent really seems to have spread a big net and conquered the automobile market in an all-round way. Although we may not see a car with Tencent LOGO printed on it in the future, Tencent may appear in every car in the future.