【EV Vision Report】At the 2021 Guangzhou Auto Show, Nezha Automobile officially unveiled Nezha S at this auto show, which is closer to mass production than the previous concept version of Nezha S. In addition, the official also brought a new mountain and sea platform. Shanhai Platform is a full-stack self-developed intelligent safety vehicle platform released by Nezha Automobile that integrates high safety, high scalability, high intelligence and environmental friendliness.
"Mountains and seas" have specific connotations in Chinese civilization, the mountains are tall and majestic, and the waves of the sea are magnificent. The posture of mountains and seas is a state of calmness and self-confidence. Nezha Automobile named the new platform "Shanhai", which means that in the era of rapid development of the new energy automobile industry, it will meet the future star sea with this attitude!
On February 28, 2022, Nezha Automobile held a "Netalks" media exchange meeting in Beijing. At the meeting, Nezha Automobile announced the intelligent driving system TA PILOT, and for the first time mentioned that Nezha Automobile will cooperate with Huawei, which will become the industry's first intelligent driving mass production program equipped with Huawei's MDC platform and OEM software self-development mode.
Why was it named "TA PILOT"?
TA is taken from the English name NETA suffix of Nezha Automobile; TA is also taken from the TALENT prefix, talented PILOT literal translation of the talented navigator.
TA PILOT is about to be fully equipped, and Nezha is about to be armed to the teeth
At the exchange meeting, Nezha Automobile said that it will soon install the intelligent driving system TA PILOT in the entire product line, and will adopt TA PILOT 2.0, TA PILOT 3.0, TA PILOT 4.0 and TA PILOT 5.0 according to different models.
The mass-produced Nezha U (Parameter | Offer) series/V series and subsequent models have already deployed TA PILOT 2.0 and 3.0, while TA PILOT 4.0 will be installed on the Nezha S, which will be launched at the end of this year. Ta PILOT 5.0, which is fully developed and has 1000+ TOPS, is still under development
Is the core configuration of TA PILOT 4.0 really reliable?
In the above article, we mentioned that TA PILOT 4.0 will be listed at the end of this year on the Nezha S equipped with mass production, TA PILOT 4.0 uses MDC610 chips from Huawei, and the computing power can reach 200TOPS. In terms of hardware configuration, it will use 2 solid-state lidars; 11 assisted driving cameras, including 2 forward 8M cameras, 4 surround view cameras, 5 circumferential vision cameras; 5 millimeter wave radars and 12 ultrasonic sensors.
The author through the current information to see, most of the models on the market are less than 400 TOPS, and even more almost reached the 1000 TOPS hash rate, then TA PILOT 4.0 uses the MDC610 chip from Huawei, can the computing power reach 200 TOPS be reliable?
According to this problem, in the on-site explanation work, Wang Junping, vice president of the Nezha Automobile Intelligence Research Institute, said that from the perspective of the entire environment, the current computing power of many intelligent cars is excessive, and these costs are also spread to consumers to pay. Although Nezha's hash rate is lower than other brands, it still has a high cost performance ratio, and it can also be upgraded through OTA in the later stage. There is also a purpose of choosing Huawei, that is, to support the development of domestic chips.
The author believes that if consumers trust and choose to apply intelligent assisted driving, then when driving on the actual road, they must hope that their cars have higher computing power, after all, "spending money to buy safety" may be the current cognition of most consumers. If in the actual use of the later stage, Nezha TA PILOT can indeed reach a higher level of strength, it will certainly be widely recognized, which will have to wait until our later evaluation.
Based on the above, in the future, the product function development of Nezha Automobile can realize NNP-Nezha Intelligent Pilot Assist, NTP-Nezha Memory Parking and NCP-Nezha City Pilot.
On the eve of this exchange meeting, Nezha Automobile officially announced the latest information of its new model Nezha S. It is reported that the new car will launch a pure electric version and an extended range version of two models, of which the extended range version of the NEDC endurance of up to 1100km. In addition, the new car is equipped with a self-developed HozonEPT4.0 constant temperature thermal management system, which effectively increases the cruising range by 20%.
It is understood that Nezha S will be equipped with a new generation of self-developed HozonEPT4.0 constant temperature heat management system, which is an integrated heat management system based on a highly integrated water source heat pump, which protects the performance and safety of the car by opening up the heat management of the whole vehicle and opening up the thermal management of the occupant compartment, battery, electric drive and electronic components. Realize the concentration of the physical part of all components and the concentration of the part control part, reduce the overall number of pipelines by 40%, increase reliability by 50%, and the working range of the heat pump is down to -18 °C.
In addition, Nezha S is equipped with intelligent dual-zone air conditioning, which can be based on the ambient temperature, electric drive temperature, battery cell temperature and other states, according to the temperature difference between the target temperature of the air conditioner main/co-driver and the ambient temperature, automatically calculate the wind direction adjustment mode, in the -20 °C, 40km/h driving process, 10 minutes in the car can reach the comfortable temperature.
In terms of power, Nezha S adopts a front and rear dual motor design, with a peak power of 340kW. In addition, the new car will launch two power versions, range extender and pure electric, of which the pure electric version of the NEDC has a range of 710km, while the extended range of the extended version is 1100km.
Huawei provides hardware support, Nezha carries out software self-research, 1+1 may be greater than 2?
The dividing line of cooperation is clear, Huawei provides hardware support, and the software level Nezha intelligent driving team conducts self-research. So why is Nezha and now more and more OEMs doing full-stack self-research? It can be said that the traditional automobile ecology can not provide a good intelligent ability and driving experience, intelligent track everyone is in the same starting line, like Nezha Automobile such a new force enterprise can be said to be in a relatively good era. It is also true that only by self-study can we get out of our own path.
Speaking of the demand for intelligent driving, the current trend of consumer group rejuvenation is becoming more and more obvious, and now young people can be said to be the natives of the "intelligent" era, the requirements for intelligent experience are getting higher and higher, and it is more and more important to respond quickly to user needs and improve intelligent driving experience. Intelligent driving is a long-term track, in order to adapt to the characteristics of long-term and rapid iteration, the full-stack self-developed way can ensure rapid iteration of products and form a long-term system capability accumulation, and finally provide customers with a leading and safe driving experience.
What car companies are cooperating with Huawei at the moment?
According to Huawei's current market position and strength, a number of car companies are or plan to carry out in-depth cooperation with Huawei. Models being worked on include the Huawei HI version of the Alpha S, the SF5 of Cyrus, and the recent hit AITO M5.
The Alpha S HI version is equipped with Huawei ADS full-stack autonomous driving solution and Hongmeng OS intelligent interconnection system. The Xilis SF5 adopts the dual-electric four-drive combination of XILIX SEP200 motor + Huawei DriveONE three-in-one electric drive, and is equipped with HUAWEI HiCar all-scenario intelligent interconnection system, HUAWEI Sound audio and other technologies. AITO Q&I M5 is the first mass-produced SUV equipped with the latest Hongmeng system and many intelligent solutions from Huawei, and Huawei has invested in many parties and carried out a direct sales model of Huawei's offline flagship store.
In the intelligent driving solution adopted by Nezha Automobile, the cooperation dividing line is clear, Huawei provides hardware support, and the software level Nezha intelligent driving team develops itself.
To improve the coherence of the driving experience, can the adaptability of 'Scene +' gain consumer trust?
From simple driving scenarios to complex scenes, the system often requires drivers to frequently take over or intervene, or even quit, which will bring users great anxiety, and lack of trust in intelligent driving over time. Around this point, intelligent driving requires full-scene adaptation, ensuring the consistency of the experience and thus gaining the trust of consumers.
1. Weaken the driving level and strengthen the 'Scene +' layout
Nezha Automobile's intelligent driving technology is gradually weakening the concept of driving level, and gradually enhancing the expression of the scene, realizing the coverage of the whole scenic spot to the point, extending from high speed to the main road in the urban area, parking lot, residential area, and even covering all semi-closed unstructured roads, enhancing the coherence of the cross-scene functional experience.
In the industry, the difficulty of full-scene coverage lies in solving the driving ability of the area without HIGH-precision map coverage, city ends, semi-closed and closed areas, because of factors such as high cost of map data collection and information limitations, it is impossible to achieve full coverage of high-definition maps. In order to solve this problem, Nezha Automobile took the lead in proposing the 'last 5 kilometers' scenario, and developed a solution that relies on perception ability, which is a forward-looking thinking on the difficulties of the industry and customer needs.
2. LiDAR support to enhance the perception ability of complex scenes
With the blessing of lidar and front-looking 8M camera, obstacle type recognition is more abundant and environmental portrayal is more accurate. In order to adapt to the complex urban traffic environment, Nezha intelligent driving system adopts lidar multi-perspective scheme and visual feature-level fusion perception scheme. The last 5 km scene is constructed by fusing the navigation map and the on-board sensor to generate a local map in real time, and the parking scene uses lidar to improve safety and garage cross-layer capabilities, and lidar plays a very large role in improving the adaptability and system robustness of the above scenarios.
3. Data closed-loop
The advanced nature of intelligent driving systems is largely reflected in the effectiveness of handling various long-tail scenarios. In order to improve the adaptability to long-tail scenarios, the algorithm must be continuously improved through data. Therefore, the realization of data closed loop is the current core power point of Nezha Automobile, and it is expected to achieve algorithm iteration and product upgrade through data closed loop to promote experience upgrade. Specifically, it is embodied in three points, self-developed data-driven algorithms, collect massive high-quality training data, and develop an efficient automated data processing platform.
Data-driven algorithms can continuously learn the ability to generalize scene recognition through data; in terms of data sources, as more and more Nezha cars are equipped with intelligent driving systems, the data will increase in geometric multiples, and it is expected that the cumulative data volume will reach 10+ PB in 2022, and the large-scale simulation platform will reach millions of kilometers per day. In order to make more efficient use of data, Nezha Automobile has developed an automated processing platform, relying on large-scale heterogeneous data lakes, semi-automatic annotation large models, ultra-high computing power GPU clusters, large-scale simulation platforms and data mining algorithms, continuously mining effective scene data in massive data, and iteratively verifying algorithms.
The intelligent driving team will exceed 500 people, and the total investment will exceed 10 billion
High investment does not necessarily have a high return, but there will be no return without investment. As of now, the number of Nezha Automobile Intelligent Hospital has exceeded 600 people, and will reach 1,000 people in 2022. Among them, the intelligent driving team of Nezha Automobile currently has more than 300 people, and the proportion of master's and doctoral degrees is more than 80%, of which the proportion of algorithm software personnel has reached 70%. In 2022, the team size of Nezha Automobile's intelligent driving team will exceed 500 people.
Summary: The author has been transferring from gasoline editor to new energy editor for 4 years, and has seen too many PPT cars and false propaganda cars, and there are too many new energy brands that have not yet seen real cars, and they have disappeared. Compared with these brands, Nezha Automobile has taken every step from the beginning to the present is down-to-earth, and it has never played a virtual game, which is the place we are most happy to see as a new force car manufacturer. Through the release of TA PLIOT, it can also be seen that the future Nezha Automobile will gradually transform into intelligence and enter a new track.