Produced by | Tiger sniff car group
Author | Zhang Bowen
Header image | IC Photo
In the past two years, if you pay attention to the new energy field, or have the intention of buying new energy vehicles, you will find a very obvious trend.
The public opinion discourse power of Tesla and several new car-making forces is too heavy, and the degree of attention is too high. Other new energy brands, whether they are born from traditional brands, sub-brands that specialize in new energy, or new energy models with traditional fuel factories hanging their own brand logo, which is a golden signboard, consumers basically do not pay attention to it, and even this brand does not know about new cars.
Even the media, it is easy to fall into the situation that has been staring at the movements of one or two companies, technology and new cars, after all, people's energy is limited, and there are so many things happening in the entire electric vehicle circle every day, it is difficult to understand everything comprehensively.
What made me feel this way was a recent communication with Wu Bing, CEO of Feifan Automobile, and a look at the company's new car, feifan R7.
To be honest, as an automotive media that has driven almost all mainstream electric vehicles in the world, I was very unfamiliar with the name of this company when I first heard it, until I found out that Feifan Automobile is a sub-brand of SAIC, which was previously called R brand, and later called R standard for a period of time.
According to the CEO of Feifan Automobile: the establishment of Feifan Automobile is not a simple change of standard, in a sense, it is a process of continuous deepening of the understanding of the future development of new energy strategies of large automobile enterprise groups, through the operation of the past period of time, let us deeply understand that as a huge market development track, it is necessary to have an independent company to operate such a brand and do a complete product spectrum, so as to truly meet the needs of consumers.
From the perspective of the onlooker media, such a continuous adjustment of the brand name, it is difficult not to make people wonder that this is the back and forth swing of the brand strategy, and for consumers, the old owners will feel that the brand they once believed in will not be yellow for a long time, and the potential owners will also worry about whether if they buy a car, will the brand change again after a while.
However, the brand name change has become an established fact, in essence, it depends on the subsequent development of the brand and the absolute product power of the new car.
From the perspective of pure product strength, according to the information that has now been made public, the Feifan R7 will be a very interesting car.
It is interesting because from the hardware, the Feifan R7 is a car that piles up various hardware configurations as much as possible, but almost all the high configurations will be a big test for the software delivery and subsequent investment ability of Feifan Automobile.
The Feifan car tube R7 is called the extremely intelligent high-end SUV, which is quite modest in positioning, but it is true that the configuration of the Feifan R7 is quite high.
All high configurations can be divided into 3 pieces.
First of all, the high-level driving assistance part, according to the official announcement, Feifan R7 exclusively developed the PP-CEM pixel-level point cloud fusion high-level intelligent driving solution, which is equipped with up to 33 high-performance perception sensors, which can achieve all-weather, full-scene, over-the-horizon, multi-dimensional six-fold perception fusion program.
This should be the smart driving solution with the highest accuracy and the highest cost on the market, and it is also the solution with the most redundancy and the highest requirements for multi-sensor fusion algorithms.
LuMINAR for the roof of the Feifan R7 is currently the company's highest specification of lidar, using a 1550nm light source, which can achieve the longest detection distance of more than 500 meters and high-precision target recognition, and can also ensure performance in extreme weather conditions such as dense fog and dust.
Secondly, in terms of cockpit, Feifan R7 used a set of 43-inch triple screens as instruments, central control and co-pilot screens, of which the central control screen is OLED material, the resolution is also very high, can reach 2.5K, and also equipped with an AR-HUD equivalent to a 70-inch screen, and the chip is also used this year's vehicle-level flagship chip Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155.
The most interesting part is the battery and the recharge, the endurance is 600km, the motor is 400kW maximum peak power, 700N · m The highest peak torque, cooling has also been changed from the more common water cooling on the market to the oil cooling that is more conducive to continuous high-performance output. Even a power swap is supported, which can be done in 150 seconds. This also makes the Feifan R7 the first consumer-facing, replaceable, flagship SUV on the market after Weilai.
And from the appearance point of view, I personally feel that this car design is not bad, the appearance is very advanced.
But does this mean that the Flying R7 will definitely succeed? Not really.
Under the extremely high hardware configuration, there are still some problems that may occur in the future, we will say one by one.
In terms of assisted driving, the more sensors, it is certainly more conducive to perceiving and accumulating more redundant environmental information, but the more data collected, the greater the pressure on computing power and algorithms, how to integrate sensor data from different suppliers and eventually output it into driving decisions, will be a problem. Because of the industry's internal volume, various car companies will also choose to use lidar on flagship products, but there are not many models or scenarios that really call lidar in assisted driving.
On the other hand, now most car companies are advocating the so-called hardware first full, software functions follow-up OTA ideas look reasonable, the actual operation is not so simple, in essence, once the sensor hardware is set well positioned, the whole vehicle determines the computing power, what kind of driving assistance function can be finally achieved by a car, the car company is the clearest in mind. For consumers, in fact, no one will really care what kind of driving assistance hardware a car piles up, basically only to see whether the function is good or not.
In terms of smart cockpit, the supply chain at this stage has been able to deliver a large enough size and good display quality to car companies, and after using the Qualcomm 8155 chip, the touch and sliding experience of the entire screen can also be very smooth.
However, the larger the size of the screen, it means that more content can be displayed, and it will also pose more challenges to the design of the UX experience of car companies. How to ensure that the content display is sufficient and not chaotic, how to ensure that all the functions are easy enough to use and will not distract the driver, and even how to weigh the display brightness of the screen in different light environments, this extremely detailed function will affect the experience of the entire large-screen vehicle.
In the part of the power exchange, the problem is more direct, because it involves the construction of the infrastructure of the power station, how many replacement power stations will be laid by manufacturers, how many specifications of batteries will be prepared, what kind of power exchange programs are provided to users, and even because of the laying of the power station, the fixation of the battery size, the follow-up products of this brand will still use the same size of the same battery. As long as Feifan R7 is clear about taking the road of changing electricity, what Weilai has done, the money spent, and the service system built, Feifan needs to go again.
That is to say, in essence, in the era of intelligent electric vehicles, the launch of a car with a very high hardware configuration, providing a high enough price, it is indeed not easy, but for consumers, this is actually just a big pie drawn by the brand to the user, in the short term, it is only possible to eat "my car configuration is very high" This part of the pie crust, what the enterprise has to do is to follow up through software, through service, so that users can truly experience the high-end experience brought by the high-end configuration.
There is no doubt that this is very difficult and takes a lot of time.
But in order for users to really be willing to pay for the pie drawn by the car, there are actually only two paths, one is that the potential owner has extra trust in the brand, and the other is that the car company has come up with a set of functions that are as perfect as possible and to a certain extent ahead of the competitors when it is first delivered, rather than simply throwing everything to the follow-up OTA solution.
In the process of interviewing Wu Bing, CEO of Feifan Automobile, he repeatedly emphasized the brand DNA of Feifan Automobile: authenticity, pioneering and taste. Emphasize that in the future publicity process of their own brand, they will also pay attention to the relationship between user expectations and actual products, not exaggerated, truly face the voice of users, and provide services and products that the brand believes are worthy of conscience.
For Feifan Automobile, such a back-to-back SAIC has built several cars, but for potential consumers on the market, or a brand of new entrants, authenticity is indeed the most basic character to win the trust of consumers.
The rest can only wait for the car to go public.