From Internet car manufacturing to car companies making mobile phones, cross-border competition has become the norm in the industry

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At this time last year, there was a very hot word called "Internet car", when Baidu, Xiaomi, Ali, Didi and other Internet companies announced car manufacturing. At the beginning of this year, the industry has come out with a hot word, called "car companies make mobile phones". Car companies led by Geely and Weilai have begun to make their own mobile phones.

For example, Geely announced that it will invest 10 billion yuan to build mobile phones, and plans to launch products in 2023. Recently, it has been reported that Geely is acquiring Meizu mobile phones. Similarly, Weilai Automobile also wants to make mobile phones, and it is to build mobile phones from 0 and refuse to accept any form of OEM. Moreover, not only domestic car companies make mobile phones, Musk has also hinted in interviews many times that Tesla will enter the smart phone business. The name of the phone is all thought out, called Model π.

From Internet car manufacturing to car companies making mobile phones, cross-border competition has become the norm in the industry.

Why do car companies want to build mobile phones? When we talked about Internet car manufacturing before, we said that in the future, data, like oil, is the most important factor of production. At present, the hardware port that collects big data on user behavior is the mobile phone; the main port of the next generation may be the smart car. Internet car manufacturing is to seize the main entrance of the next generation of data collection.

In turn, car companies make mobile phones, which is also this logic. The essence of smart cars is to change the car from a mechanical device to an electronic device, the so-called "software-defined car, data determines the experience" Whoever has more user data can optimize the user experience better. Where does more data come from? Although the industry believes that the next generation of the main data entrance may be smart cars, but that era has not yet arrived.

Now smart cars are equipped with central control screens or even multiple screens, but most drivers are driving, the operation is still relatively small, and the user's main behavior data is still on the mobile phone. What's more, do users spend more time with the car or more time with their phones? Therefore, car companies want to obtain more user data and optimize user experience, of course, they have to build their own mobile phones. As Geely Li Shufu said: "The better development of mobile phones can bring better development of car machines, and the better development of car machines can promote the continuous improvement of the level of intelligent cockpits, thereby helping the competitiveness of smart cars to continuously improve." ”

Of course, in addition to the underlying logic of data acquisition, car companies make mobile phones, and there are more realistic considerations.

You know, smart cars are divided into two systems: smart driving and smart cockpit. In the intelligent driving part, a realistic consideration for car companies to make mobile phones is to reduce traffic costs.

Smart cars will be equipped with multiple sensors, such as Xiaopeng's latest P5 model, equipped with 32 sensors, including 13 high-definition cameras, 5 millimeter wave radar, 12 ultrasonic radar and 2 lidar. The massive amount of data collected by these sensors needs to be sent back to the cloud to optimize the algorithm. Because the amount of data to be uploaded is amazing, and the traffic fee charged by operators to car companies is much higher than that of mobile phones, uploading data is very expensive.

Users with conditions can park their car in their garage and connect to Wi-Fi at home, or install a charging pile with their own Wi-Fi, but such applications are not yet popular. If the car company makes its own mobile phone, then you can first transmit the data collected by the car to the mobile phone, and then upload the data to the cloud when you get to the place where there is Wi-Fi, which can save a lot of traffic costs.

In addition to the traffic considerations of the intelligent driving part, in the smart cockpit part, the car company has a realistic consideration for making mobile phones, that is, it has more bargaining power when negotiating with the video platform.

Although the current smart car is equipped with a large screen, the use experience is not good. To watch entertainment videos, you have to borrow a screen-casting mini program, which is very troublesome. If you want to install a video APP directly on the car machine, then the car company has to find a video platform to talk. The specifications of the car screen are various, the video software is very expensive if it has to be adapted one by one, and the sales of smart cars are two orders of magnitude worse than mobile phones, and the video platform has no incentive to do this. Car companies really want to install, that has to pay the video platform every month according to the number of each user, and this money is also a pain in the flesh. Car companies make their own mobile phones and have a larger user base, so they are more confident in talking with video platforms.

Some people even open their minds and say that in the future, it is possible that the mobile phone itself is the core component of the smart car. That is to say, the smart cockpit no longer needs to be equipped with a smart car machine, and the mobile phone is the car machine. As soon as people get on the car, the folding screen of the mobile phone is fully expanded, which is a large car screen. Then switch the mobile phone to the intelligent car mode with one click to realize the full function of the car machine. Moreover, you can design the location of the mobile phone in the center control, co-driver, and rear seat of the car, and the people on the car will have a device that will not interfere with each other, get out of the car and take the mobile phone away, when the normal mobile phone is used.

More importantly, the smart cockpit with the mobile phone as the core can also be upgraded at any time. Cars often take more than ten years, and it is very troublesome to replace the chip in the middle, and it is often left behind in a few years. The mobile phone is changed once every two or three years, and the smart cockpit can be upgraded at any time. Of course, in order to create a smart cockpit with a mobile phone as the core, car companies must also personally make mobile phones, after all, the core components of the car can not fake others.

Qin Lihong, co-founder of Weilai Automobile, said: "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 whose users are. In short, whether it is the Internet car or the car company to make mobile phones, it is to "stay" around the user as much as possible. As long as you're there, you have a chance.

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