IT companies and auto companies are vying for dominance of the future car?

Collaboration between automakers benefiting from globalization and the tech giants leading the IT era is also taking a different form than ever before. We are entering an era of cooperation, not an era of consolidation. Horizontal division of labour, alliances and collaborations take place through equal relationships rather than suppliers. Cooperation between IT companies and technology companies is taking place in various forms. Of course, the focus is on the hardware of electric vehicles and the software of self-driving cars. Let's look at Waymo in the United States and Geely Cars in China. Sony and Honda are achieving positive results.

[1] Waymo and Geely Automobile Group jointly developed a robot taxi

In 2009, Google really surfaced the concept of self-driving cars. Google announced in 2013 that it would launch a fully autonomous car in 2018, but that didn't happen. Alphabet's subsidiary Waymo was spun off in 2016 and initially tested using a hybrid minivan based on the previously sold Chrysler Pacifica. In 2017, it began public testing of vehicles with drivers and fully driverless vehicles. In 2019, Waymo, Renault and Nissan began researching the feasibility of new driverless mobility services.

In 2020, Waymo also tested the Jaguar i-Pace based on a fifth-generation autonomous driving system. That same year, it also agreed to work with Volvo to develop a ride-hailing self-driving car. At the same time, Daimler Trucks decided to jointly develop a self-driving truck. In 2021, it will expand its partnership with global logistics giant UPS to strengthen its partnership with robotics semi-trucks beyond delivery trucks in Texas cities.

And at the end of 2021, Waymo is looking for a new way to get a robo-taxi from China's Geely Automobile Company. Through this acquisition, Geely Holdings aims to acquire Waymo's self-driving technology and expand its U.S. operations. Waymo offers a minivan from ZEEKR, a pure electric vehicle brand owned by Geely Automobile Group.

Founded in early 2021, Zecker is a global technology mobile brand with Swedish design and engineering resources.

Zecker Battery Electric Vehicle is waymo ONE's minivan, a taxi service using Waymo's self-driving cars, designed and developed by CeVT (European Vehicle Technology Center in China) in Gothenburg, Sweden, geely. Moga will integrate and operate autonomous vehicle drive technology. Geely said it will supply battery electric vehicles within a few years, with production to be a choice between the U.S. and China. Although it is not a joint venture, it has attracted much attention as an example of IT companies cooperating with automotive companies to develop complete vehicles.

[2] Baidu and Geely Automobile's joint venture Jidu Automobile

Like Waymo, search engine Baidu is also focusing on autonomous driving, turning to the automotive industry. It began in 2011 when the first Chinese company set up a development company in Silicon Valley, USA. In 2014, the company began jointly developing autonomous driving systems with BMW. The idea was to develop an autonomous driving system that was already in the works at the time to adapt to the situation in the Chinese market. Since then, Baidu has attracted many talents from American universities, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. In 2015, for the first time in China, driverless cars were successfully realized based on the BMW 3 Series. It travels 30 km /h at a top speed of 100 km/h. It is also the first in Asia. However, the partnership with BMW ended in 2016.

In 2017, Baidu announced Apollo, an open platform autonomous driving system development project. Named after NASA's lunar exploration program, the Apollo program aims to provide hardware and software service solutions, including aircraft platforms, hardware platforms, software platforms, and cloud data services. The goal was to develop fully autonomous vehicles by 2020.

The project, which aims to develop open, inclusive and reliable software for autonomous vehicles, is currently involved by more than 100 companies. About two-thirds are Chinese companies, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, Ford and other vehicle companies, Bosch, Continental, ZF, Velodyne and other hardware companies, software companies such as Microsoft and Tomtom. The plan is to use the huge market as a weapon to attract players from all over the world.

In 2018, the self-driving platform Apollo 2.5 was unveiled, and L4 self-driving cars were tested on public roads. In 2019, the 4-level robot taxi jointly produced with FAW Group Hongqi began test driving in Changsha, Hunan Province, and expanded to Beijing, Hunan, Changzhou and Hebei in 2020.

In 2020, in California, the center of autonomous driving technology development, the test mileage performance of China's Pony AI and Baidu ranked third and fourth after Google Waymo and GM Cruise, respectively. In particular, among the 33 companies that disclosed their 2019 results, Baidu had the lowest frequency of manual intervention per 29,000 kilometers. This means that drivers operate the steering wheel and brakes the least often compared to Waymo once every 21,000 km and GM Cruise once every 19,000 km.

Baidu originally intended to commercialize self-driving cars in 2020, but failed to achieve it, and set a goal of achieving large-scale commercialization of autonomous driving technology in the next 5 years.

In 2021, it will establish an electric intelligent vehicle joint venture with Geely Automobile, Jidu Automobile. Decided to produce a model based on Geely Automobile's pure electric vehicle platform.

There are many opinions about Baidu's entry into the automotive industry, but there is also a view that it is more likely to promote the robo-taxi business than to seriously produce and sell cars.

At the same time, Baidu launched the Apollo Moon, which was jointly developed with Arcfox, a new energy vehicle brand under BAIC Group. In addition, its goal is to build a fleet of 3,000 driverless taxis within two years, and by 2023, the total number of users in 30 cities is expected to reach 3 million.

[3] A joint venture between Alibaba and SAIC Motor, Zhiji Automobile

Alibaba began developing a car operating system in 2010 and first introduced a connected car in 2016. The Internet of Vehicles provides a variety of services such as AR navigation, intelligent speech recognition, high-definition maps, O2O service reservations, restaurant maps, and non-stop payment systems.

After these preparations, Alibaba and SAIC Motor established a joint venture company Zhiji Automobile, and began mass production of the first pure electric vehicle in December 2021. Zhiji's first product is the L7, a luxury car that will be launched in April this year.

In the Chinese market, this cooperation between these industries is taking place in various ways. Didi Chuxing's cooperation with BYD is one of them.

[4] Sony and Honda

Honda and Sony announced the establishment of an electric vehicle market alliance on March 4, 2022. It's been two years since CES launched vision S 01 in 2020. Sony and Honda will jointly form a new electric vehicle specialist to develop and sell electric vehicles. Honda is responsible for body development technology, while Sony is responsible for sensor technology and entertainment technology. The focus is on Honda in charge of mass production of cars, and Sony in charge of entertainment services such as music and movies.

After the sale of the first model in 2025, other companies are expected to join the partnership. Details such as ownership percentage and brand name will be discussed in the future.

In Sony's view, in addition to purchasing in-vehicle batteries and drives that are key components of Honda's electric vehicles, Honda seems to be using mass production technology to efficiently manufacture cars, while Honda uses Sony's IT, sensors and entertainment equipment.

【Summary】

The cooperation between the automotive industry and the IT industry seems to be competing for the dominance of the future car, but in fact it is trying to form a close relationship.

However, in such a process, in the case of the integration of different sensibilities in the industry, it is also a challenge to create synergies through automobiles and technology.

But there is also a special case in the automotive industry, which is Tesla. Tesla develops almost everything on its own, and even the battery wants to get rid of its dependence on Panasonic. The automotive industry is changing dramatically, and it's hard to say who will be the last to laugh in the future.