Jiwei Network reported, "If new energy vehicles are compared to the first half, intelligent networked vehicles are compared to the second half, China's automotive industry has achieved great results in the first half, but the decision to win or lose is still in the second half." Miao Wei, deputy director of the Economic Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, pointed out at the 2022 China Electric Vehicle 100 Forum on Saturday (March 26).
In the first half of the competition of the new energy vehicle track, the start of China's auto industry has achieved good results. Statistics show that since 2015, China's new energy vehicles have achieved the world's first production and sales for 7 consecutive years. According to the China Automobile Association, the passenger car share of Chinese brands reached 44.4% last year, of which the growth mainly came from new energy vehicle brands, and China has become an important driving force for the transformation of pure electric drives in the global automotive industry. Taking electrification as an important step in "lane change and overtaking" has become the consensus of the domestic automotive industry.
Now that competition has entered a new stage, the revolution around intelligent networking in the second half is obviously more critical and will be more intense.
Intelligent networked vehicle technology has entered a critical period of landing
The leapfrog development of the new energy vehicle market is driven by technologies such as vehicles, components, and electronic and electrical architectures. Under this "unprecedented change in the global automotive industry", the automobile is gradually transforming into a large-scale mobile intelligent terminal - the power system is transforming from an internal combustion engine drive to a pure electric drive, the control system is evolving from distributed to centralized control, and the automotive products are moving from closed systems to open systems.
Unmanned driving is the ultimate goal of this change has been the industry consensus, and the next key lies in the landing of intelligent network technology. Compared with the electrification transformation in the first half, intelligent connected vehicles involve a wider range, higher technical complexity, and obviously have greater challenges.
At present, L2-level autonomous driving in passenger cars has achieved large-scale commercial applications, and 22.2% of full-caliber passenger cars in 2021 have installed L2 and below automatic driving systems, and technologies such as adaptive cruise (ACC), automatic emergency braking (AEB), lane keeping system (LKS), and automatic parking (APA) have been widely used on board.
However, when it comes to high-level automatic driving above L3, it may be difficult to achieve it by relying on bicycle intelligence alone. "You have to move some of the computing power from the car to the side of the road, otherwise the car will be overwhelmed." The amount of high-level automatic driving data has increased sharply, and Miao Wei pointed out that bicycle intelligence and network empowerment are the dual support for achieving automatic driving, and the Internet of Vehicles and vehicle-road collaboration can accelerate the early realization of automatic driving. "But it needs to be pointed out that the core is still the car, so the intelligence of the bicycle is indispensable, but it also needs to support the necessary infrastructure and industrial chain around the car, including the core vehicle specification chip, battery, etc."
In fact, there is a phenomenon worth noting, since the end of last year, the world's major mainstream car companies have accelerated the landing of electric vehicle strategies, a change in the past conservative pace. Ford, GM, Volkswagen, Daimler, Toyota and other car companies have indicated their new electric vehicle strategies.
For example, Toyota, which has always been cautious about the strategy of pure electric vehicles, announced a new pure electric vehicle strategy in December last year, planning to invest 35 billion US dollars in the production of electric vehicles, aiming to sell 3.5 million electric vehicles worldwide, and releasing more than 10 electric vehicles under the e-TNGA framework in one go. Akio Toyoda, who has always appeared in a low-key and humble image, unusually shouted the slogan of "everyone is electric" at this electric vehicle strategy conference.
At this time, many investors also suddenly found that in terms of battery technology, Toyota was the first automobile company to start cooperation with Panasonic, and the latter was Tesla's original battery supplier. However, since Toyota has a strong electrification foundation, why has its electrification landed in the past many years?
There has been a mainstream view that Toyota has invested heavily in hybrid and hydrogen energy, and hybrid products are lucrative, and Japan's energy structure does not support the large-scale promotion of pure electric vehicles, so that its rapid transformation of pure electricity is not sufficient. However, some industry analysts pointed out that from the current stage of Toyota's product iteration and electric vehicle development, intelligent technology is more like the main reason for Toyota's promotion of pure electric vehicles.
From the fuel vehicle products launched by Toyota in the past two years, it can already be seen that the iteration speed of its intelligent application has increased significantly. Further review of Toyota's history of R & D cooperation in recent years can be found that while cooperating with Tesla before, Toyota has continued to deepen cooperation with many American technology companies, and when the cooperation with Tesla was terminated in 2017, Toyota has comprehensively accelerated cooperation with Chinese technology companies. Obviously, Toyota has been making every effort to make up for its intelligent shortcomings.
This is also an important hurdle that all traditional car companies collectively face in this round of great transformation. Compared with the electrified supply chain, smart technology suppliers are more unfamiliar with the automotive industry, and mainstream technology companies are concentrated in North America and China.
Cross-industry in-depth collaboration to create a new car supply ecology
With the change of the form and attributes of automotive products, AI, 5G, cloud computing, big data, etc. have become the key technologies of automotive intelligence, and these technical aspects have formed certain advantages in China. China has accumulated a number of world-leading ICT enterprises, and its years of technology and ecological accumulation are expected to enhance the competitiveness of intelligent and connected vehicles. The traditional automobile industry chain cannot cover all new fields, such as electrification, networking, and intelligence, new industries, and new technologies, and the development of the automobile industry is not completely carried by a single industry or enterprise. It is these technology companies that bring the "technology" gene into the automotive field by empowering the traditional automotive industry to cooperate, and support the rapid development of China's automotive intelligence and networking.
However, how to form a new cross-border integration of the automotive supply chain ecology is a new topic for the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain.
Jiwei Network noted that one month before the forum was held, on February 25, the China Electric Vehicle 100 Association released the research report "Cross-border Integration and New Forces of the Automobile Industry" (hereinafter referred to as the report), which deeply studied the advantages and challenges of cross-border integration of China's automobile industry, and explored how to better integrate cross-border new forces into the automotive industry chain.
For the automobile, a large-scale mobile intelligent terminal, the most important thing for the next development is the problem of supply chain integration and reshaping. More and more cross-border technologies and applications are entering the car, which is unprecedented. For example, the car's smart cockpit has begun to be "all-encompassing" - whether it is immersive Internet entertainment experiences such as social, music, video, games, consumption, AR/VR applications, or technologies such as 5G communications, big data analysis, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, virtual reality, and human-computer interaction, which have all overlapped and changed in a small car space.
The chip content in the car is constantly increasing. According to Infineon's forecast data, from 2021 to 2030, automotive semiconductors will rank first in the global semiconductor market, with an annual growth rate of 13%-13%. The improvement of the level of autonomous driving will continue to promote the increase in the semiconductor content of automobiles.
However, it has to be admitted that at present, the core technology such as chips and operating systems in China is still subject to people, and it is still very lacking in controlling the composite high-end talents of multiple industries, and the management process and certification system in technology-intensive industries are still lacking in experience and standards. At the same time, the new force of cross-border integration of automobiles is rapidly infiltrating into all aspects of the automobile industry, and has launched an impact on the original automobile supply chain. These are the challenges that the cross-border integration of China's auto industry will face.
At present, the biggest pain point in the global auto market is the "lack of core", last year's multiple "black swan" events superimposed, resulting in a serious shortage of vehicle-grade chips in 2021, the lack of one or two ECUs in hundreds of ecus in the car has prevented the development of automakers and the automotive industry. Wan Gang, vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and chairman of the China Association for Science and Technology, stressed at the meeting that in order to ensure the safety and stability of the global supply chain system, international cooperation in the field of chips should be strengthened, the transformation of the automotive power and electrical architecture should be adapted, the functional upgrade of automotive chips should be accelerated, the advanced and safe should be ensured, the upgrading of the vehicle-grade chip standard system and international mutual recognition should be promoted, the pattern of the vehicle-grade chip industry should be reshaped, and the market capacity of the vehicle-grade chip should be improved.
Cross-border integration has become an unstoppable and inevitable trend for the automobile industry. In this process, the mutual empowerment of automobiles, chips, operating systems and transportation, information and communications, smart cities and other industries has become the inherent demand for the development and growth of market themes. In the next step, who can tell the story of cross-border integration of automotive intelligence ecology will be the key to competition in the second half.
(Proofreading/Jimmy)