The "smart war" of China's high-end electric vehicles is in full swing.
Recently, Ideal Auto, luxury brand Lotus, and Gaohe have successively released their new pure electric vehicle models, which are invariably equipped with intelligent "hardcore" configurations such as Hesai AT128 lidar + large computing chip + 8 million high-definition cameras.
At the same time, whether it is the ideal L9, or high-end intelligent electric vehicles such as Lotus Eletre and HiPHi Z, intelligence has become its most core focus. For example, the Ideal L9 is not only equipped with a fully developed intelligent driving system - Ideal AD Max, but also equipped with large-size AR-HUD, multi-modal three-dimensional space interaction and other current front-end high-tech configurations.
At present, the entire automobile industry is accelerating its transition to electrification and intelligence, and the weight of the impact of intelligent driving experience on consumers' car purchase decisions is increasing year by year.
In this regard, Miao Wei, deputy director of the Economic Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said at the 2022 China Electric Vehicle Hundred Forum that in the first half of the competition of the new energy vehicle track, the start of China's automobile industry has achieved good results, but the decision is still in the intelligent network car.
In the next few years, China's auto industry will usher in a golden period of curve overtaking. In this way, the innovation and upgrading of China's intelligent electric vehicle brands is expected to change the existing pattern of China's automobile market.
First, China's luxury car market is about to change?
The rapid growth of China's intelligent electric vehicles exceeding market expectations, as well as the launch of more and more new high-end intelligent electric vehicles, are undoubtedly the biggest variables in China's luxury car market.
According to the data monitored by the Gaogong Intelligent Automobile Research Institute, in 2021, the annual delivery volume of Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal was 91,400 vehicles, 98,200 vehicles and 90,500 vehicles respectively, and the annual delivery volume increased by more than 100% year-on-year. In China's pure electric vehicle market, the total delivery volume of "Wei Xiaoli" far exceeds BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi.
In addition, it is worth noting that as the best-selling luxury car brand in China before, the total sales of Mercedes-Benz and Audi in the Chinese market in 2021 have shown a year-on-year decline, while second-tier luxury car brands such as Lexus have also experienced a year-on-year decline in sales.
Industry insiders agree that with the acceleration of the pace of intelligent and electrification of automobiles, the advantages of traditional fuel vehicles have begun to slowly decrease, and the pattern of China's luxury car market is undergoing tremendous changes.
In this competition, China's independent brands such as Wei Xiaoli, Great Wall Salon, FAW Hongqi, and SAIC Zhiji hope to carry the brand upward banner through intelligence and networking, so as to seize the commanding heights of the second half of the automobile competition in advance.
For example, the recent debut of the ideal L9, Lotus Eletre, Gaohe HiPHi Z and other models, as well as NIO ET7, Xiaopeng G9 and other new models, the price is more than 400,000, targeting the luxury car market.
At the same time, whether it is Wei Xiaoli, or Lotus, Gaohe, Jidu and other car companies are using hardware embedding + algorithm software upgrade research and development routes on the next generation of models:
For example, the Ideal L9 and NIO ET7 are equipped with intelligent perception hardware such as NVIDIA Orin chips, lidar, and 8 million driver assistance cameras, as well as a full-stack self-developed intelligent driving system.
Lotus Eletre is equipped with 34 assisted driving sensors such as NVIDIA Orin chips, 4 lidars (including the main lidar in front and rear as Hesai AT128), 7 8 million assisted driving cameras, and the autonomous driving software algorithm of Lotus Robotics (a joint venture between Lotus and Momenta).
Gaohe HiPHiZ is also equipped with 31 intelligent perception hardware such as Nvidia Orin chip, Hesai Technology AT128 lidar, 8 million driver assistance cameras, and Gaohe's self-developed HiPhi Pilot intelligent driver assistance system.
It can be seen that the recently unveiled ideal L9, Lotus Eletre, and Gaohe HiPHi Z have chosen Hesai Technology's A128 lidar as a forward sensor to provide safety redundancy for the intelligent driver assistance system and subsequent high-end automatic driving systems.
In fact, in addition to the ideal L9, Lotus Eletre, and Gaohe HipPi Z, Jidu Automobile, Zero Run, etc. will also be equipped with Hesai's AT128 lidar.
Second, why do we use Hesai AT128 lidar?
Ideal Car said that when judging the performance of lidar, users can mainly focus on the three major indicators of ranging ability, global resolution and number of point clouds. Among them, the number of point clouds refers to the number of lasers that lidar can emit per unit of time. The greater the number of point clouds, the higher the "refresh rate" and faster response of the system-aware environment while maintaining the resolution.
Ideal L9 Official Spoiler Episode 4 (Video Source: Ideal Cars)
Ideal Auto said that the ideal L9's forward vehicle specification-level lidar is equipped with Hesai Technology AT128, which has 128 independent lasers inside, and can simultaneously emit 128 lasers in the vertical direction for scanning, with a global resolution of 1200x128 and a point cloud number of 1.53 million / s, which has the strongest comprehensive performance among the vehicle-grade lidar that has been mass-produced.
According to the data, through the chipized 128-channel solid-state electronic scanning, Hesai AT128 lidar realizes the structured scanning of "true 128 lines", and the point cloud is evenly distributed without stitching in the horizontal and vertical directions of the complete field of view angle, which can provide image-level ultra-high resolution and structured data similar to the camera.
This seems like a completely new concept. In previous publicity about lidar, the number of lasers was rarely mentioned. So, how many lasers are inside lidar, and is there a difference in performance? Is the greater the number of lasers, the better?
As we all know, most of the major lidar manufacturers innovate the technical route of lidar around different combinations of lasers, detectors, ranging methods, scanning methods, etc. At present, the rotary mirror and MEMS galvanometer solutions have become the mainstream solutions of front-mounted vehicle-mounted lidar.
From the perspective of scanning dimension, both the rotor and MEMS galvanometer solutions have two forms: one-dimensional scanning and two-dimensional scanning, and the two scanning methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. At present, Luminar and Tutton use two-dimensional scanning, while Hesai, Huawei, and Valeo use one-dimensional scanning.
Ultra-long-range lidar equipped with NIO ET7 (Source: NIO)
In general, through two-dimensional scanning, lidar can achieve a scanning effect equivalent to 100 lines or even higher with only a small number of lasers. At present, many automakers and lidar manufacturers will eventually choose a system architecture with fewer lasers based on a balance of performance, reliability and cost.
However, it is worth noting that the smaller the number of lasers, in order to ensure a higher output of the number of point clouds, the more laser beams each laser has to shoot, the higher the working load, and the shorter the life of a single laser.
If you want to guarantee both a high output of the number of point clouds and a small number of lasers, you need to use complex high-frequency mechanical scanning to quickly scan both horizontally and vertically. But in this way, with high-frequency vibration/rotation, the reliability of lidar will be greatly tested.
Dynamic comparison of the three scanning methods
Different from the two-dimensional scanning scheme, the one-dimensional rotor scheme itself has the advantages of small size, light weight, small motor load, etc., and only needs to use a larger number of lasers to ensure the number of laser beams, thereby improving the resolution of lidar.
The relevant person in charge of Hesai Technology said that the greater the number of lasers, the higher the resolution of lidar, and the more accurate the detail perception of distant objects. For example, Hesai AT128 adopts a semi-solid-state one-dimensional rotor scheme, which is equipped with 128 lasers, which can simultaneously emit 128 lasers in the vertical direction for scanning, and hit 1.53 million points per second in three-dimensional space, thus obtaining a very good perception of the surrounding environment.
Schematic diagram of the scanning method of the AT128 one-dimensional rotating mirror of Hesai
In addition, the greater the number of lasers, the higher the safety redundancy of the lidar system, even if a laser fails inside, the lidar system can still perform overall perception. "If there is only one laser, once it fails, the lidar will face the risk of having no data at all."
Third, how to achieve the dual optimization of cost and performance?
Since the greater the number of lasers, the higher the safety redundancy of the lidar system. So, why is it only adopted by a very small number of companies such as Hesai Technology?
On the one hand, as an important component inside lidar, the greater the number of lasers, the higher the manufacturing cost of lidar. Although the addition of lasers can directly improve the perception effect of lidar, many automakers and lidar manufacturers will choose between performance, reliability and cost for cost control reasons.
On the other hand, the more lasers there are, the more difficult it is to design and create barriers to lidar. The relevant person in charge of Hesai Technology said that the integration of hundreds of lasers into the interior of lidar, not only to ensure that it is small enough size, but also to meet the harsh working temperature requirements, lidar manufacturers are facing great technical challenges.
In response to this, Hesai Technology integrates hundreds of lasers on a small number of chips, turns lidar into semiconductor products, and drives it into the orbit of "Moore's Law", thus solving the problems of large size design difficulties and high costs caused by the large number of lasers.
Lu Wei, vice president of global business development of Hesai Technology, once said, "With the continuous progress of transceiver devices and the deepening of chipization, the lidar transceiver module can follow the development of Moore's Law, and every once in a while, the resolution is doubled, the cost is unchanged, or the resolution is unchanged and the cost is halved." ”
At this stage, unlike Tesla's pure visual perception scheme, most car companies have chosen the perception route of radar + visual fusion, because radar has more dimensions when collecting data, and the rich information transmitted back can be redundant with the camera, providing a safer guarantee for the existing ADAS system and even the high-end automatic driving that will gradually land in the future.
According to The Ideal Car, the Ideal L9 uses 11 high-performance cameras as the main perceptual source of the Ideal AD Max driver assistance system, while lidar can effectively complement the camera in multiple scenarios, thereby further improving the safety of the intelligent driving system.
For example, in scenes with limited cameras such as low light and strong light, lidar is less affected, which can ensure the accuracy of the system's environmental perception; in addition, it can also help vehicles improve the recognition of stationary and special-shaped obstacles, such as accident stationary vehicles on highways, construction barricade objects, etc., so that the system's environmental perception is more accurate.
Therefore, for car companies, lidar that can take into account both cost advantages and can provide higher number of point clouds and higher safety redundancy will have a great competitive advantage in the future Chinese intelligent electric vehicle market.