Have you found one thing, that is, no matter how quickly various electronic products are replaced, you can find a group of "fundamentalists" in various fields.
What is a fundamentalist? To put it bluntly, it is a group of people who especially follow the tradition and remember the old.
For example, whether the pancake fruit can be sandwiched with tenderloin or bacon, most fundamentalists feel that only fritters are authentic;
Not to mention that Cook blew the new iPhone at the press conference, many fundamentalist iPhone users still feel that the 3.5-inch, one-handed control of the iPhone has Joe's main taste.
Recently, bad reviewers have discovered a new fundamentalist group that opposes the growing screens of the car's center control, believing that the button is the soul of the car.
Think about it carefully as if this is indeed the case, I don't know when to start, the various car companies are particularly keen to change the central control of the car to the screen, bad reviewers go out to hit a car, the basic per capita central control of the big screen, to play you in turn "Summer Wind" also with display lyrics.
For those central control fundamentalists, this is nothing less than torture, and they are just like those who miss the 3.5-inch and home button iPhone, shouting in the comments section every day:
If you like to visit the car section of the forum, you can basically see the button party and the screen party war every day.
In their view, the car is used to drive, focus on driving the car, experience each switch feedback, each knob delicate sense of damping is king, this is what the screen can not give the experience.
Some people even feel that the screen is the pseudo-demand created by car companies in order to create a sense of technology, which is neither intelligent nor easy to use, and there is no improvement in experience, just like mobile phone manufacturers are scrambling to do a full screen:
There were even angry button parties who put on a TV in the car and called the screens that had been forcibly added "tombstone screens"...
But people who like screens don't think so, there is a screen in the car, which is equivalent to buying a car and sending an iPad, ah, nothing to play games to see the drama, he is not fragrant?
The screen party sometimes puts out big moves: "Since the button is so good, why has the screen become the mainstream of the market?" Are automakers all fools? ”
For this question, the bad reviewer is really curious: Yes, the car's central control screen, in the end, when did it start to become bigger and bigger?
In fact, as early as the 80s, in order to more intuitively display the speed, temperature and mileage, there were already a large number of car manufacturers who wanted to apply electronic instrument clusters to cars.
Interestingly, limited by the technology of the time, this display looked particularly cool and futuristic, and at one point became one of the pop cultures of the 80s.
In addition to the dashboard, Toyota even applied a color display in the car and used CD-ROM to map the space to achieve navigation.
At that time, the pursuit of electronic screens by car companies was no worse than now, and even in the late 1980s, General Motors applied touch screens to its own models...
However, such innovations were also spurted by car critics and consumers at the time, who felt that the speed of the car was directly displayed by the number without a sense of speed, and the sun could not see clearly.
So soon, the futuristic electronic dashboard was eliminated by the market, but people's demand for navigation still existed.
In 1990, General Motors launched a navigation software "Guidestar", although the GPS of that year was not very mature, only able to save maps of 17 states, and even sold for as much as 2,000 US dollars, even so, this software that can tell you when to turn, is still very popular.
With the development of GPS technology, after 2000, a reliable navigator has also become a must-have item for car owners, and some car companies have begun to try to put the screen in the central control, but because of the technical limitations at that time, the experience is particularly poor, and even many screens have no touch function, and can only be controlled by the buttons next to them.
Later, with the development of smart phones, the central control screen that can touch control, built-in navigation MP3 and other functions can be regarded as a real entry into thousands of households.
Although the system and touch experience is still very slow, for the bad reviewers who did not understand the car at that time, judging the quality of a car is mainly through its screen size, whether it can directly navigate and play songs.
However, all this changed in 2012, just when everyone felt that a screen that could achieve simple functions was completely enough, Tesla directly made a 17-inch large screen on the Model S, integrating all the functions that needed to be through the physical buttons before.
Since then, various car manufacturers have begun to grow wildly on the central control screen, the screen is getting bigger and bigger, the functions are getting more and more, and it seems to be more and more science fiction:
But the bad reviewer can no longer distinguish the good or bad of the car through the screen, because every family has a similar large screen, and even the old brothers who like to look at the picture and guess the car can no longer see what price model this is through the central control.
More importantly, although many manufacturers put the screen there in order to quickly create a sense of technology, they do not care about the quality of the screen and do not carry out research and development of supporting intelligent systems.
This has also caused a lot of central control screens, although they are getting bigger and bigger, but the resolution is particularly low, the UI is particularly ugly, the voice system is not easy to use, and it takes half a day to open an air conditioner, and the reason why the button party criticizes is also here:
Screens are used instead of buttons, but does that mean the car is smarter?
As a technology Internet company, there are also many central control fundamentalists among our colleagues, especially the veteran car critic KK, who grew up with a Retina screen, and is dismissive of the "central control screen = intelligence" atmosphere.
So when Xiaopeng Motors came to us and wanted KK to help evaluate their smart coupe Xiaopeng P7, he refused, but they insisted that if you use this car as a smart phone to experience for a day, you will subvert your own view of the central control screen...
I have to say that this screen of Xiaopeng P7 really surprised him, there is no impression of large fruit grains and do not follow the situation, in the use experience, Xiaopeng Xmart OS uses left, middle and right three-column UI design.
The left column resembles a mobile phone's negative screen, and even if KK has no knowledge of the car, he can see the settings at a glance:
Just like everyone activates the new mobile phone, the first thing is of course to apply, at this point, Xiaopeng P7 did not disappoint KK: the app store app that comes with it is also very complete, and it is certainly an experience that traditional cars cannot give when waiting for people to use the steering wheel to play "Wild Drag Racing":
However, after experiencing many car app stores, what makes KK feel most intimate is the localization service of Xiaopeng Motors.
In order to better fit the way Chinese consumers use, they and Alipay cooperation, so you can directly use Alipay Mini Program in the screen, such as illegal parking, or even call the driver of the commonly used mini programs in life, can be found here:
At the same time, as a headphone enthusiast, KK is also very satisfied with the built-in Danner audio of Xiaopeng P7, the P7 top version of the car is equipped with 18 speakers, the total power of 600W, whether it is watching a drama or listening to a song, it can create a special three-dimensional sound field.
Especially when night falls, KK parks the car downstairs, turns on the music and mood lights, and he becomes the most beautiful boy in the dream town.
When colleagues rushed to watch, KK told me that his view of the Xiaopeng P7 had changed: after a day of testing, he felt that Xiaopeng Car was not only a very good coupe, it was more like a super-large smartphone that you have used for a long time, very geeky, but also very intimate.
For example, the car will automatically monitor the air quality outside the car, if someone outside the window smokes, Xiaopeng P7 will even close the window with special understanding:
Not only that, the Xiaopeng P7 is also equipped with XPILOT 3.0 automatic driving assistance system, which can provide L3 level of automatic driving computing power.
In new energy vehicles, although automatic driving is not a new thing, Xiaopeng's automatic driving is dependent on the development of domestic road conditions, which can better identify the traffic lights and speed limit intersections you have to pass every day, and better understand Chinese consumers.
In the process of experience, you will find a lot of details that are particularly familiar to you, from the window, to the air conditioner to the engine, will give you the experience of the smart phone.
Because, whether it is autonomous driving or intelligent experience, it requires a lot of computing. The intelligence of Xiaopeng P7 also benefits from its advanced underlying electronic and electrical architecture, which is a central centralized architecture, although the self-research rate is not as high as Tesla, but it has a strong latecomer advantage.
The core advantage of this architecture is that it can realize the large data volume communication between the various sensors of the whole vehicle and the central processing unit, and the large amount of image and video data obtained by the camera can be quickly transmitted to the CPU through Ethernet for processing, and support all ECU upgrades in the whole vehicle, as well as the vehicle OTA.
Coupled with the Qualcomm 820A in-vehicle chip equipped with the Xiaopeng P7 to provide high-performance computing power, the Xiaopeng P7 has a higher signal transmission efficiency, which is also one of the cores of the future development of smart cars towards cloud computing.
When watching science fiction movies, bad critics had fantasized about what the future car could be like, maybe there might be a smart assistant like Jarvis, or it might be fully autonomous driving like in "Upgrade".
Perhaps we can find the answer to this question in the Xiaopeng P7, in their view, the screen is no longer just a large MP4, but an interface that connects all aspects of the car; the car is no longer a car, but a smart space running on the road, software and hardware can become a medium carrier to convey and receive information.
Because judging whether a car is smart is not whether it has a screen, but whether it has an "understand you" experience.