Hello everyone, this is the GeekCar Intelligent Cockpit Intelligence Bureau, and I'm Mr.Yu.
After experiencing the Intelligent Cockpit Intelligence Bureau in 2021, we have seen the ever-changing nature of the smart cockpit with you, and together we have dissected the ideas, logic and motivations behind the product. And, with you a glimpse of the trend of cockpit evolution, the possibility of products.
This year's Smart Cockpit Intelligence Bureau column will continue to work with you, watching and thinking as you go.
Back to the point.
In the last issue, we evaluated the Ford EVOS, a customized model for the Chinese market from Changan Ford. One of the things that impressed us the most was the intelligent performance of the Ford EVOS, which did not look like a fuel car at all. Perhaps we can say that some car companies have finally made practices that can break the stereotype of "intelligent premise is new energy".
In this issue of the Smart Cockpit Intelligence Bureau, we will still focus on the experience, details and analysis in the smart cockpit.
Mr.Yu has always believed that it is better to talk about ten thousand books than to talk about ten thousand heavens, and everyone is welcome to come and talk to us.
In this issue of the Intelligent Cockpit Intelligence Bureau, this time it is a new friend, Lantu FREE.
As a high-end brand under Dongfeng, Lantu is the first enterprise in the central enterprise to adopt a direct operation model. In the face of a turbulent competitive environment, such genes give brands a faster response speed. Compared with the new power brands that have no bottom at all, the strong technical research and development strength and institutional innovation do not have the burden of the difficulties of the start-up company, but it can make the new brand free to innovate independently.
As early as 2020, Dongfeng Group strategically invested in The Network of Birdsitells, and the two sides joined hands to lay out the on-board intelligent networking products, and the intelligent cockpit of Lantu Free is an important milestone in the cooperation between the two sides.
The LAN Tu FREE that we see now is the first answer of Lan Tu. With this cockpit review, let's dissect the inside of this answer.
*This review is based on the V1.1.0 release of LANTU FREE pushed in batches at the end of December 2021.
Interactive hardware
Lantu FREE has a total of 3 screens in the intelligent cockpit, the standard instrument screen + central control screen + co-pilot screen triple screen design, resolution of 1920×720, support AR real-life navigation. Three triplets of 12.3-inch landscape screens are integrated. This set of "integrated liftable triple screens" is controlled by a lifting system, which can be raised or lowered in different situations and modes. While the sense of ceremony is full, it also cleverly "hides" the waiting time of the system's start-up action into the sense of ceremony.
The color of the three screens is cool as a whole, the overall image effect is more delicate and soft, and the overall visual comfort is higher.
We have shown you in previous columns that the ultra-long screen that supports split display, such as Ford EVOS and Polar Fox Alpha S, can be dragged and swapped through specific gestures, greatly improving the usability and convenience of the screen.
A similar design exists on LANTU FREE, and some applications can switch between the central control screen and the co-driver screen by three-finger swipe or touch screen button.
In addition to the square control area, two sets of physical buttons are set in the LANTU FREE cockpit.
A group is located directly below the central control screen and, together with the lever, is used to control air conditioning, circulation mode, temperature and other comfort-related functions.
The other group, located on the left side of the gear handle, is used to adjust the driving mode, control of the lifting screen, activate 360-degree surround view, reversing radar and other driving and parking functions.
The wireless charging pad is hidden in the area below the air conditioner outlet. After the wireless charging pad appeared in the car, the designers basically evolved two design routes: either put the mobile phone in a place that is easy to see and get; or hide it as much as possible, and everything depends on the car machine. The designers of Landu FREE take the second route, which often reveals that designers and PMs have a strong confidence in their own products.
On the right side of the gear handle is a touch control board, which the main co-driver can easily reach with one hand, corresponding to a series of quick operations:
Swipe up or down to adjust the volume of the played content;
Swipe left and right to switch between playing content and cutting songs;
Quickly double-click the corresponding pause and resume playback.
Combined with the experience, blind exercise can be easily achieved within the reach of the trackpad. This design is very rare in the cockpit, and we believe that the design takes into account the convenience of the co-pilot occupant's control over the playback of content in the car.
The negative screen of Lantu FREE is designed with two sets of shortcut operation menus.
The home page swipes from top to bottom, you can call out the first set of shortcut operations, including volume, brightness, WiFi, Bluetooth, settings, applications, etc., which are very similar to the operation logic of smart phones, simple and fast, in line with the operating habits of most smartphone users.
Swiped to the right, the second set of quick actions can be called out a total of 12 functional icons, including the memory position of the three sets of seats, main driver heating/ventilation/massage, fuel tank cover/charging cover opening, canopy dimming, one-touch window/ventilation and so on. On the other hand, long pressing on the icon can go into the customization of the icon. Here we have to start to suspect that HMI designers have a background in smartphone work.
Later, our conjecture was confirmed in another place.
Finally, I have to say that the variable panoramic canopy of Lantu FREE is really cool.
As your fingers slide and adjust in the graphical interface set by the canopy, watching the canopy change from milky white to transparent, and from completely transparent and rapidly atomized knots to milky white, an indescribable sense of excitement will emerge in your heart. Although it is not known that behind the panoramic canopy dimming is the use of electrochromic technology, or other principles. But what is certain is that this configuration will undoubtedly win a good favor for Lantu FREE in terms of practicality and sense of technology.
Visual elements
The system interface of Lantu FREE is dominated by cool colors, the main display colors are white and ice blue, light blue and restrained black are used to represent text, labels, status, etc., and the Dock bar is permanently on the left. Under most interfaces, the color style of each level is relatively refreshing and unified.
Lan Tu gave this theme a name called "Chi Yue Tiandi". As you can see, there are not a few visual design styles in the theme interface of the new power model with light colors, but a large number of applications like Lantu are rare. The advantage of this is that it can be flattering to reduce the brightness of the screen required to see the information clearly, thereby reducing the physiological burden of vision to a certain extent.
Fluency
In terms of configuration, lantu FREE's system adopts hard isolation technology. Powered by an SoC chip, it runs both Linux-based instrumentation and Android-based in-vehicle infotainment systems.
Thanks to the latest V1.1.0 OTA upgrade, Landu FREE's operating system performs well overall. The opening of native applications in the system, the progression and return between different levels, and the switching between pages all show relatively good control response speed and fluency.
Map function
The main map resource of Lantu FREE is Baidu Map.
There are shortcut buttons on the navigation card of the main interface of the central control screen. From top to bottom, search for records, quick searches, go home, go to the company, favorites, these highest application frequency locations can be quickly and directly accessed with one click.
Like most car-machine systems equipped with the in-car version of Baidu Maps, the overall interaction logic of this navigation is not much different from that of Baidu Maps on the mobile phone. In terms of interface design, most of the icons and key information are biased to the driver's side, which is convenient for perception and control.
Lantu FREE's Baidu Map also supports LBS (Location Based Services), which can recommend parking, refueling, food, attractions, shopping and other demand scenarios according to the current location. It should be noted that the LBS recommendation of Lantu FREE is almost the most detailed classification we have ever seen.
During the actual road test. The route navigation at the macro level is clear and comprehensive; in the vicinity of the main and auxiliary roads, roundabouts, and even some complex intersections, the reminder and guidance window based on the realistic landscape will also appear on the left side of the central control screen to better assist the driver to make decisions.
In some areas with relatively poor GPS signals, such as the long-distance form of the road section under the viaduct, LANTU FREE shows stable inertial navigation ability, which can provide users with reliable location information and key tips.
Application ecology
In addition to the native Huawei family bucket on the AITO Q&A M5, we can clearly perceive that the choice between car companies and suppliers is becoming more and more concentrated in terms of application on the car. The "music + long video + audio content" entertainment ecological three-piece set has become a fixed choice, and more choices reflect the insight of car companies on the needs of user scenarios.
So, let's take a look at how Lantu FREE performs in this regard.
In terms of long videos, it is everyone's old friend, web drama and online variety coffee iQiyi.
In terms of music and audio content, it's still Cool Me Music and Himalayas.
Looking at the Smart Cockpit Intelligence Bureau column, these three applications have a high rate of appearance and have become frequent customers.
Inflight entertainment isn't just about input audio and video content. We can see that more and more car companies realize that the cockpit, as a confined private space, still has huge development possibilities. The hardware quality and algorithm tuning of car audio are different, but the most important thing is that we can see that what we buy is generally not bad. As a result, the application of various K songs on the car has become a new trend.
There's no doubt that even though commercial KTV venues aren't the mainstream choice for young people's party entertainment, this thing isn't dying. KTV has simply entered other corners of life in a more flexible and private way.
From last year's NIO OS 3.0 update to gahic and Tesla's customized cockpit K song program, KTV on-demand system developers are moving faster and faster into the field of cockpit entertainment.
It is understood that the K song scheme of Lantu FREE cockpit is the result of the cooperation between Lantu Automobile and The Network of Botai Vehicles and Thunderstone KTV, which can provide a large number of genuine MV songs in the car.
Connect to a dedicated paired transceiver and a wireless microphone with a cute color scheme and you'll be able to sing in the cockpit. 10 DYNAUDIO cockpit sounds and excellent sound insulation create an excellent K-song space for Landu FREE. If you feel that it is not too addictive, you can also drive the car to the environment with weak external light, and then turn on the atmosphere lights in the car to directly fill the atmosphere.
On the other hand, the product managers of Lantu FREE have not forgotten that children are important family members. Open the "Children's Space" app of Lantu FREE, and a large number of audiovisual content for children will be aggregated in the Qu listening/Quhi watch platform.
Using the multi-screen interactive feature of Lantu FREE, children can sit on the co-driver and enjoy their favorite content in the parking state.
Multi-scene voice interaction performance
Based on the new evaluation system, we test the wake-up rate and recognition accuracy of the cockpit intelligent voice assistant in static and dynamic scenarios through the three main listening environments of completely closed windows, high wind noise, and maximum air conditioning in the car.
The results showed that the intelligent voice assistant in the LANTU FREE smart cockpit (wake-up word "Hi, Lantu") responded to the voice wake-up with a very high accuracy rate, reaching 100% in the three main listening environments of the static scene.
In the dynamic scene of high-speed driving on the loop road, we open the window to a specific angle, and the voice wake-up success rate of Lantu FREE in the environment of high wind noise + high road noise reaches 90%, and the wake-up success rate of the other two cases is 100% when the window is closed and the air conditioning in the car is the maximum airflow.
On the other hand, in the case of playing music in the car, as well as voice command interaction in the case of broadcast, cross-talk and other sound content, the response accuracy of the intelligent voice assistant is 100%; in the noisy environment where people chat in the car, this number also reaches 100%.
Judging from the results, Lantu FREE's performance in voice wake-up is very stable.
In addition, after the user says the wake word in its entirety, the speed of the intelligent voice assistant is very fast, which is also impressive. After verification, through the latest OTA, the voice wake-up speed of the intelligent voice assistant has been optimized from 800 milliseconds to 300 milliseconds, and the accuracy of the car-machine voice system has been improved by optimizing noise reduction and echo cancellation.
A new intelligent voice potential stock
Although the smart cockpit has not really gone through its own first decade, even many people have no concept of the smart cockpit. But for the direction of the evolution of the car, bigger and better screens, fewer physical buttons, and intelligent voice that is gradually moving towards the core of in-car interaction, all of this is gaining more and more recognition.
Among the various models evaluated by the Intelligent Cockpit Intelligence Bureau column, Lantu FREE's performance in terms of voice ability can also be regarded as a fairly capable one.
From wake-up to execution speed, Landu FREE shows a considerable degree of fluency. After you turn on the continuous conversation setting, you can support wake-free continuous conversations for about 20 seconds. Perhaps in order to better adapt to the voice interaction habits of different users, whether it is the extraction of key information or the ability to accept interruptions at any time, it makes the dialogue closer to the way of communication between real humans.
Of course, if you are not used to it, you can also choose to close the continuous dialogue in the settings and return to the state of each interaction starting with the wake word.
At the same time, Lantu FREE's preference for home users is obvious.
From the complete and controllable four-tone zone locking in the car, the feature of supporting the vehicle personnel to join the same round of dialogue, to the VOYAH Care child care mode that automatically recognizes the child after automatically locking and automatically adjusts the temperature through the in-car camera, all the characteristics show that the Lantu team considered the possibility of child passengers appearing in the cockpit to a large extent when designing the function.
Common commands wake-free, contextual continuous dialogue these voice capabilities are not new to the smart cockpit, and Lantu FREE still brought some small surprises to our evaluation:
In the music, radio, navigation, vehicle, system settings and other interfaces visible can say that the instructions are no longer just silently executed, the system will also simulate the click of the animation and sound effects to confirm the execution status to the user. The benefits of this design are very obvious, without occupying too much of the user's visual perception channel, saving the attention expenditure during interaction, and obtaining a disguised improvement not only security, but also interaction efficiency and operation texture.
From car wash to restaurant reservation, hotel reservation and even to movie ticket seat payment, the ability of voice to call services and resources in the system ecosystem is directly extended to the point of full availability, avoiding the industry strange phenomenon of Internet services scrambling to get on the bus but "unavailable".
Just casually chanting "there is a little heat in the car", the system automatically reduces the temperature of the air conditioner to a relatively comfortable state, and natural semantic understanding and non-wake-up are implemented here.
When some complex voice commands cannot be accurately understood or executed, they are told by intelligent voice assistants that "I can't seem to help you, so you might as well try it yourself." Such an end mechanism would obviously be more reasonable, even rather flattering, than being bluntly rejected or simply oblivious.
All of the above conveys a message to us that well-designed and highly available voice interaction capabilities are the focus of Lantu in terms of intelligent experience. And, after that, the performance of Lantu FREE in terms of voice can be completely expected.
At the application ecological level, Lantu FREE accesses mainstream navigation and entertainment applications, and has been meticulously polished to ensure the unity of the use experience level.
We believe that the intelligent cockpit of Lantu FREE has an overall excellent performance in terms of voice-related and car-using experience.