Car stuff (public number: chedongxi)
The author | Hao Han
Edit the | Xiao Han
On the first anniversary of its establishment, how did the car made by Baidu go?
In March last year, Jidu Automobile, a new car brand jointly created by Baidu and Geely, was officially established.
On April 18 this year, it was originally scheduled to be the ROBODay of Jidu Automobile, which was also the day when its automotive robot concept car was unveiled, but due to the postponement of the epidemic, we could not see the true face of the first automaker.
Although sorry, don't rush to go.
According to the official design sketch and trailer, try to PS out the approximate appearance of the first model of Jidu, you can have a sneak peek, you can also leave a message to write down your imagination of the first model of Jidu.
At the same time, we also based on the official release of the trailer map and various spy photos, combined with the supply chain information, trying to help you unveil the mystery of this car robot in advance.
▲Jidu's first car design draft (top), the appearance of the car's east-west prediction (bottom)
First, the design manuscript exposure The mass production version is 90% similar to the concept car
What exactly does an automotive robot look like?
Last November, Jidu Auto posted a working photo of a designer discussing on Weibo. In the lower right of this work photo appears a design manuscript of the vehicle's appearance, from which a sketch of the front side of the vehicle can be faintly seen.
▲Work photos released by Jidu Automobile
From the sketch, the whole vehicle is a streamlined design, the body form is not a hatchback or sedan in the traditional sense, but more like a hunting car similar to the extreme Kr 001, but the vehicle in the sketch is longer hanging in front, accounting for almost 1/3 of the entire body.
Overall, the front styling of the vehicle in the manuscript is similar to asaston Martin's Vanquish Zagato hunting edition, while the rear styling is closer to Honda's CR-Z.
Therefore, if the front design of the Vanquish Zagato Hunting Edition is integrated with the rear design of the Honda CR-Z, coupled with the four-door body of the Aston Martin Rapide, the appearance of the first model of Jidu can basically be restored.
▲ Design manuscript comparison chart
Yesterday, Jidu Automobile released a new car trailer. From the picture, you can vaguely see the front shape of the vehicle. Only from the front shape of the car, the concept car of the first model of Jidu is relatively highly reducible compared with the manuscript design drawing.
The vehicle's headlights are split in design and have two purple indicators at the front arch and hub. The purpose of the indicator light is to inform pedestrians and vehicles outside the car whether the car is currently in an autonomous driving state and further improve driving safety.
▲Two indicator lights on the outside of the new car
At the same time, judging from the trailer video previously released by Jidu Automobile, the first model of Jidu will most likely use a "swan wing" door similar to Aston Martin, and the door will have a certain angle after opening, but it is not a scissor door in the traditional sense.
It is worth mentioning that Jidu Automobile has said that the appearance of the mass production version of the model will be 90% consistent with the concept car, and the car thing speculates that the 10% that needs to be changed is likely to be the front face of the vehicle.
Judging from the photos released by the current Jidu Automobile, the seams of the front cover of the new car are located behind the headlights of the vehicle and do not cover the headlights.
▲ Li wants to Weibo screenshot
Ideal Auto CEO Li Xiang said on Weibo that by 2024, in order to achieve the latest pedestrian protection regulations, the engine cover should be completely covered on the lights, and the cover and lights must have enough buffers, if not met can not be sold.
Therefore, if the concept car is unveiled in June this year, the mass production version of the SOP in July next year is judged at the time node, the mass production version of the first model of Jidu Automobile is likely to adjust the front face design in order to meet the latest regulatory requirements.
Second, equipped with Hesai AT128 adopts hidden lifting design
Recently, Wang Weibao, head of Jidu Intelligent Driving, also shared the latest progress of Jidu automobile robots in intelligent driving.
Recently, Jidu's software-integrated analog model vehicle (hereinafter referred to as SIMUCar) has been iteratively upgraded to version 2.0, and its automatic driving system has been added to the lidar sensor, and has been integrated with the high-level automatic driving intelligent architecture JET1.0 (electrical and electronic architecture + SOA) developed by Jidu.
At present, Nvidia Orin and Hesai AT128 semi-solid-state lidar have been put on the car to participate in the test of the jidu automatic driving system.
▲Set degree SIMUCar
This means that the high-end autonomous driving technology solution for mass production, which is based on Apollo's unmanned autonomous driving capability, has been fully exposed for the first time.
Previously, Jidu Automobile had officially signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Hesai Technology, and the official said that the two sides would carry out in-depth cooperation to create a safe and efficient intelligent driving system, and this Time Jidu Automobile also officially announced that it would use Hesai Technology's "star product" AT128 semi-solid-state lidar.
Hesai AT128 hybrid solid-state lidar can reach 1.53 million dot frequencies per second, through chip 128 channels of solid-state electronic scanning, to achieve 128-line structured scanning. In addition, the Hesai AT128 has a detection distance of 200 meters at 10% reflectivity, and the farthest ground line can reach 70 meters.
▲Hesai Technology AT128 part of the parameters
According to reports, the first model of Jidu will be equipped with two Hesai AT128 semi-solid-state lidar, and placed on both sides of the front fender of the vehicle, which can achieve horizontal 180-degree FOV coverage, and in the driving scenes such as "ghost probes" and left and right obstructions, the recognition ability of left and right traversing pedestrians or obstacles is stronger.
▲Set degree automotive robot lidar opening method
It is worth mentioning that the two lidars on Jidu's first model adopt a liftable design, which can be stored inside the vehicle without lidar intervention to avoid accidental damage.
At present, many domestic models are equipped with lidar, in addition to the wiring harness and suppliers and different, there are also obvious differences in quantity.
The Ideal L9 and BEIC Polar Fox Alpha S HI editions are equipped with 1 and 3 lidars respectively, while the first model of Jidu will be equipped with 2 lidars. So what are the pros and cons of different lidar numbers?
First, equipped with a higher number of lines of lidar, the generated point cloud map can be directly fused with the content captured by the camera without stitching. 2 or 3 lidars are more complex to fuse with vision before they are fused. Because the laser mounted on both sides of the front of the car is to look at the front of the side, and the front view camera is to look at the front, the perspective of the three is different, so it is necessary to install additional side front cameras to fuse with the side radar.
▲Comparison of the perceptual range of different quantities of lidar
The AT128 lidar of Hesai Technology is 128 lines with an angular resolution of 0.1° (H) x 0.2° (V). Thanks to this, the point cloud map generated by the lidar detection is clearer and more conducive to pre-fusion.
Of course, using 2 or more lidar schemes, although the amount of computation will be more, but the coverage area is wider, and more road information can be captured.
▲Dual lidar fusion point cloud
At the same time, from the information released by Jidu, the new car may be equipped with three front-view cameras, including a standard focal length, wide-angle and telephoto lens. In addition to this, it can be seen from the pictures that the sides of the vehicle's roof and under the rearview mirrors are equipped with cameras. It is speculated that the first model of Jidu will be equipped with at least 7 cameras for assisted driving perception, and as a model mainly for the 2023 market, 8 million pixels should also be nailed.
In addition to lidar and high-definition cameras, Jidu's first model may also be equipped with 4D millimeter-wave radar, which can detect altitude information in addition to regular distance, azimuth and other data.
Set degree
Xia Yiping, CEO of the car, has also previously said that before the launch of the first product of Jidu Automobile, users can experience the automatic driving function when test driving the product, rather than issuing it to users through OTA after the future model is listed.
In other words, the various autonomous driving functions on Jidu's first car are not futures, and can be used when the vehicle is delivered.
▲Inside the red circle or for high-definition cameras
Third, the domestic debut of 8295 in-car AR/VR has become possible
At the end of last year, Jidu Automobile announced the intelligent cockpit chip configuration of the first mass-produced model - Qualcomm SA8295P chip (hereinafter referred to as the 8295 chip), which will be equipped with cockpit system and software solutions jointly developed by Jidu and Baidu in the future.
Qualcomm's 4th-generation Snapdragon Digital Cockpit Platform is Qualcomm's latest generation of intelligent cockpit platform, and its SoC is built using a 5nm process, and it is also the world's first intelligent cockpit chip based on a 5nm process.
▲ Qualcomm 4th generation Snapdragon car digital cockpit SoC
Among them, the 8295 chip used in Jidu's first mass production car is the most powerful chip in Qualcomm's 4th-generation Snapdragon digital cockpit platform, and may also be the most powerful chip in the field of car chip. The most powerful thing about this chip is its AI performance, and its AI computing power can reach 30TOPS, which has surpassed last year's Qualcomm flagship mobile chip Snapdragon 888.
If you focus on the field of car and machine chips, the AI computing power of the 8295 is basically unbeatable. Among the third-generation Snapdragon digital cockpit platform that Qualcomm has mass-produced, the largest number of mass-produced and loaded models is the flagship chip SA8155P (referred to as the 8155 chip). It is understood that the AI computing power of this chip is 4TOPS, and the 8295 chip is 7.5 times higher than the 8155 chip.
More powerful AI computing power means that vehicles are easier to use in common in-vehicle functions such as voice processing and intelligent recommendation. At the same time, Qualcomm's Kryo CPU, Adreno GPU, Hexagon DSP and other core computing units are optimized for AI computing, so the software research and development team of Baidu and Jidu uses the AI performance of the chip to let the smart cockpit play more imagination space.
It is understood that the Qualcomm 8295 chip supports synchronous processing of multi-screen scene requirements such as dashboards, cockpit screens, AR-HUDs, rear-seat displays, and electronic rearview mirrors, and also supports integrated driving record and monitoring functions, based on the Soft SKU function of Gaotong's cloud services, which can achieve OTA upgrades. That said, the 8295 chip is capable of integrating more traditional distributed computing components in the car, which is very much in line with the future of central computing electrical and electronic architecture.
▲Baidu, Jidu and Qualcomm Technology Company reached a cooperation
With such a powerful chip, what surprises will Jidu's first model bring in terms of intelligent cockpit experience?
Recently, Che Dongxi found a utility model patent applied for by Jidu Automobile in October last year at the State Intellectual Property Office, named Smart Glasses Box and Vehicle.
According to the description of the patent document, the smart glasses case is set on the box body with the glasses cover opening and at least two storage positions, which can store different types of glasses. And by collecting the user's needs for access to glasses, so that any storage position can move to the pick-and-place position, it is convenient for users to quickly take and place glasses. Moreover, the smart glasses box can be used as a car glasses case.
In simple terms, the patent can be understood as automatic access to glasses for drivers and passengers, and at least two pairs of glasses can be placed.
▲Screenshot of Jidu automobile patent
But in general, the most commonly used by drivers in the car is nothing more than sunglasses and near (far) glasses, and often the two are integrated, and most vehicles also set up an glasses storage position.
So, what is the use of two or even multiple glasses storage slots?
At nio day last year, at the same time as the ET5 debut, NIO also brought an exclusive AR glasses, through which the front occupants of the vehicle can display a 200-inch large screen 6 meters in front of their eyes. In addition, NIO also released an ultra-short throw VR headset product in conjunction with NOLO. In addition to Nio, companies such as Porsche are also developing in-car AR/VR devices.
As cars become more and more intelligent, new entertainment methods such as AR/VR have gradually become a new direction for major car companies.
▲NIO's exclusive AR glasses
Jidu's first model will be equipped with Qualcomm 8295 chip, its 3D rendering capability reached 3 times the 8155 chip, and the pixel support was also improved by 3 times, which also provided a hardware basis for the AR/VR function in the car, and the use of this smart glasses box is likely to be to store AR/VR glasses.
We can try to imagine a scenario where when the vehicle is moving, this smart glasses case provides the owner with the glasses needed for driving, and provides sunglasses or polarizers according to the weather conditions, and ar/VR glasses are provided according to the needs of the driver and occupants after the vehicle is parked.
At the moment when VR in the car is hot, with the powerful performance of Qualcomm 8295 chips, Jidu Automobile may bring surprises to consumers and the entire industry in terms of in-car AR/VR.
Fourth, set up a guarantee team in advance to run forward
Previously, chedong and other media also interviewed Xia Yiping, CEO of Jidu Automobile, who also made corresponding answers to how to deal with supply chain shortages and new car planning.
Xia Yiping said that although the first model has not yet been mass-produced, the A samples, B samples and C samples required in the production verification process are often not found, so in the process of testing samples, Jidu set up a supply team in advance.
"The supply team used to be set up on the eve of mass production of the vehicle, and now the supply team has been set up at the stage of testing the samples, sometimes even to chase two or three chips a day." Xia Yiping said.
At the same time, in addition to the tight supply, the cost has also increased a lot.
Xia Yiping told Che that sometimes the cost of a sample is close to dozens of times the cost of mass production, and it is even necessary to take cash to buy spot goods in the country and even globally, which is very exaggerated. However, from the time point of time when Jidu's first model is put into production, the shortage of supply chain may not be a particularly big problem, and Jidu Automobile will still stick to the time point of the product SOP in July next year.
In addition, according to reports, Jidu has opened the pre-research of the second and third models, and the second car is expected to be released at this year's Guangzhou Auto Show.
Unlike some car manufacturers PPT first, the car manufacturing process of Jidu Automobile is undoubtedly rapid, and the company has only been established for 1 year, and has made progress in key technologies such as intelligence. As a representative of the joint manufacturing of cars by technology companies and car companies, Jidu Automobile is accelerating its entry into the market with the advantages of Baidu Apollo's autonomous driving technology and the SEA platform provided by Geely.