The biggest contribution of new forces to the automotive industry is not to provide ecological diversification, but to introduce IT technology and design ideas, and to promote the integration of automotive engineering technology and IT technology.
Author 丨 Huang Yaopeng
Edited 丨tian grass
Produced 丨 Automan Media
The business success of a business is always a factor of marketing, technology and service. As representatives of a non-specific type of enterprise, the sudden rise of new forces must have more basic elements at work.
When did the automobile, as a manifestation of the system synthesis in the era of large-scale industry, become the carrier of science and technology? It is because of the addition of new forces. As a result, technology has become the most ostentatious feather of the new forces.
1
The psychological superiority of the new forces
New forces have brought Internet thinking and IT design concepts.
In the past year, the "new four modernizations" have no longer been a fashionable concept, but its core is related to the rise of new forces. Among them, "intelligence" is most closely related to new forces. In this field, the new forces are also overtly and covertly, believing that traditional car companies are "not OK" in this regard.
From the public's point of view, the mass production of autonomous driving is nothing more than the L2 level, no matter what suffix it is, L2+, L2.5, L2.99, all belong to the category of "assisted driving". But this seemingly narrow level is actually made up of numerous subdivision features.
At the level of basic functions, there is no difference in capabilities between traditional OEMs and new forces. Adaptive Cruise (ACC), Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB), Lane Departure Warning (LDW), And Automatic Lane Keeping (LKA) have been well-established solutions before the rise of new forces.
Almost all car companies can deploy the above technical solutions with the help of first-tier suppliers. This actually already includes perception, computation (prediction), but it is still in the "pre-ARTIFICIAL" stage.
As new forces joined the automotive industry, they relied more on self-development than suppliers, and soon had small but important breakthroughs.
For example, the pilot function of high-speed and urban roads. This is not the same as the automatic car ability, relying on the basic dynamic control + simple calculation, it is no longer possible to achieve. It requires richer perception hardware and complex algorithms to understand the position, speed, and attitude of other vehicles in the vicinity, combined with relatively accurate maps and inertial navigation, to form a perception of its own relative position, so as to achieve behavioral prediction.
This is the current level of artificial intelligence applications in mass production cars. Relying on these capabilities, automatic up and down ramps, parallel lanes, overtaking planning and control is realized.
In cities, because it is difficult to predict for other traffic participants, there is no pilot function for mass production. But there are a few manufacturers that are approaching mass production, and they are all new forces (or new forces incubated by state-owned enterprises). This part of the function relies more on high-precision maps (not yet commercialized) and lidar (not yet perfected).
In this area, new forces are ahead of the curve, a feature focused on by Tesla, Wei Xiaoli, and technology companies trying to become new tier suppliers (Huawei, Momenta, Ma Zhixing, etc.); while traditional tier vendors show no signs of breakthrough attempts.
This has led to the new forces looking very close to deploying pilot technology. Traditional car companies have not moved, because the supplier technology is not in place.
Once a number of new forces achieve commercial deployment, and traditional car companies stand still, this ability can effectively reduce the pressure of urban driving, then consumers will obviously experience: traditional car companies are technologically backward.
This day will come in a year or two.
This is the main source of the psychological advantage of the new forces over traditional car companies. This is a human resource problem, but also a genetic problem of IT technology development, but also a problem of money.
Technology research and development is becoming more and more expensive, requiring more and more technical manpower, and the boundary benefits generated are not obvious. However, when technical differences accumulate to a certain extent, generational differences will be formed. This is the biggest reason why the prospects of new forces are optimistic, rather than the actual sales volume or financial situation.
The response of traditional car companies is to form large-scale software teams and isolate them to try to defeat the new forces of Internet genes in the way of the Internet. This in itself is tantamount to acknowledging that the new forces have a competitive advantage in this regard.
Not only automatic driving, in the wave of "software-defined cars", intelligent cockpit user ecological construction, cloud construction, V2X applications, etc., are in urgent need of car companies to build their own code capabilities.
From the perspective of human resources, there is no shortage of software engineers for the new forces, and there is no shortage of product engineers for traditional car companies. Unilaterally emphasizing the manpower advantages of new forces is not objective, but the software's self-research ability and iterative ability are destined to be able to face the changing user market more flexibly.
Traditional car companies throw money, may let the number of software research and development catch up (in fact, there is not), but the iterative ability has not caught up.
From the user's point of view, traditional car companies show that they turn a deaf ear to the user's voice or are slow to respond. Everyone thinks that this is a problem of service attitude, or an organizational structure problem, but it is actually a problem of technical capabilities.
2
The new force thinking of the "three electricity"
From the perspective of hardware, traditional car companies are also lagging behind the new forces, but the former is catching up, because the latter has touched the engineering bottleneck of "three electricity".
"Three electrics" is the core technology of electric vehicles. If you can express the current industry pattern in one sentence, it is that Tesla is still leading, but the lead is greatly reduced.
In terms of batteries, Tesla was not excellent at first, but was limited by the choice of suppliers and forced to use 18650 batteries. But it quickly went out of its own way, 21700 batteries, 4680 batteries, every few years there are structural innovations, and it is engineering innovation, not mouth cannon innovation.
What's more, Tesla has shaped the supplier itself in the process of advancing battery technology (which relies heavily on suppliers), and the United States and China have completed the vertical integration of supply chains at the same time.
In 2012, the Tesla Model S had a range of 483 kilometers (NEDC). At that time, both multinational car companies and domestic car companies, including BYD, were still on the grade of more than 100 kilometers, and "Wei Xiaoli" was more than two years away from its birth. In 2019, other manufacturers caught up with this achievement.
It can be seen that the core of the battery technology competition is the competition of energy density, of course, under the premise of safety and high cycle times.
Now everyone is aiming at 400Wh/kg (single body energy dense), and currently from the main engine factory to the supplier are drawing cakes. No matter what technology is used, whoever touches the line first will win, it's as simple as that. However, even if you paint a cake, it is also a new force playing with your life, and the traditional car companies lie flat, as if they have nothing to do with themselves.
Some people sarcastically say that some enterprises can't do technology, fight for "playing with their lives to be good for you", and fight differentiated competition. Of course, the experience brought by the disparagement of the service is biased, but there is a premise for playing the service, that is, the technology cannot have a generation difference. This is similar to competing in advanced driver assistance systems.
Unlike the rapid development of battery technology, motor competition is in a very secondary position. Because the motor technology is mature, there are not many flower jobs to play, and everyone directly purchases the supplier's products. The difference is whether the electronic control part is done by itself. The silicon carbide module is one of the few technical highlights, and BYD and Tesla are in the forefront.
Electronic control is a part of the technology that is difficult for consumers to detect, but its technical advantages and disadvantages are immediately known to professionals. For example, after closing the door and locking the car, the high voltage is continuous, which is a technical division point.
Tesla started with the Model S and continued to the Model 3 with constant high voltage, even in the case of car locking, which relies on its excellent power management and anti-interference (EMC) capabilities. Other brands are not unable to follow, but in the case of lack of technical grasp, it is manifested as lack of guts.
Continuous high voltage has many benefits, the car machine responds quickly, after opening the door and dispatching the vehicle, there is no need to do cumbersome internal power-on self-test, reducing the possibility of misoperation and accidents, and also allowing the direct use of air conditioning. Moreover, the monitoring of the battery (the so-called "sentinel mode") is not interrupted after the car is locked.
Of course, the disadvantages are also obvious, the power consumption after locking the car decreases by 0.4% every 90 minutes, and the battery SoC (state of charge) calibration is also biased.
However, if the high voltage is continuous, many companies can not control the power consumption at all, and it is difficult to stop for one night to consume the battery. Most manufacturers often adopt the method of delayed power-down and timed wake-up to balance the contradiction between parking monitoring and power consumption. From this small detail, you can see the difference in technical level.
This is the advantage of some new forces, bold, dare to go to the traditional car companies do not dare to go to the technology, the premise is to have confidence in self-developed technology. If you rely on the vendor, you will be conservative and dare not change the function package provided by the vendor.
Consumers will feel that in terms of charging strategies, it is often conservative to do the traditional car companies. After charging to 90%, it takes trickle charging, or even directly locks the power.
3
Is it integration or technology traction
However, the competition for the supply of "three electricity" has given birth to a dramatic effect, that is, the less traditional main engine manufacturers that start from the supplier position stand out and unexpectedly become the stage winners. But there are other reasons for its lead.
Yes, we're talking about BYD.
From any point of view, BYD is not a new force, but it is not a typical traditional car company. It is cut from a supplier perspective, and the whole vehicle starts in the opposite direction (controversial), but under the long-term investment in electrochemistry and physics, it has built the key capacity of the supply chain and a large number of application technologies.
Since the new century, BYD is the most successful car company in vertical integration, which is related to its own particularities.
In March, BYD's sales reached 103,000 units, ranking second in overall sales and first in new energy vehicle sales, and the year-on-year growth rate reached an eye-catching 334%. This is the realization of its long-term accumulation of vertical integration capabilities.
From this perspective, it seems to be concluded that technology is not as important as the ability to integrate supply chains. But don't forget that BYD's total number of patents for the "three electricity" technology is very exaggerated, and the number of patent applications in 2019 exceeds the sum of the new forces. Of course, the application is not equal to the authorization, and the "vase patent" such as practical technology and design should also be deducted.
BYD's integration of technology and engineering capabilities is at the root of its sales explosion starting in 2021. It is only a matter of time before BYD's monthly data and even the annual data reach the top.
The biggest contribution of new forces to the automotive industry is not to provide ecological diversification, but to introduce IT technology and design ideas, and to promote the integration of automotive engineering technology and IT technology.
As long as this contribution influence exists, the "newcomer dividend" of the new forces of the head will not disappear. They can use the window period to transform to traditional OEMs, or they can make new technical contributions, or both. If these two directions are not grasped, the survival of specific new forces will remain a problem.
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