In the tide of auto industry change, BYD belongs to the forefront of independent car companies, to say the least, from fuel vehicles to new energy vehicles, BYD is one of the most determined players.
Today, the return of "new energy transformation determination" has been presented in sales. From January to March this year, BYD's sales of new energy vehicles increased by 361.73%, 494.28% and 422.97% respectively year-on-year, and the cumulative sales of new energy vehicles were 291,400 units. Among them, the sales of new energy vehicles reached 104,900 units in March, which also made BYD the first new energy passenger car brand in China to exceed 100,000+ monthly sales of new energy. At the same time as reaching its peak, BYD officially announced to the outside world that it would stop selling fuel vehicles.
As early as last September, BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu said that the first half of the revolution in the automobile industry is electrification, and the second half is intelligent. After a long-term focus on the first half of electrification, the new energy vehicle brand seems to be interested in starting to make up for the shortcomings in intelligence.
A few days ago, BYD Semiconductor announced that it has launched the BS9000AMXX series of automotive grade 8-bit MCU in March, further expanding the lineup of automotive-grade 8-bit general-purpose MCUs, and announcing the full launch of client application development projects. Shortly after the announcement, Horizon announced a targeted cooperation with BYD. BYD will carry the Horizon Journey 5 chip on some of its models.
In fact, judging from the actions since the beginning of this year, BYD has shown the intention of expanding the intelligent layout, especially in the field of autonomous driving, which is the focus of the current intelligent competition.
Before announcing the launch of the Horizon Journey 5 chip, BYD had already announced a strategic cooperation with the former in March. In the same month, BYD announced that it has reached a cooperation with NVIDIA in intelligent driving, according to the cooperation agreement, by 2023, some of BYD's models will be equipped with NVIDIA DRIVE Orin chips to achieve intelligent vehicle driving and intelligent parking.
Horizon and NVIDIA are both suppliers of self-driving chips, and according to the cooperation reached by BYD and the two, by next year, the hardware of autonomous driving chips for many of BYD's products will be supplied by the above two suppliers.
In terms of autonomous driving software, BYD has chosen Baidu as its intelligent driving supplier. In February, Baidu was exposed to provide BYD with an ANP intelligent driving product and a man-machine co-driving map, and Baidu's intelligent driving team has entered the field to cooperate with BYD for development.
As the head player of self-driving enterprises, Baidu Apollo's self-driving software strength does not need to be questioned, but as a supplier, Apollo has also been criticized in previous cooperation. WM Motors, a new car manufacturer, established cooperation with Baidu in the field of intelligent driving in the past few years, and WM products intelligent driving products did get help, but then the news that Baidu restricted its self-developed intelligent driving business came out, and WM also fell into a trough.
From the perspective of cooperation content, BYD's route is also to use Baidu as a supplier of autonomous driving software.
In fact, BYD also has certain self-research results in intelligence. In terms of intelligent assisted driving, in 2020, BYD Intelligent Network Center launched the DiPilot advanced intelligent driver assistance system. In the field of smart cockpits, in September 2021, BYD released BYD OS, an automotive operating system. The two products have also been launched on the flagship model BYD Han, but from the feedback from consumers and evaluation agencies, BYD Han has many problems in assisted driving and intelligent applications, and even cannot achieve OTA upgrades.
As mentioned above, BYD Semiconductor launched a new automotive grade 8-bit MCU BS9000AMXX series, and the official said that the new MCU products can meet multiple application scenarios in automotive electronics, such as: car interior lights, door handles, air conditioning touch panels and various sensor applications. This product is bound to help the brand in terms of intelligent cockpit control, but in terms of automatic driving, BYD's self-research level is still stretched.
Judging from the suppliers selected by BYD, whether it is Nvidia and Horizon in the hardware field or Baidu in the software field, they are all called the leading enterprises in the industry. Horizon Journey 5 is the leader in domestic automatic driving chip products, it is understood that the single computing power of the Journey 5 chip can reach 128TOPS, and the intelligent computing platform equipped with 4 chips can support L4 level automatic driving. The NVIDIA DRIVE Orin chip is already the single chip product with the highest computing power value in the industry, which is enough to enable BYD's products to achieve L4 autonomous driving.
In terms of cooperation progress, BYD is also promoting the landing of products as soon as possible, and according to the plan, models equipped with two chips will land next year.
In the second half of intelligence, leveraging the industry's leading suppliers is a shortcut to quickly improve the intelligence level of its products, but from the perspective of mastering core technologies, BYD's second half is obviously a difficult situation.