Introduction | cars become consumer goods?
On April 25, Zero Run announced that it had launched the world's first battery-free CTC technology. On May 1, Zero Run and Wei Xiaoli and other new forces announced April sales at the same time, and it won the April sales championship with a delivery of 9,087 vehicles.
For a time, zero running seems to have transformed into a leader in the new forces, and under the influence of the epidemic, it has achieved contrarian growth, which can be said to be the same for a while.
However, Che Jujun is more concerned about its breakthrough at the technical level. Integrating the battery and chassis together, Tesla and BYD have mentioned, what does it mean for the car? What is the direction of the development of the new energy automobile industry? Let Che Jujun take everyone to see it together.
1 Car building 4.0, the key to the era of electrification?
Although the automobile was born in the 19th century, it really made great development for the first time, and the connection with the lives of ordinary people was still due to the automobile production assembly line invented by Henry Ford.
▲Image source: Ford China official website
Before the advent of the automotive production line, Carl Benz's cars were built entirely by hand and were extremely inefficient. At that time, it took 728 labor hours to produce each car, and the largest car manufacturers produced about a dozen cars a year, so the price of the cars produced was naturally very expensive, and it could only be the playthings of the top magnates.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Henry Ford introduced the automobile production assembly line, which worked by placing the car chassis on the assembly line conveyor belt, and as the conveyor line moved, the workers gradually installed the engine, carriage, steering wheel, seat, door and so on at each link.
The emergence of the automobile production line has increased the production efficiency of the T-type car by thousands of times, and also made it possible to popularize the automobile, and its emergence represents the entry of automobile production into the 1.0 era.
▲Image source: SAIC Volkswagen official website
After Ford and Mercedes-Benz carried forward the car, Volkswagen introduced car manufacturing into the platform era. The core of mass platforming is actually the standardization of the chassis. There is a classic passage, Volkswagen only has one car golf, elongated to become Passat, flattened into cool, height into Tiguan, plus ass become Sagittarius. Although the paragraph is a paragraph, it is also a bit of a satire on the meaning of Volkswagen's "matryoshka doll", but this method does ensure the efficient production of dozens of models of Volkswagen.
Especially in the era of fuel vehicles, it feels that it is as easy for volkswagens to produce new cars as it is to drink water, and the cost control ability is far superior to other car companies, which is the culmination of the car 2.0 era.
▲Image source: Tesla
Toyota and Volkswagen dominated the 2.0 era, so much so that for a long time the development of automobiles was driven by emissions regulations. From China 1 to China 6, it guides the development of automobiles in the direction of energy conservation and emission reduction. Until the emergence of Tesla, the car has entered the era of electrification.
Tesla put forward the concept of pure electric architecture, electric vehicles are no longer "replaced" with the original engine gearbox with a three-electric system, but completely based on standardized electric drive assembly design to maximize performance and optimize space. This method has formed a dimensionality reduction blow to traditional car companies in the field of electrification, at least in recent years, the "struggle" of traditional car companies has looked very weak.
Most of the new forces are learning from Tesla, and to some extent they have entered the era of car building 3.0.
▲Image source: Zero Run official website
The CTC battery chassis integration technology recently launched by Zero Run (BYD and Tesla are also doing it) can be seen as an attempt to standardize the whole vehicle. It integrates the battery and chassis design, so that the chassis structure of the car body and the battery tray structure are coupled, reducing a large number of redundant structures and improving the utilization of space to a certain extent.
At the same time, the body will also complement the battery structure, improving the torsional stiffness of the body and the impact resistance of the battery. Looking at the body integrated die-casting technology recently promoted by major car companies, it can actually be coupled with CTC technology, so that the core "three major parts" such as the body, chassis and battery are directly simplified into two parts that are perfectly integrated.
Of course, this technical difficulty is still very high, if it is really realized, it will have a very big impact on the automotive industry, Chejujun is willing to call it the car 4.0 era.
2 Following the mobile phone, the car enters the "smart" era?
In recent years, it seems that overnight it has entered the era of national car building. Doing the Internet, building houses, selling electricity, and engaging in parts and components have all poured into the automotive industry at once, and many of them have also done a lot of work. For example, Zhu Jiangming, the chairman of Zero Run, is actually a security equipment giant, and he has also done set-top boxes earlier.
This scene is very similar to the mobile phone industry more than 10 years ago. When Lei Jun, who was born in Kingsoft Group, launched millet and hit the price of 1999 yuan, presumably HTC and Motorola also inhaled a cool breath. There are also spoilers like Luo Yonghao, who contributed the famous passage "owes 600 million".
▲Image source: Cheju Network
Nowadays, capital giants are unanimously optimistic about the automotive industry, in fact, they are also optimistic about the development of this industry. When Xiaomi and Huawei entered the mobile phone industry, there was actually an important opportunity, that is, the emergence of smart phones.
Before the emergence of smart phones, this industry is completely nokia, Samsung, Motorola's world, they all have a very large production scale, first-class industrial design and workmanship, domestic mobile phones in all aspects of quality control can not be compared with them, can only conquer some giants can not see the market.
After the advent of the smartphone era led by Apple and Google, it became simple to build mobile phones. Chips can be purchased by Qualcomm or MediaTek, and the screen can be purchased by BOE and Pegasus, and then pulled on Foxconn or BYD OEM. As long as the manufacturer does a good job in resource integration and product positioning, it can produce a good product.
▲Image source: Weilai official website
Weilai's ES8 is not like this, the original model battery module comes from the Ningde era and Samsung SDI, the BMS battery management system comes from United Electronics, the motor design scheme comes from the German hofer powertrain group, the vision chip comes from Mobileye, and the millimeter wave radar comes from Bosch. With these big guys, the basic performance and reliability of the vehicle can be guaranteed. The follow-up is to gradually optimize and control costs on this basis, such as upgrading the motor system, replacing Mobileye with NVIDIA and so on.
Ideal, Xiaopeng is also basically this routine, the core components are packaged to suppliers, and they focus on system integration. However, zero running is a new force that takes the road of full-stack self-development, which is somewhat similar to BYD. However, considering that its current sales are concentrated on trolleys such as T03, its gold content of this pin crown should be marked with a question mark.
3 Advanced and backward, user experience is king?
In recent years, a variety of new technical concepts have emerged, but whether it means advanced or not still has to be marked with question marks.
▲ Image source: the public number loves Tesla
Just like Tesla's upcoming mass-produced die-cast one-piece body, reducing the 171 parts of the Model Y front and rear body to 2, the production efficiency of the car company has been greatly improved, the cost has been greatly reduced, and it seems that there is only benefit.
But this is not the case for users, the one-piece body is often more difficult to grasp the dimensional accuracy, although the safety can be guaranteed, but the details of the body gap, compared to the combined body assembled by the size chain, down a lot. Then there is the maintenance problem behind, once the collision deformation occurs, the follow-up replacement will only be sky-high.
▲Image source: Zero Run official website
The same is true for battery-free pack CTC technology, although it is theoretically possible to reduce design redundancy and improve battery safety. However, this method also eliminates the possibility of power replacement, and the difficulty of maintenance is also greatly increased. Once there is a collision, whether it means that the chassis and battery should be changed together, it is conceivable that the subsequent insurance cost will naturally increase significantly.
Then there is the accumulation of industrial technology with zero run to challenge what Tesla and BYD have not yet completed, and what kind of effect it will eventually show must also be marked with a question mark.
▲Image source: Ideal Car
But some so-called "old" technologies can also shine brightly. The more typical ones have ideal range extender hybrids and BYD's DM-i super hybrids, which are essentially new bottles of old wine, but after making some improvements in the wine making process, they have quickly been recognized by consumers in the new era.
The ideal range extender hybrid solution actually appeared as early as 2007 on the Chevrolet VOLT Volanda. However, it is not until the thermal efficiency of the engine has improved in recent years, the battery cost has been reduced, and the life has been extended, that this solution has better practicality.
▲Image source: BYD official website
The same is true of BYD's DM-i super hybrid, which is officially based on the F3 DM in 2008 and the control logic is similar to Honda's i-MMD. But BYD uses a larger battery, can be oilable and electric, in the case of 100,000 levels can be on the green card, the loss of power fuel consumption has also achieved within 4L/100km, the practicality is quite good.
This is actually a bit like the touch screen of a mobile phone, and it appeared very early. But in that era when mobile phone intelligence was insufficient, the big screen gave people the feeling that it was of little use and consumed electricity. Who would have thought that years later, the playability and functionality of mobile phones would reach such a point, the battery capacity would also climb rapidly, and this "old" technology would also shine with new brilliance.
▲Image source: Xiaomi mobile phone official website
From this point of view, it is no longer meaningful to entangle who is "new" and who is "old", and good use is king.
Car gathering summary
The current national car is actually a bit similar to the previous national mobile phone. The car is also a bit of a trend of conversion to consumer goods, CTC chassis, battery integration, all-in-one drive system, die-casting integrated body, these technologies all point to one point, that is, there is no intention for users to repair. It seems like a technological breakthrough, but the impact is unknown.
"New" does not equate to "good", in the end it depends on whether it is good enough to use and whether it can be accepted by users. Of course, for our ordinary users, more manufacturers are involved in a good thing, after all, when Apple, Xiaomi, and Huawei are fighting the most fiercely, it is the happiest moment for consumers.