The rise of smart electric vehicles provides an opportunity to re-divide the territory and cut the cake, but the protagonists at the card table are no longer the ones in the impression.
In the era of new energy vehicles, who will be Tesla's biggest rival? It is said that the traditional car companies are in the first layer, and those who tout "Wei Xiaoli" these new car-making forces are in the fifth layer; and those who see Internet giants such as Baidu and Google, this wave is really in the atmosphere.
Recently, it has been reported that Xiaodu and NIO have reached a cooperation, and the two sides will optimize and upgrade the experience of USO's in-vehicle voice operating system. According to reports, in the future, Xiaodu will serve as the content ecological party and cooperate with Weilai Automobile to further enhance the human-vehicle interaction experience.
Going around, the seemingly "stubborn" new car-making forces finally fell under the pomegranate skirt of Baidu and these Internet giants.
"Wei Xiaoli" has limited ability
If the end of part-time work is the preparation of examinations, then the end of the car-making road that can be seen today is the car as a connection alternative to the mobile phone, or with the mobile phone as a tool to interconnect all things, with great imagination space.
At present, the car and the mobile phone have a certain degree of linkage, from the earliest mobile phone mapping to the car machine to perform some functions, and then the later mobile phone APP has become a tool to monitor the condition of the vehicle, and even become the key to start the car. In the future, it is not impossible for cars to link with smart home appliances.
Imagine that when you drive a smart car home after work, when there are still 800 meters away from home, smart appliances will automatically detect the information that you are about to return home, and turn on the air conditioner in advance to adjust to the appropriate temperature, open the curtains, turn on the water heater, and prepare for welcoming you home. In the process, you don't even need to control remotely via voice.
Imagine that one day in the future, you will see half of the TV series in the living room, and you can even change it to the big screen of the car with a sentence, so that the information flows seamlessly across the various platforms.
This is the focus of this cooperation between Weilai and Xiaodu.
From the most basic remote control to open the air conditioner, voice switch lights to more complex action recognition and automation scene linkage, smart home can be said to have covered all aspects of our daily lives. Among them, Xiaodu Assistant has now become the largest conversational voice operating system in China, ranking first in the country in the four major scenes of home, hotel/real estate, car, and portable.
And these are the areas that "Wei Xiaoli" basically did not set foot in, and they are also in the path that they cannot avoid in the final form of smart cars, and cooperation with Internet giants such as Baidu, Xiaomi, and Huawei is the most direct way.
Through cooperation to make the cake bigger, to achieve scale landing
In fact, this is one of the reasons why the current market has a high enthusiasm for the technology Internet giant car newspaper.
Connecting more of the application ecology of daily life on a smart car is a key step in redefining the car as the fourth space. To take this step, it is difficult to expect traditional car companies, after all, the former industry hegemon will form a "Nokia moment" when it encounters new rules for the rise of high dimensions.
At this moment, throughout the industry, the subversive innovation of the market is often not opened by the traditional giants in the industry, but by the cross-border giants, and the current technology Internet giants such as Apple, Baidu, and Huawei are the "seed players" who have the ability to open the subversive innovation of the automobile market.
In the case of Baidu, it has the world's leading technical strength in the field of artificial intelligence, Baidu Apollo has long been a veteran player in the field of automatic driving, more than 10 million kilometers of L4 automatic driving accumulation test mileage in China, Lego-style car intelligent solutions have become the first choice for mass production of intelligent technology of global car companies.
Even at the level of autonomous driving, Baidu will have an advantage over Apple. Although Apple has sharp insights into consumer demand and leading industrial design, software systems, chip design and other capabilities, it has not shown strong competitiveness in the field of autonomous driving technology related to the future development of automobiles.
In contrast, Baidu has chips, cloud computing, the strongest AI technology in China, an ACE intelligent traffic engine, Apollo automatic driving, and a high-precision map, which is almost self-made and achieves a perfect closed loop.
It can be said that today's Baidu is very similar to the original Tesla, if one day Baidu will become Tesla's biggest opponent, I will not be surprised at all.
Of course, Apollo's automatic driving is actually only part of Baidu Apollo's capabilities, and Apollo's complete capabilities also include intelligent cars and intelligent transportation, which are constituting Apollo's troika. In order to really pull this troika, Baidu alone cannot do it, and cost factors are more critical than technical factors.
The importance of cost (product price) in market competition is self-evident, and He Xiaopeng, CEO of Xiaopeng Motors, said in an interview: "The subversion of smart phones starts with cheaper smartphones."
For all manufacturers, the current priority is that all parties do their best to promote the development of various technical routes, continue to reduce the cost of mass production of various technical routes, so as to jointly make the cake bigger and promote the large-scale landing of technology.
The cooperation between Weilai and Xiaodu is undoubtedly very forward-looking. This is similar to Google's commission of Huawei to manufacture Nexus products, with more rapid and direct technical feedback, to achieve faster technical iteration.
As for the advantages and disadvantages of the technical route, it is enough to leave it to the market to judge and test.