2-second acceleration is still top-notch, but overcharging no longer meets the demand, can FF91 win new forces?

Nowadays, when it comes to new forces in car manufacturing, I believe that most people will first think of NIO, Xiaopeng, and ideals, but to say that the oldest qualified new forces in car manufacturing, in fact, is Faraday Future (FF for short), which officially released its first model FF 91 in Las Vegas as early as 2017. In that year, NIO's first production model, the NIO ES8, had just been officially launched, and Tesla was only in the early stages of development.

More than 6 years have passed, a lot has happened to FF, and the former "head" Jia Yueting has been working hard to make FF's first product FF 91 officially land, and until recently, this wish has really come true. Just now FF announced that FF 91 is expected to be produced on March 30 and delivered by the end of April, with a high degree of credibility. In this regard, many friends are full of expectations, but there are also a considerable number of friends who are worried, such as whether the new car will lag behind as soon as it is launched? Can the previously advertised technological upgrades really land? Let's talk about it.

With the same type of lidar as NIO, is it difficult to land the unique HUD?

I believe you still remember the feeling when you saw FF 91 in 2017, the avant-garde model design, powerful power system, including valet parking and other intelligent driving technology, all made everyone's eyes shine, I believe everyone will not doubt at that time, FF 91 will be a revolutionary car product. It's just that after that, FF encountered a lot of difficulties, so that the landing of FF 91 waited and waited.

But even so, FF has not stopped upgrading the FF 91, especially in recent months, including 13 key upgrades such as powertrain, battery, chassis, and 13 upgrades such as computing, sensing, and communications. And from the upgrades officially mentioned, we can see that the feasibility of some technologies is still quite high.

For example, FF 91 will be driven by three motors, the maximum power of the motor is 1050 horsepower, 0-60 mph (about 0-96 km/h) acceleration time is 2.27 seconds; at the same time, the upgraded FF 91 also increases the battery capacity, will be equipped with a 130kWh ternary lithium battery pack, EPA range of up to 613km (NEDC range of more than 700km); It will also be equipped with NVIDIA DRIVE Orin chip, four-wheel drive system, rear-wheel steering system, lidar, 11 screens in the whole car, etc.

There is no doubt that after watching the hardware arms race of new forces in recent years, and then looking at these upgrades mentioned in FF 91, I believe that most of them can be landed, after all, most of the things we can see in many new forces products in China. However, it should be noted that compared with the earliest FF 91 put the lidar on the front hood, only when you need to use the parking lot valet parking function will rise, the upgraded FF 91 is likely to put the lidar on the roof, under the premise of realizing the valet parking function, it can also help the vehicle achieve a higher level of automatic driving capabilities, and the lidar will also use Falcon LiDAR, the longest detection distance can reach 500 meters, and the lidar used by NIO is the same model.

However, in the previous FF 91 mentioned a feature configuration - HUD, whether it can land is still in suspense, at first FF's idea is to solve the problem of poor reflection display on the HUD windshield, so it is planned to use a "special" HUD, the information is projected to the driver 2.7 meters in front of the position to help the driver focus on the road, the solution is not based on LCD display, but based on DLP (digital light technology) PGU, Of course, at this stage, the current domestic new forces do not have too many bright technologies in this regard, so it is unknown to see this configuration on FF 91.

In addition to motivation, other people have no advantage in the face of new domestic forces?

Some upgrades of FF 91 before are still relatively obvious, which is of great help to improve product strength, but compared with the domestic mainstream new forces, many technologies are not new technologies, more like a "follow-up" upgrade, so in many technical and parameter indicators can not bring surprises.

First of all, take the power, at present, for pure electric models, the performance is almost the most "cheap" product power, as long as the car company is willing, to create a dual-motor four-wheel drive, zero hundred acceleration 3 seconds of car without any difficulty, even if it is a medium and large SUV, zero hundred acceleration can easily run into 4 seconds. However, from the FF 91 three-motor drive, the maximum power of the motor exceeds 1000 horsepower, zero hundred acceleration in more than 2 seconds, it is still quite explosive, but after Model S Plaid, which has zero hundred acceleration of 2.1 seconds, and then accelerate again, the attraction is bound to be greatly reduced.

In terms of endurance, pure electric models now generally achieve 600-700km endurance level, FF 91 is passing, but due to the limitations of the car platform, the production place does not consider the battery chassis, the key technology to increase battery capacity, so there is a certain upper limit, 130kWh ternary lithium battery pack, put in the domestic new force products, also has no advantages.

In terms of automatic driving, at present, the new domestic forces NIO and Xiaopeng are the first echelon, which can already rely on high-precision maps to achieve high-speed, urban complete automatic driving, and in the future, it may also be possible to achieve higher-level automatic driving without relying on high-precision maps, and in order to achieve this goal, they are top in the number of sensors and chip computing power. At present, FF 91 is sure to be equipped with NIO's same lidar, the chip will probably also use the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin chip, so the heap hardware should be in the first echelon, but the actual ability to achieve high-level driving assistance capabilities, there is greater difficulty, the main reason is that if you want automatic driving to be easy to use and safe, you need massive road data and continuous upgrades, simply put, you need to throw money, and FF is most lacking in money.

Before FF 91 also has a certain achievement in fast charging, the introduction of that year can provide 200kW rated power DC charging technology, in other words, almost 1 hour can improve 800km of endurance, that is, less than 1 hour can be fully charged, aside from this charging technology can land, we will take Xpeng G9 out of comparison, the latter from the 800V architecture, in the case of the use of self-built S4 supercharging pile, the maximum power is 480kW, the fastest 5 minutes to replenish more than 200 kilometers, the power from 10% It only takes 15 minutes to charge to 80%. This also means that if this fast charging technology of FF 91 is not upgraded, it will not be considered the current state-of-the-art technology after launch.

Epilogue:

FF 91 can be regarded as the "pioneer" of new forces in car manufacturing, and some of its car manufacturing concepts still influence the car manufacturing ideas of some pure electric vehicles, which is undoubted. However, in the past few years of FF 91's "difficult birth", the domestic new energy vehicle market has undergone earth-shaking changes, and software and hardware technologies have developed by leaps and bounds, so even if all the upgrades mentioned in FF 91 can be successfully landed, they will still lag behind almost comprehensively compared with domestic new force models. Of course, more importantly, compared with FF 91 based overseas, domestic new forces have the advantage of low cost of car manufacturing, while FF 91 does not, so in the lack of freshness, technology is not leading, estimated pricing of more than one million yuan and other comprehensive product forces, it is almost impossible to let domestic users pay.