In the previous "Huawei's internal horse racing results, Wang Jun suspended, Yu Chengdong alone? In the article, the Westward Journey Club made a preliminary analysis of the causes and consequences of Wang Jun's suspension and Yu Chengdong's grasp of the smart car business.
Westward Journey believes that even if Huawei's automotive business is further tilted towards the smart car model in the future, under the premise that Huawei has supporting cooperative relations and vested interests with a large number of car companies, it is really a good strategy for Huawei to personally build cars.
Based on the above analysis, Westward Journey believes that Huawei's most sensible choice is to become the Google (Android) in the automotive field.
That is, Huawei can do the core components of new energy vehicles, in addition, Huawei also has the Hongmeng system, the intelligent driving system-level solution of the whole vehicle can also be done, and a relatively complete quality verification system has been established.
Huawei also knows the difficulties and costs of engineering technology.
Make Huawei's smart car series like Google Nexus series mobile phones, which are benchmark models equipped with Android's latest system solutions (Google's Nexus series mobile phones are all produced by mobile phone manufacturers, HTC, Samsung, LG, and Huawei have all served as foundries, and Google itself has not personally built mobile phones), rather than building cars itself.
01
Android's way to survive and develop
Since Apple released the original iPhone in 2007, Google's Android system has also entered the smartphone market, and quickly established a mature ecosystem, defeating other smartphone systems represented by Nokia's Symbian and Microsoft's Windows Phone.
In the first few years of listing, the Android system has been fully supported by HTC, Samsung, MOTO, LG, Lenovo, ZTE and other hardware manufacturers. However, due to the Android camp at that time, HTC's G series, MOTO's milestone series and Samsung's Galaxy series mobile phones, which formed a lot of competitive pressure on Apple's iPhone mobile phones.
Therefore, Apple "selected" Samsung, which was the biggest threat to the iPhone at the time, as the target of litigation, and took it to court around 2010: it was believed that Samsung's WizTouch OS based on Android system infringed iOS interface patents, and asked for a ban on sales in the United States. This incident once caused the Android camp to be in a hurry.
To this end, Google spent $12.5 billion to acquire Motorola Mobility in 2011, thus owning a large number of mobile phone technology patents (remember that the world's first mobile phone born in 1983 is Motorola DynaTAC). Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility's patent barriers has formed a strong deterrent to Apple, making Apple dare not easily pick up the patent stick to file a lawsuit against the Android camp mobile phone manufacturers.
Google's production of Nexus series mobile phones invite Android mobile phone companies to do foundry, and Nexus mobile phones are only sold in the United States, Google more as a "test field" for technology development and system integration, and does not compete directly with other mobile phone manufacturers in the Android camp on a global scale.
In fact, after Google acquired Motorola Mobility in 2011, it did not deeply intervene in the development and operation of Motorola's mobile terminal business. And three years later, Motorola Mobility was sold to Lenovo for 2.91 billion yuan.
When Google acquired Android in 2005 and jointly launched the HTC G1, the first smartphone with open source Android system with HTC in September 2008, it was just in time for full-touch screen phones to fully replace keyboard phones and 3G networks to begin large-scale promotion of applications. Therefore, the Android system has quickly established its own ecological barriers through the open source of the system, defeated competitors based on traditional keyboard mobile phones and 2G network development represented by the Symbian system, and can be on par with Apple's iOS system.
From the perspective of the development of smartphone/tablet operating systems, Westward Journey believes that Huawei's choice of routes in the automotive business is nothing more than two routes: Apple's iOS (closed source) route or Android (open source) route. Once Huawei personally builds a car, it means that Huawei has chosen the Apple route, that is, Huawei develops its own car equipped with the Hongmeng system, builds the Hongmeng system into a closed-source ecosystem like iOS, and cooperates with Huawei's smart phones, computers and other intelligent terminal hardware in the automotive field. However, from the practical difficulty point of view, the difficulty and risk of choosing this route are extremely high.
02
Huawei Hongmeng operating system and Android,
CarPlay breaks the wrist, what are the odds?
Compared with Google's entry into the Android system in 2008, Huawei is a latecomer in the field of intelligent operating systems, and the Harmony system entered the market late.
From the previous experience of Nokia's cooperation with Intel to develop MeeGo (a merger of the Meamo system developed by Nokia and the Moblin system developed by Intel) system and Microsoft's failure to promote the Windows Phone system in the smartphone market, it also fully illustrates the ultra-high threshold and great difficulty for latecomers to establish their own software application ecology in front of competitors who are already in a monopoly position.
In view of the previous failures of MeeGo and Windows Phone systems, in order to promote the Harmony system, Huawei chose to use hardware architecture, including chips, computing platforms, intelligent cockpits, and radar fusion solutions, in the automotive field to drive the design and promotion of the software ecosystem of the Harmony system. Such as ADAS, Internet of Vehicles, V2X, etc.
Judging from the three models just listed in Huawei's automotive business (namely parts supply model, HI model and smart car model), Westward Journey believes that Huawei has chosen the open source Android route in the automotive field, but it is deeper than Google's participation in the smartphone and tablet market.
In the context that the smartphone and tablet market has been monopolized by iOS and Android, and the vehicle system is dominated by Android and BlackBerry QNX system, due to the late entry time, for Huawei, a new entrant in the operating system, Huawei adopts a "hard and soft" approach to drive the design and promotion of the Hongmeng software ecosystem in the automotive field through hardware architecture in the automotive field, which is a relatively smart tactical choice.
03
How did Google cut into the automotive industry?
Representatives of the "soft with hard" route
A year after the release of the first Android phone, the HTC G1, in 2009, Google X launched Project Chauffeur, focusing on areas such as autonomous driving, robotics, automation and smart sensors, and has since entered the automotive industry.
In October 2015, the project achieved the world's first fully autonomous driving road test (no steering wheel, no control pedals); In December 2016, the driverless car project was spun off from Google to form a new independent company, Waymo, which belongs to parent company Alphabet. After obtaining a driverless test license from the California Department of Transportation, Waymo has been leading the way in road test mileage and takeovers throughout the year.
By 2017, Waymo had launched its fourth-generation autonomous vehicles, driving in more than 20 cities in the U.S. in eight years, driving 3.5 million miles on the road, and simulating 2.5 billion miles in 2016 alone.
In addition, it should be pointed out that before 2009, due to the 3G network and smart phones have not yet been popularized, most of the Internet of Vehicles systems developed by the world's major automobile OEMs are based on the Windows CE system.
Since 2011, because the share of Android system in the smartphone market has occupied a leading position, it is parallel with Apple's iOS system. Major car companies have changed their ways, and have changed their vehicle systems that provide Internet of Vehicles services to Android systems or BlackBerry's QNX systems. And on this basis, it is compatible with functions such as Apple's CarPlay.
It can be said that Waymo unmanned vehicles are a typical representative of the "soft with hard" route. Domestic Baidu Apollo's autonomous driving open platform also takes this route.
From its birth in 2009 to the end of 2015, Google invested more than $1 billion in the Waymo self-driving car project every year to develop software and hardware for driverless cars. The reason for splitting Waymo to Alphabet is mainly because Google considers that Waymo is difficult to make a profit in a short period of time, which will drag down the performance of Google's listed companies.
Such a large investment cannot pay for itself in the short term, let alone make a profit. Although Waymo has not yet announced its financial status, from the third quarter earnings report of its parent company Alphabet, compared with 2021, the company's profit fell by 27%, of which the most loss-making business is Google cloud computing and other businesses, and Waymo is included in this part of the business.
John Krawsic, former CEO of Google's driverless car project, has said that Google's driverless car technology is close to "entering the public life", suggesting that Waymo will soon start commercialization. But the facts show that Google still underestimates the difficulty of commercialization.
At present, the commercialization of high-level autonomous driving generally faces many restrictions such as policies and regulations around the world. In addition, there are many difficulties to effectively promote substantive issues such as license requirements, right of way, division of accident liability, and insurance policies, and lack of prerequisites for commercialization.
The success or failure of Waymo's unmanned vehicle's "soft belt hard" route has also given Huawei sufficient reference and reference.
04
Huawei's future road, how to go?
Before Huawei's layout of the automotive industry, domestic independent car companies and parts supporting enterprises still relied heavily on foreign suppliers for their system architecture, including domain controllers, due to late start and lack of core technologies: the operating system mainly relied on the QNX system of BlackBerry of Canada and Google's Android system.
In the field of mainstream controller chips, it mainly relies on Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Intel in the United States, Samsung in South Korea, Renesas in Japan, and NXP in the Netherlands. The previous domestic chip solution was only Taiwan's MediaTek, and there was a big gap between the process technology, CPU computing power and GPU computing power and Qualcomm's chips.
Before Huawei, no company in China could independently develop and mass-produce the whole vehicle-level software system and domain controller chip industry chain.
Huawei's huge investment in the automotive field for many years has effectively filled the gaps and gaps in China's previous core technologies such as high-computing power core chips and operating systems, and has made considerable changes in China's core technology fields in the past.
Whether Huawei wants to become the Android of the automotive industry and choose between Tier 1 or being an OEM is a question at present.
But in any case, there are significant trade-offs.
Conclusion
Compared with building cars himself, Huawei's three models in the automotive business (namely parts supply model, HI model, and smart car model) prevail, which means that Huawei has chosen the open source Android route in the automotive field. However, because the platform and system integration of automobiles is much higher than that of smartphones, Huawei must promote the software ecology of the Hongmeng system by developing hardware architectures such as chips and intelligent cockpits. In the future, even if Huawei takes the smart car model as the strategic focus of its future automotive business and adopts a method similar to Google's operation of the Nexus series of mobile phones, it will be more conducive to driving the design and promotion of the software ecosystem of the Harmony system and reducing the risk of trial and error in the promotion of the Harmony system ecosystem.