2023 in the automotive circle: anxiety is pervasive and the market is adjusting in days

Author | Tu Ming

Editor|Zhao Jian

"Reshuffle, price war, window period of only three years, industrial chain cooperation model change, organizational model urgent need to change..."

At the recently held China Electric Vehicle 100 Forum (2023), Wang Chuanfu, Li Xiang, Li Bin, Yu Chengdong and other "car circle" bigwigs sat together to discuss the future development trend and competition pattern of China's electric vehicles, from which we can glimpse the latest trend of the development of the electric vehicle industry.

Due to the large number of participating companies, "Jiazi Lightyear" focused on the speeches of some representative participants according to the four sections of complete vehicle, automatic driving, chip, and lidar, including:

First, the second half of new energy vehicles: fast fish eat slow fish

1. BYD Wang Chuanfu: The market is adjusting in days

Whether it is sales volume or revenue, BYD can be called the biggest winner in 2022.

According to the latest data, BYD's new energy vehicle sales reached 207,000 units in March, and the cumulative sales in the first quarter reached 552,000 units, a year-on-year increase of 92.81%. BYD's cumulative sales in the first quarter were 130,000 units higher than Tesla's, becoming the global sales leader. BYD's operating income last year was 424.061 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 96.2%. The net profit attributable to the parent was 16.622 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 445.86%.

Wang Chuanfu, chairman and president of BYD, once declared, "BYD's goal is to become China's largest automaker by the end of this year." ”

In this year's high-level forum of the 100 People's Meeting, Wang Chuanfu put forward two suggestions:

First, it is recommended to extend the new energy vehicle purchase tax reduction policy until 2025 to help stabilize market expectations and promote market development;

Second, it is recommended to promote the "multi-gun fast charging" new energy vehicle charging mode, which refers to "charging a car with two or more guns at the same time". BYD has more than 100 patents on this model, which is intended to be open to the industry for free use.

Wang Chuanfu believes that at present, China's new energy vehicle market is ushering in a critical stage from quantitative change to qualitative change, and the iteration of new and old things has ushered in a historic critical point. "The automotive market in the first quarter has already reflected this change", the market is adjusting on a daily basis, and the timetable for the full electrification of Continental vehicles is advancing and the process is accelerating, faster than expected. In this regard, "the industry must have full expectations and preparations".

He predicted that this year's domestic new energy vehicle sales can reach 8.5 million ~ 9 million units.

This process, "for any enterprise, is organic in crisis, and there is danger in opportunity", Wang Chuanfu called on peers to "pay attention to small changes in the market, think calmly and respond calmly".

He believes that the current industry is mixed, "happy that the mainland auto market is huge, and worried that the market competition is extremely fierce." At this time, the market competition is "not big fish eating small fish, it may be fast fish eating slow fish".

In the great change, Wang Chuanfu believes that "enterprises must have innovative technology, accurate strategy and flexible decision-making, all three are indispensable, only in this way can enterprises survive." ”

2. NIO Li Bin: Last year's loss was in research and development

NIO's 2022 annual report showed that it recorded an operating loss of 6.7 billion yuan in the fourth quarter of that year, a record high, and the loss rate increased from 30% in the third quarter to 42%. At last year's NIO annual meeting, Li Bin, founder, chairman and CEO of NIO, said that "NIO is indeed difficult now."

By 2023, Li Bin said that "this year's sales target is to double." Based on last year's annual sales of 122,400 units, NIO needs to sell 244,800 vehicles this year, with an average of 22,400 units per month. In January and February this year, NIO's average monthly sales were 10,000 vehicles.

At this year's Electric Vehicle 100 Conference, Li Bin once again stressed that "the uncertainty of the entire industry is very large" and "the whole industry has to make some very difficult choices". Last year, NIO delivered 122,000 vehicles at an average price of 437,000 yuan, and NIO's market share was 54.8% in the high-end pure electric market of more than 300,000 yuan, and its share in the market of more than 400,000 yuan was 75%.

Li Bin said, "As a startup, we are not qualified to stop and think too much", in order to win, NIO has made changes in three aspects, namely strengthening core technology research and development, promoting the construction of charging and swapping infrastructure and expanding the global market.

Li Bin said that NIO's losses last year "were mainly lost in research and development, which I think is an investment." At present, NIO has established more than 10 R&D centers in the United States, Europe and China, and NIO's R&D investment in the fourth quarter of last year was close to 4 billion yuan, and last year, NIO's R&D investment reached 10.8 billion yuan.

This year, NIO will continue to increase investment in research and development. Li Bin said, "Around the full-stack capabilities of smart electric vehicles, from chips, underlying operating systems, materials to battery cells, NIO must invest in research and development." Li Bin believes that this is a tradition of NIO since 2015, "three electric, three wisdom, all-aluminum body, has always been NIO's own doing."

Regarding the charging and swapping infrastructure, Li Bin believes that this is the most important factor in determining the user experience of electric vehicles. NIO has set up a rechargeable, exchangeable and upgradable charging and swapping service system since 2015, and so far, more than 180,000 charging piles and more than 14,000 public charging piles have been installed, and the charging piles are open, and more than 80% of users are not NIO owners.

Globally, NIO has also connected more than one million third-party charging piles, and deployed 52 destination plus circuit lines across the country, such as the Sichuan-Tibet line, Mount Everest base camp, Mohe, Xinjiang, etc., and more than 20 such destination plus circuit lines will be deployed this year. In addition, NIO has built 1,326 swap stations across the country and deployed 13 stations in Europe.

At present, NIO has completed 20 million power exchanges, and its power exchange has accounted for 60% of the total electricity consumption of users, exceeding the charging power. Li Bin said that it is expected that by 2025, NIO will fully complete a high-speed power exchange network covering 19 large urban agglomerations, and by the end of this year, NIO will build more than 2,300 exchange stations, add 10,000 charging piles, and resolutely carry out infrastructure construction.

In the global market, NIO's NIO House in Frankfurt has just opened.

3. Ideal Li Xiang: Organizational change will not achieve full results until 2025

On April 1, Li Auto announced its sales for the previous month, with deliveries of 20,823 units in March, a year-on-year increase of 88.7%, and sales of 16,624 units in February, with cumulative sales of 52,584 units in the entire first quarter, a year-on-year increase of 65.8%.

In addition, Ideal also set a record for the fastest delivery of 300,000 vehicles by a new automaker, which took 39 months. Li Xiang, founder, chairman and CEO of Ideal, once said, "We will challenge the entire luxury SUV market in the price range of 300,000 yuan to 500,000 yuan to win 20% market share this year. ”

At the 100-person conference of electric vehicles, Li Xiang mainly shared the problem ability of the automotive industry with long chain, difficult organization and management, and high difficulty in full-stack self-research.

Li Xiang said that from the Internet to the automotive industry, the ideal needs to become four different types of enterprises at the same time, and the capabilities need to cover four aspects: software applications, industrial manufacturing, service networks, and platform research and development. At present, Ideal has realized full-stack self-research in the extended range electric system, intelligent cockpit system and intelligent driving system.

Li Xiang said that the realization of "blossoming on all sides" requires high organizational capabilities, so Ideal began to introduce Huawei's IPD matrix organizational process and organizational management method. Li Xiang believes that by transforming into a matrix organization, the ideal can achieve global coordination, solve the collaboration problem of technology, platform and product research and development, and get out of the business collaboration dilemma of product, supply chain and delivery.

Li Xiang emphasized, "Under such a process and organizational structure, we began to cultivate a large number of business-minded people, who will not only consider how to make money, but also control costs throughout the process." Such organizational changes are just beginning, and "full results will not be achieved until at least 2025".

In addition, with the advent of AI Big Model Software 2.0, the ideal has also been adjusted. For example, in terms of data labeling, ideal previously mainly relied on many outsourcing companies for calibration, but the use of large model 2.0 for automatic calibration, the efficiency is 1000 times that of people.

4. Wang Jun of Changan Automobile: The supply chain cooperation model of automobiles has been reshaped

Changan Automobile is a long-established enterprise in China's automotive industry, and has transformed into a smart low-carbon mobility technology company since 2017, and currently has three brands: Changan, Deep Blue and Avita.

Among them, Deep Blue is a new energy vehicle brand independently operated by Changan Automobile, targeting the mid-to-high-end pure electric vehicle market; Avita brings together the three directors of Changan Automobile, Huawei and CATL.

At present, Changan Automobile is committed to promoting the transformation of its own automobile production line to intelligent manufacturing. Zhu Huarong, Secretary of the Party Committee and Chairman of Changan Automobile, said: "Previously, Changan Automobile's production line required more than 1,000 people, but now only 100 people are needed, and this process is to achieve manufacturing production with more guaranteed quality, higher efficiency and lower cost than manual operation through intelligent robot management, big data management and industrial Internet technology." ”

In addition to the traditional machinery manufacturing industry, Changan Automobile also has a layout in software technology, such as its "Zhuge Intelligence" brand, which is committed to intelligent driving, intelligent interaction and intelligent ecology. It is estimated that by 2025, Changan Automobile will successively launch more than 30 new intelligent and connected products.

At the 100-person meeting of electric vehicles, Wang Jun, president and deputy secretary of the party committee of Changan Automobile, said that the automotive industry chain and supply chain will gradually change from the original chain-type commercial exchange relationship to the strategic partner management relationship, and the original cooperation model of OEM coordination and parts supplier division of labor will also become a new model for parts suppliers and vehicle enterprises to jointly face customer needs.

From the perspective of resource system, smart electric vehicles will also bring a large number of new ecological cooperation needs, traditional automobile companies, new vehicle enterprises, and even ICT companies will compete on the same stage in communications, chips, software, maps and other fields.

In the business model, car sales will also change from a hammer sale to a full life cycle management. With the advent of the "software-defined vehicle" era, the cost of a vehicle will also change from the user bearing the entire cost at one time to providing service value throughout the life cycle of the enterprise.

In addition, Wang Jun believes that from the perspective of global competition, China's new energy vehicles have now reached the stage of focusing on economies of scale. At this stage, new brands have the opportunity to re-compete with established companies for pricing power, he said, this round of technological change and its market breakthrough, will be the only visible "lane change and overtaking opportunity" for Chinese brands in the next 10 years.

Changan Automobile has built a global R&D layout in 6 countries and 10 places, established 16 technology and product R&D centers, 17 technology companies, and a R&D team of more than 14,000 people. In the field of new energy, Changan Automobile has realized the mass production and application of three new energy technologies: hydrogen fuel cell system, intelligent plug-in hybrid, and Force electric.

In terms of intelligence, Changan Automobile has implemented the Beidou Tianshu Plan and has mass-produced 26 intelligent technologies such as remote intelligent parking.

5. Extreme Krypton An Smart: It is expected to enter the European market in the fourth quarter of this year

Geely Automobile's high-end electric vehicle brand, focusing on the luxury electric vehicle market, has launched three models: Extreme Krypton 001, Extreme Krypton 009 and Extreme Krypton X. It is reported that at the end of 2022, the valuation of extreme krypton will be as high as about 10 billion US dollars.

An Conghui, president of Geely Holding Group and CEO of Zeekr Intelligent Technology, once revealed that Zeekr submitted a draft registration statement for a possible IPO to the US Securities and Exchange Commission at the end of December last year on a confidentiality basis, which is currently under regulatory review. "Subsequently, if the market window is appropriate, the company will choose the opportunity to make a public submission and strive to complete the listing."

At this year's Electric Vehicle 100 People Conference, An Conghui sorted out the achievements of Zeekr since its establishment two years ago. He said that since its establishment, Zeekr has delivered more than 93,000 vehicles, with the average order amount of the first model Zeekr 001 exceeding 336,000 yuan, and the average order amount of the luxury flagship model Zeekr 009 reaching 527,000 yuan.

An Conghui introduced that in terms of global layout, Geely has provided Zeekr with underlying empowerment in core technology fields such as three electric and intelligent through industry-research integrated institutions such as Veritian Energy and ECARCOM and the forward-looking technology ecology of space-ground integration. In addition, Zeekr Motors has also established international institutions such as the European Innovation Center and the European Design Center, and now has a research and development team of more than 7,000 people.

In terms of global manufacturing, Zeekr has built a smart factory of Zeekr and An Conghui said that its integrated die-casting technology is internationally leading and has been fully used on Zeekr 009. In terms of architecture, Geely has spent five years building China's first vast architecture with complete intellectual property rights and native pure electricity consumption. All models of Zeekr are designed around this architecture.

In addition, regarding global competition, An Conghui said that Zeekr has established a European sales team last year and is expected to officially enter the European developed market in the fourth quarter of this year.

6. Leap Auto Zhu Jiangming: Only complete self-research can ensure rapid iteration

Leapmotor is the fourth listed automaker after Wei Xiaoli.

Not long ago, Leapmotor released its 2022 financial report. According to the financial report, the company achieved operating income of 12.385 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 295.4%; The net loss was 5.109 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 79.52%. The loss did not translate into an increase in sales, and in January this year, the delivery volume of Zerorun fell by 86.59% month-on-month, and in February it fell by 62.4% year-on-year.

In 2020, Zhu Jiangming, founder, chairman and CEO of Leapmotor, proposed a "5-year plan", hoping that Leapmotor could enter the top three of new forces in 2023 and obtain 10% of the domestic new energy vehicle market share in 2025.

At this year's Electric Vehicle 100 People Conference, Zhu Jiangming mainly shared the iteration and profitability of electric vehicle products.

Zhu Jiangming said that smart electric vehicles are an electronic product, and today's smart electric vehicles cannot be viewed with the same eyes as traditional cars. For example, in the past, cars were four to six years newer, while smart electric vehicle iterations only take two years. 60%-70% of the cost of smart electric vehicles are spent on batteries, electric drives, electronic controls, intelligent cockpits and other electronic components, according to the laws of the electronics industry, this part of the price reduction space is huge, and the price reduction speed will be very fast.

Zhu Jiangming believes that the electric vehicle industry has come to the second half of the event, fighting for intelligent cockpit, intelligent driving and vehicle domain control. According to Moore's Law, chips in these fields are iterated every two years, which requires car companies to follow Moore's Law and iterate the cockpit platform every two years. This requires a high level of self-research capabilities of car companies, only complete self-research can ensure rapid iteration, if the products of Tier 1 suppliers are used, the speed of technological innovation will be difficult to guarantee.

For the price of electric vehicles ten years later, Zhu Jiangming said, "It is completely possible to achieve a price of 50,000 yuan, which refers not to a cheap mini car, but to a medium and large SUV like the Leap C11." Zhu Jiangming further explained his judgment, he said, "Ten years later, the price of the battery can be easily 'halved', the weight of the electric drive can be reduced to 50kg, the price is reduced to less than 4,000 yuan, and counting the intelligent cockpit and other components, the price is completely possible." ”

Zhu Jiangming therefore proposed that in the future electric vehicle market, "the iteration and price reduction speed of cars must be much faster than that of fuel vehicles, and if they cannot catch up with this update cycle, they will fall behind."

For Zerorun, their development speed is three iterations in five years, launching the first generation of distributed electrical and electronic architecture in 2019, launching with centralized electrical and electronic architecture in 2021, and in September this year, Zerorun is expected to release a new centralized electrical and electronic architecture, "that is, the intelligent cockpit, central domain control, power amplifier, ADAS, etc. are concentrated in one box", with a higher degree of concentration.

7. GAC Aianxi Zhongmin: Sales hit 600,000 units this year

GAC AION is an independent new energy vehicle company under GAC Group, according to the recently disclosed sales of China's new energy vehicle market in March, GAC AION's vehicle sales are second only to BYD, reaching 40,016 units, higher than Tesla and Li Auto.

Previously, GAC AION's new car, the AH8 model, is a medium and large intelligent pure electric SUV jointly built with Huawei, which is scheduled to be mass-produced before the end of this year. However, on March 27, the GAC Group announced that GAC AION's AH8 project will be changed from "joint development with Huawei to independent development", and Huawei will participate in model development as an important supplier of AION. In addition, the project investment increased from CNY 925 million to CNY 1.233 billion, and all the increased funds were financed by GAC AION.

This shift epitomizes the changes in the partnership between automotive companies and Tier 1 suppliers. At this year's electric vehicle 100 people meeting, Xi Zhongmin, deputy general manager of GAC AION, said that the competition in the future electric vehicle market is based on comprehensive capabilities, including: rapid iteration capabilities in R&D dimensions, rapid factory layout, large-scale production, short-cycle low-cost delivery capabilities in intelligent manufacturing, independent stable and controllable capabilities of the industrial chain, independent user operation and service capabilities, and efficient organizational system construction capabilities.

Regarding the future pattern of the electric vehicle market, Xi Zhongmin said, "In the next five years, the Matthew effect of the new energy track will become more and more apparent, the market differentiation will continue to intensify, and finally 3-5 enterprises may be gathered", now the new energy track is talking about technology, talking about automatic driving, cockpit, chassis, GAC AION summarized it as "technology + cost" and "product + ecology" competition.

Xi Zhongmin further added, "the generation of new technology is often relatively costly, so cost and sustainable operation is the key to the next stage of competition", and reducing costs requires scale, in scale, the power of "technology + cost" can be reflected, and after that, product competition will become "product + ecology" competition.

Regarding GAC AION's development goals, Xi Zhongmin said, "Our sales target for this year is to hit 600,000 yuan. ”

In addition, Xi Zhongmin suggested that he hopes that the government will introduce policies to control the price of raw materials, help solve the "stuck neck" problem of chips, and continue to give more technical or policy subsidies and support on the autonomous driving track to help enterprises solve the bottleneck of autonomous driving technology.

8. Cialis Schulin: This year is a watershed moment for the new energy vehicle market

Cialis Auto is one of the automotive companies that cooperate most closely with Huawei in the automotive industry, and in the Huawei smart car model, it has jointly created the AITO brand with Huawei, and the development speed is very rapid.

Not long ago, Cialis announced its March production and sales report, the report showed that the cumulative sales of all new energy vehicle brands under Cialis Group in March was 8511 units, a year-on-year increase of 14.23%, of which the total sales of Cialis brand new energy vehicles reached 3679 units, a year-on-year increase of 16.42%.

The sales volume of the series of vehicles is not disclosed separately, but according to past data, the sales volume of the series of cars should be basically equivalent to the sales of Cialis brand new energy vehicles.

Huawei's cooperation with Cialis has recently sparked heated public opinion, and in early March, the original logo of the brand "AITO Question" was quietly changed to "HUAWEI Question", which was once speculated by the industry as a precursor to "Huawei's end to build a car". Recently, Ren Zhengfei, founder and chairman of Huawei, signed a decision-making announcement, once again emphasizing that "Huawei does not build cars", which is valid for 5 years, and emphasizing that "Huawei/HUAWEI cannot be allowed to appear in the publicity and appearance of the whole vehicle".

In response to the society's concern about the cooperation model between Cialis and Huawei, Xu Lin, CTO of Cialis Group and President of Cialis Automobile (Rotation) at this year's Electric Vehicle 100 People Conference, shouted for Huawei, "Huawei did not build cars, it was doing joint development with us", he said, "The cooperation model of AITO is truly led by Cialis, Huawei is deeply empowered, we jointly design, jointly develop, jointly quality control and joint marketing." ”

In addition, in response to the development trend of the electric vehicle market, Xu Lin said that "the new energy vehicle market will usher in a key watershed in 2023", with slowing growth, intensifying competition, and diving car prices as core features.

Xu Lin believes that the key to winning the future electric vehicle market lies in the creation of intelligent cockpits, intelligent networking, automatic driving and user characteristics. On the technical route, Cialis will adhere to the extended range technology route. Through the efforts of the past three years, the Cialis range extension technology route has entered from 1.0 to 3.0.

9. Avita Chen Zhuo: roll product power, but not easy roll price

Avita is a smart electric vehicle brand jointly created by Changan Automobile, Huawei and CATL, which is positioned as "human emotional intelligent travel partner". At present, Avita has launched two popular products, Avita 11 dual-motor version and single-motor version, and there is also an Avita 011 limited edition of 5,000 units.

At the end of last month, Avita disclosed car sales data, which showed that in the ranking of China's high-end pure electric SUV with more than 300,000 yuan (March 1-March 26), Avita 11 won the championship with 1,673 units.

In today's automotive circle, price wars seem to be the norm. However, at this year's electric vehicle 100 people meeting, Chen Zhuo, senior executive vice president of Avita Technology, clearly stated that "Avita will not easily do price competition, but will roll the product to the extreme", and the underlying logic is to strengthen its high-end brand positioning.

Chen Zhuo said that the volume of product power is reflected in the design concept of Avita Automobile's "entry is standard, standard is full", and an entry-level Avita model is also equipped with 3 lidars, 6 millimeter wave radars, 3 ultrasonic radars, and 13 cameras as standard. Chen Zhuo further explained, "The core point behind this product positioning is Avita's future planning for the ability of this system to carry and evolve. ”

Chen Zhuo emphasized that Avita users are extremely early adopters of science and technology, and they pursue to experience first-class scientific and technological achievements, so Avita must leave sufficient upgrade space on the front-end hardware to meet the needs of users.

Second, assisted driving ushered in the "impulse" moment

1. Huawei Yu Chengdong: To be an ecological brand, insist on deep involvement with car manufacturers

In the past, Huawei has always adhered to the concept of "not building cars" to empower automobiles, and has created three major enabling methods: parts supply model, Hi model, and Huawei smart car selection model. Some time ago, the brand "AITO Qianjie" cooperated by Huawei and Cyris was renamed "HUAWEI Qianjie", which caused heated discussions in the industry, and the industry once speculated that "the era of Huawei not building cars is coming to an end".

Soon after, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei made it clear that "Huawei does not build cars", and did not allow the "Huawei" or "HUAWEI" logo to appear on the publicity and appearance of the vehicle.

At this year's electric vehicle 100 meeting, Yu Chengdong, director of Huawei, CEO of Terminal BG, and CEO of Intelligent Vehicle Solution BU, responded to market speculation, saying that Huawei did not build cars, but only wanted to establish an ecological brand of "HUAWEI Question". Yu Chengdong said, "Each independent brand is difficult for Huawei's marketing, service, and retail, and the input cost will increase, so I hope to have an ecological brand and a common element." ”

Yu Chengdong further explained that in the past, "we wanted to become a parts and Tier1 supplier in the field of cars, and become Bosch or Continental", but in today's era, Huawei cannot do it, because "Huawei does not do automatic standardized components such as brakes and steering, but soft things such as software, algorithms, clouds, chips, etc., and do intelligent increments", it is difficult to standardize sales, and can only be "deeply involved with car manufacturers".

Therefore, "if we only provide technology, the car we make may not be able to sell", so Huawei has implemented the smart car model, not only providing technology, but also providing Huawei's experience in To C transformation. "Adding 'HUAWEI' before the 'Qianjie' brand is also to enhance brand recognition, otherwise the enterprises enabled by Huawei are independent brands, and it is difficult for consumers to distinguish them, and the brand structure pressure is too great for Huawei."

Yu Chengdong also gave an example, he said, using the HI model, "Before three manufacturers cooperated with us, now basically only Chang'an's Avita remains." We only provide technology, and the car we make is not necessarily commercially successful, because the exterior, interior, and product definition may not sell if it is not very competitive. ”

Yu Chengdong really responded to Ren Zhengfei's announcement, saying, "After adding the 'HUAWEI' logo, some leaders of our company had different opinions, so we issued another document to cancel the 'HUAWEI'." In fact, the essence has not changed, I still want to be an ecological brand. ”

In addition, Yu Chengdong also mentioned the IPD management innovation that Ideal is implementing, saying that "this is what we quoted from IBM at a huge cost", Huawei empowers car companies, and "the quality management system of Huawei cooperative car companies has been optimized by orders of magnitude".

Yu Chengdong said that in order to maintain the advantages of Huawei's empowerment model, Huawei "invests almost 10 billion yuan per year in the automotive business, more than 7,000 direct R&D personnel, and indirect Huawei platform personnel investment may exceed 10,000." At the end of this month, Huawei will release a new car equipped with high-precision map intelligent driving technology.

The second is the intelligent cockpit, Huawei can transfer the capabilities accumulated by Harmony OS on the terminal to the field of vehicle machines, as well as intelligent networking, and software-defined vehicles, in these three areas, Huawei's goal is to "be the world's first".

In addition, Huawei also pursues independent controllability, and they have created three major systems for the car, one is VOS for vehicle control, the other is intelligent driving, and the third is intelligent cockpit. Huawei uses these three systems to "completely solve the operating system of the entire car". Yu Chengdong also appealed that he hoped to cultivate a domestic industrial chain on algorithms and chips, "because the size of the car is large, the requirements for the semiconductor process are not high, and all the chips in the car can be better replaced and independently controlled." ”

2. Baidu Li Zhenyu: The next three years are the window period for the intelligent driving industry

Baidu's Apollo intelligent driving system is the earliest autonomous driving solution in China, and in 2021, Baidu released a report that its ADAS solution has moved towards mass production, and robotaxi technology is also industry-leading, and Baidu has since entered a new stage of development.

At the end of last year, Baidu launched the ANP3.0 system (Apollo Navigation Pilot 3.0), which integrates parking lots, urban roads and highways, and is a high-end assisted driving product derived from Baidu's L4 technology; All the way still pointing to L4, the number of Baidu's radish fast running unmanned fleet has exceeded 100 in Wuhan.

At this year's Electric Vehicle 100 Conference, Li Zhenyu, Senior Vice President of Baidu Group and President of Intelligent Driving Business Group, expounded Baidu's latest insights on autonomous driving from the aspects of autonomous driving technology, large models, human-vehicle relations, and intelligent networking.

Li Zhenyu first judged the development trend of the future electric vehicle market. He said that in 2021, the penetration rate of vehicle electrification exceeded 15%, completing the "cross-ditch" of electrification; By 2026, the penetration rate of high-end intelligent driving will exceed 15%, completing the intelligent "cross-ditch". At that time, the development of the intelligent driving market will cause a new round of reshuffle in the automotive industry, which has been the consensus of the industry, and the next three years are a key window period, Baidu believes that AI will be the key to victory.

Looking back on the past year, Li Zhenyu believes that the biggest change in the field of smart cars has occurred in the field of unmanned driving. In China's complex urban road scene, driverless has achieved real landing last year, and Beijing, Wuhan, Chongqing, Shanghai and other cities have successively begun fully unmanned testing and operation. For example, Baidu's Radish Run, its fully unmanned fleet in Wuhan has exceeded 100, accounting for 1/3 of the number of special cars in the region.

Li Zhenyu said that from 0 to 1, Baidu has gone for 9 years, but from 1 to 100, Baidu has only taken a few months.

In addition, in terms of AI technology, Baidu has now realized the paradigm change from rule-based to self-learning-based algorithms. Baidu's unmanned vehicles can thus handle complex scenarios more intelligently, and the scope of vehicle operation has been greatly expanded. In the past six months, Baidu Radish Express has expanded its operational area in Wuhan from 13 square kilometers to 530 square kilometers, covering more than 1.5 million people.

Li Zhenyu also mentioned that around Baidu's "Wen Xin One Word" language model, Baidu's smart car imagination space will be larger. For example, use Wen Xin's words to empower the intelligent cockpit, configure a virtual human for each car, so that the vehicle can have an all-round assistant. In this process, the distance between users and car companies will also be shortened, the relationship between users and brands will be closer, and one-to-one exclusive services will be possible with the help of AI technology.

Li Zhenyu believes that in the future, every car company should quickly establish an engineer technical team to help car companies deeply understand human-computer interaction in automotive scenarios and provide users with differentiated services for thousands of people.

Finally, regarding intelligent networking, Li Zhenyu said, "Bicycle intelligence is like a car lamp, network empowerment is like a street lamp, and the bicycle intelligence + network empowerment solution that complements each other is the final development of vehicle, road and city." At present, many places across the country are carrying out high-level autonomous driving demonstrations of vehicle-road city integration, such as the high-level autonomous driving demonstration zone in Beijing Yizhuang, the intelligent transportation operator model pilot in Guangzhou Huangpu, the "car, road, cloud" collaborative service cluster in Jiading, Shanghai, and the L3-level intelligent network connection demonstration area in Wuhan, Hubei Province.

Li Zhenyu believes that the above attempt will significantly improve the problem of traffic congestion in large cities.

3. Nasen Taozhe: Break the monopoly of foreign giants with wire-controlled chassis

Founded in 2016, Nasen Automotive Electronics is a technology enterprise focusing on the research and development of core technologies of automotive by-wire chassis, focusing on the field of intelligent driving and new energy vehicles. Its products cover intelligent braking systems, electronic stability control systems, intelligent steering systems, and autonomous driving L3/L4 by-wire chassis solutions.

At present, Nasen has obtained fixed-point cooperation with Changan, Great Wall, GAC and other vehicle enterprises, but its market share in the field of chassis electronic control system is not high, and there is a significant gap with Bosch, Continental and other established suppliers, and it is still in the stage of small-scale mass production.

At this year's Electric Vehicle 100 People Conference, Tao Zhe, founder and CEO of Shanghai Nasen Automotive Electronics, mainly shared the development status of the autonomous driving industry, the development trend of the by-wire chassis and the innovative practice of Nathan.

Tao Zhe said that automotive intelligence involves three aspects: perception, decision-making and control, and the by-wire chassis focused by Nasen is at the intersection of perception and decision-making. At present, the by-wire chassis is still in the stage of being monopolized by the three foreign giants of Bosch, Continental and ZF, and in this track, China is "stuck in the neck".

The main reason for the "stuck neck" is that security is difficult to guarantee. The by-wire chassis is a safety part in the automotive field, the functional safety level is very high, and the supplier's products must be avoided from all links to avoid foolproof, and the product can be sold, so it is very difficult.

Tao Zhe believes that the difficulty in the research and development of the by-wire chassis lies in ensuring the redundancy and safety of the product, in order to achieve redundancy and safety, enterprises need to coordinate the subsystems and sub-modules of the entire vehicle to find the safest solution, which is the core of the by-wire chassis track.

At present, Nathan has a fully automatic manufacturing plant in Hangzhou Xiaoshan, with an annual production capacity of 3 million sets of by-wire chassis. Tao Zhe said, "Whether it is the current L2, or the future L3, L4, we have a complete product plan", this year, Nathan's integrated by-wire automatic solution has been mass-produced, next year and the year after, Nasen will also mass-produce L2~L4 solution responsible for "turning".

Regarding the cooperation model between vehicle companies and Tier 1, Tao Zhe said that more OEMs' controllers are bought by suppliers, that is, the black box model. Under this model, it is generally difficult for OEMs to integrate controllers because the supply chain is unstable and the integration cost is high, making it more difficult for OEMs to ensure supply. The future development direction of Nathan is to integrate all automatic control modules such as steering, braking, and suspension, which is the innovation of Nathan.

4. Neusoft Reach Cao Bin: The industry needs to build a new ecology of automotive operating systems

Neusoft Reach is an independently operated subsidiary of Neusoft Group, committed to providing automotive companies with automotive platforms and key technologies, and its main products include automotive basic software, assisted driving and autonomous driving, and vehicle-cloud integrated software and services.

At the 100-person electric vehicle meeting, Cao Bin, general manager of Neusoft Reach Reach shared the topic of how to build a new ecology of automotive operating systems that are compatible with "broad" and "narrow".

Cao Bin believes that the essence of operating systems is to create a suitable environment for application development. Most successful operating systems prioritize solving application development problems in the period of industrial change, so that they can be widely used in a short period of time, thereby establishing a leading edge.

For the current industrial environment, Cao Bin judged that "with the drive of chips and software, the automotive industry is undergoing unprecedented changes." In this change, automotive companies are transforming and developing to E/E architecture, the industry is moving towards a new stage of multi-domain integration, and domain controllers based on SOA architecture are gradually mass-produced, all of which have led to unprecedented expansion of software development scale, and software development faces multi-dimensional challenges such as high technical complexity, new development models, and short development cycles.

Based on the above background, Cao Bin pointed out that "the new application framework needs to play the role of 'connecting the top and the bottom'", that is, "upward, support the intelligent innovation of local car companies, and downward, cooperate with chip companies to form a combination of domestic operating system + domestic chips".

Focusing on the above ideas, at present, Neusoft Reach has jointly created a national vehicle control platform solution with ZTE and Xinchi Technology, which is based on Xinchi's X9, G9, V9, E3 series chips, ZTE's microkernel OS, Hypervisor, Safety Linux series automotive operating system and Neusoft Reach NeuSAR design.

Third, the self-driving chip competition

1. Horizon Yukai: L3 may not be really realized ten years later

Horizon is a domestic AI chip unicorn focusing on autonomous driving, founded in 2015. In the eight years since its establishment, Horizon has released three series of chip products in Journey 2, Journey 3 and Journey 5.

At the first NOA test drive meeting of Horizon Journey 5 last month, Yu Yinan, vice president of Horizon, once said, "Journey 5 is the only large-scale mass production of 100 TOPS large computing power chips in China, and its mass production is a milestone node of Horizon. ”

At this year's Electric Vehicle 100 Conference, Yu Kai, founder and CEO of Horizon, shared Horizon's thoughts on the current and future development of autonomous driving.

Yu Kai believes that with the development of artificial intelligence technology, the energy consumption and heat dissipation problems caused by massive computing need to be paid more and more attention. For OpenAI, ChatGPT is computing in the cloud, with sufficient energy supply and reasonable heat dissipation system. But if the scene changes to the car, it can only rely on the heat dissipation of the car and the power battery to supply power, "the challenge will be very huge."

Therefore, Yu Kai believes that "automatic driving cannot use such a large model and such a large calculation", so in the current ChatGPT fire, whether it is Google, Waymo or Cruise, it has not promoted the commercialization of L4 autonomous driving products.

Yu Kai also called on the intelligent driving industry to return to user value, he said, "users may not really need unmanned driving, our survey data shows that 87% of users really want the sense of ease during driving", and to achieve this sense of ease, "do not need real unmanned driving, you can do it from the beginning of advanced assisted driving".

Yu Kai said that the core he wants to share with you is to hope that "everyone will not be too anxious, because the industry is not developing so fast", and he believes that what the industry really needs to do by 2025 is to make NOA automatic driving in closed road scenarios such as high-speed and ring lines "silky smooth" on a reasonable cost performance.

Regarding Horizon, Kai Yu shared their commercialization progress over the past year. At present, there are more than 120 models of pre-installed fixed points, and nearly 3 million automotive-grade autonomous driving chips have been shipped throughout the year. Horizon's Journey 5 chip is now one of only two chips in the industry that have been mass-produced with more than 100T. of computing power. Horizon is also cooperating with Li Auto, and chips for L8 and L7 models have begun to be delivered in November last year.

In last year's L2+ advanced driver assistance market, Horizon had a 49% market share, and together with NVIDIA, it accounted for 95% of the entire market. In the future, Horizon will use larger data and larger models to promote the iteration of autonomous driving algorithms unsupervised, and at the same time, ecologically, Horizon is committed to creating an open, borderless software ecology, and Horizon hopes to create a comprehensive intelligent driving computing ecology in software, hardware domain control and other aspects.

Yu Kai is more pessimistic about whether L3 can be realized, saying that "it may not be really achieved in ten years", because it involves safety issues and the determination of accident liability. But on dedicated roads, Yu Kai believes that driverless driving is achievable, which requires "all cars on dedicated roads to be autonomous."

2. Black Sesame Smart Yang Yuxin: Innovative products will be released within this month

Founded in 2016, Black Sesame Intelligent is an automotive-level autonomous driving and platform research and development enterprise, focusing on the research and development of large computing power computing chips and platforms, and can provide complete autonomous driving and vehicle-road coordination solutions.

At the 100-person meeting of electric vehicles, talking about the industry trend of autonomous driving, Yang Yuxin, CMO of Black Sesame Intelligence, said that "the wind direction has changed." He said that before 2023, the industry will focus on chip performance, which is how much computing power the chip can have. At present, everyone is looking at cost performance and scale. Nowadays, vehicle companies are facing price reduction pressure, "cost pressure has been transmitted to the upstream", so for chip manufacturers, how to improve mass production capacity and how to reduce costs is crucial.

When it comes to cost performance, Yang Yuxin said that black sesame has been able to control the BOM cost of the integrated row and parking at 3,000 yuan, and at this price, the computing power of the black sesame chip can support 50 to 100T, and the cost still has room to explore. Black Sesame's cost optimization capabilities can help car companies solve their cost pressures.

Last year, Black Sesame announced mass production cooperation with companies including Jianghuai, Geely, Dongfeng Motor and other companies, and obtained nearly 20 car companies in China. Yang Yuxin said that black sesame has gone through the stage from 0 to 1, and now it is necessary to achieve a leap from 1 to 100.

Finally, Yang Yuxin revealed that Black Sesame plans to release its innovative product in April, which was originally planned to be released at the end of last year, and its research and development time has reached 24 months, Yang Yuxin said that Black Sesame has "invested a lot" in this product.

3. Xinchi Zhang Qiang: It is expected that the shipment volume will exceed 5 million pieces this year

Founded in 2018, Xinchi Technology focuses on providing high-performance, high-reliability automotive chips, covering four fields of intelligent cockpit, intelligent driving, gateway and MCU, and has R&D centers in Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, Shenzhen and Dalian.

At the 100-person meeting of electric vehicles, Zhang Qiang, chairman of Xinchi Technology, mainly introduced the development of Xinchi in the past year and product layout.

Xinchi Technology's products are mainly "four-core in one", that is, X9, the "core of the cabin" of the intelligent cockpit, the "driving core" V9 of ADAS intelligent driving, the "control core" E3 of high-function safety domain control, and the "core of the network" G9 of the central gateway and service-oriented gateway system.

In the past few years, Xinchi has more than 260 customers, more than 100 fixed points and mass production, and shipped more than one million pieces. Zhang Qiang said that Xinchi will reach shipments of more than 5 million pieces in 2023. At present, the customers of its mass-produced products are mainly SAIC, Changan, Chery, Dongfeng, and BYD, and this year's new customers are Nissan and Honda, and in 2025, it will cooperate with Volkswagen.

4. Wu Qiang: Computing power, power consumption and cost are the pain points of vehicle-end intelligence

Founded at the end of 2020, Houma Intelligent is a large computing power AI chip company focusing on storage-computing integrated technology, and is committed to breaking through the bottleneck of intelligent computing chip performance and power consumption. The chips and solutions provided by it provide large computing power, low power consumption, and high energy efficiency ratio can be applied to edge devices such as intelligent driving, pan-robots, and cloud inference scenarios.

At the 100-person conference of electric vehicles, Wu Qiang, founder and CEO of Houmo Intelligence, shared the problem of "how to solve the pain points of computing power, power consumption and cost faced by automotive intelligence".

Wu Qiang believes that with the retention of AI large models, the demand for AI computing power has grown explosively, and the bottleneck problem of computing power has become more and more significant. In the edge application scenarios represented by intelligent driving, in addition to the demand for high computing power of chips, high power consumption and high cost are also urgent problems that need to be solved. Houma Intelligent chooses to use storage and computing integration to reconstruct the intelligent driving chip, which can not only increase the data processing speed, but also greatly reduce the data transmission delay, so that the energy efficiency ratio of the chip is improved.

Wu Qiang also stressed that as a new technology in the post-Moore era, another advantage brought by the integration of storage and computing is its relatively weak dependence on advanced processes. In extreme cases, even if a mature process such as 28nm or 40nm is used, it is still possible to make a product comparable to the 7nm process from performance to power consumption, which is essential to achieve independent control of the chip.

At present, Houma Intelligent has carried out all-round cooperation with industry-leading autonomous driving enterprises such as Neolithic unmanned vehicles and Universal Intelligence.

Finally, Wu Qiang revealed: "The first mass-produced intelligent driving chip of Houmo Intelligent will be released in May, which is an AI chip with a physical computing power of more than 100 TOPS. Many insiders also predict that 2023 is the first year of the commercial landing of storage and computing integration, and hope that Houma Intelligent will become the leader of the commercial landing of large computing power chips with integrated storage and computing. ”

Fourth, the price of lidar needs to continue to fall

1. A path of science and technology: the industry may usher in an inflection point in 2025

Yijing Technology is an all-solid-state lidar solution provider, founded in 2017, its products are mainly used in intelligent cars, robots, smart cities and other artificial intelligence landing fields. At present, the company is focusing on promoting the development, iteration and mass production of long- and short-range full-range automotive-grade front-loaded lidar products, with partners including SAIC, Yuanrong Qixing, Mobileye, Dongfeng, Shaanxi Automobile, Yingche Technology, JD.com, WeRide, Sany, etc.

At the 100 electric vehicle meeting, Shi Tuo, founder and CEO of Yijing Technology, made a series of judgments on the development trend of the lidar industry, saying, "LiDAR will take longer to adapt to the car, and 2025 is the inflection point of the industry."

Shi Tuo further analyzed, "2022 is the first year of lidar on the car, but the current price is higher, expensive in the level of 10,000 yuan, and some lidar is at the level of about 3,000 yuan, so it can only be adapted to high-end models", how to probe the lower price is "the direction that the whole industry is exploring", and the final cost reduction goal is "to make cars of 200,000 yuan and below can also afford lidar".

It will bring many problems, such as increasing the difficulty of adaptation. For suppliers, lidar has not become a standard configuration means that suppliers have to do the difference between high configuration and low configuration at the algorithm end, low configuration needs to do a lot of work on millimeter wave radar, high configuration and algorithm adaptation for lidar, which will bring a lot of waste of work.

In addition, cost reduction is also a problem, "this year's industry price reduction tide has caused a lot of pressure on OEMs, many OEMs this year's vehicle cost reduction target may be 25% or even higher, and some OEMs hope to reduce the entire system of lidar and even automatic driving to 50%, which is a relatively large cost reduction pressure for the sensor industry represented by LiDAR." ”

Regarding the technical path issue, Shi Tuo believes that compared with cameras and millimeter-wave radar, lidar does have irreplaceable advantages, but the problem is that it is difficult for ordinary consumers to directly associate the performance of lidar with the quality of driving experience, and the willingness to pay is a problem, and whether consumers can really enjoy convenience because of the technological progress of lidar is also a problem.

2. Tudatong Bao Junwei: More than 70,000 lidar units have been delivered

Tudatong is a lidar provider founded in 2016 with R&D centers in Silicon Valley, Suzhou and Shanghai, and highly industrialized automotive-grade lidar manufacturing bases in Ningbo and Suzhou.

Its lidar solution, the Falcon, has been delivered in 2022 as standard on NIO's ET7, ES7 and ET5 Aquila systems. By the end of 2022, Tudatong had delivered more than 70,000 high-performance lidars.

At the 100 electric vehicle meeting, Bao Junwei, CEO of Tudatong, said, "LiDAR is very important for automotive intelligence, high-performance lidar has the advantage of high-precision long-distance detection, its highest angular resolution is 0.05°×0.05°, the longest detection distance is up to 500 meters, and the detection distance of typical small targets is more than 120 meters, which not only means higher performance, but also represents stronger safety redundancy, providing more security for automatic driving." ”

Bao Junwei emphasized that "for any vehicle, safety is always the standard, the safety of L2 assisted driving cannot be reduced because the responsible party is the driver, and high-performance lidar will continue to protect the safety of driving and passengers." ”