In today's Chinese car market, marketing is king. And the business owners who have to serve as "chief marketing officers" are naturally "constantly under fire" all day. However, "duplicitous" bosses like BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu are indeed relatively rare.
Before this year's Shanghai Auto Show, he declared at the investor conference that "driverless is... Autonomous driving is just a capital-wrapped, advanced assisted driving. ”
If you consider that BYD's actions in automatic driving do lag behind its peers, it is understandable to understand Wang Chuanfu's firing as "anger and indisputability".
However, today, if we carefully sort out BYD's work in automatic driving (intelligent driving), we may feel more and more that Wang Chuanfu's sentence is "releasing smoke bombs".
This is because BYD has significantly accelerated its efforts to make up for the shortcomings of autonomous driving in the past year.
5,000 people have been recruited
In particular, a statement by Li Ke, executive vice president of BYD, not long ago, was leaked in the past few days, and its authenticity has also been confirmed by the company.
Li Ke revealed at an internal investor communication meeting that BYD has recruited a software team of four or five thousand people for autonomous driving.
"It's not ahead of others, but at the end of the day, BYD will be unleashed in three years," the executive vice president vowed to behold.
Photo by Carol Carquejeiro/Valor
As China's top electric vehicle brand and provider of important supply chain components such as batteries, BYD's importance in China's new energy sector needs not be recalled.
However, in many advanced technology research fields related to electric vehicles, BYD lags significantly behind in intelligent driving, and its accumulation is far less than those young competitors whose sales are far less than it.
Considering that the competition in China's new energy and intelligent vehicle market is too fierce, the model configuration has been rolled to an unprecedented extent. The popularity of key functions such as ultra-high battery life, high performance, and advanced assisted driving is increasing, and it has begun to explore from the mid-to-high-end price point to the low-end in the past.
In particular, advanced assisted driving has been laid out by major mainstream brands today. It is expected that in less than a year, by the end of this year, the high-speed elevated and NOA (Pilot Assist) capabilities of some urban roads will be fully equipped by the volume models of various brands.
At the same time, although BYD's cumulative sales exceeded 440,000 vehicles in the first quarter of this year, surpassing Volkswagen to become the quarterly sales champion, and nearly doubled the year-on-year growth in production - a problem that cannot be ignored is that many BYD models only support basic L2 level assisted driving capabilities, barely able to achieve adaptive range and lane keeping (based on Bosch's ADAS solution of the DiPilot system), and nothing else.
BYD's lag in autonomous driving will lead to a significant reduction in the future product competitiveness of China's new energy leader.
This shortcoming must be filled.
At present, it has set up a completely new department and started a large-scale recruitment wave to try to catch up with opponents on autonomous driving, and even "overtake in corners".
Last year, BYD took a strong approach to resource restructuring, re-twisting the power of autonomous driving research and development scattered among the group's organizations and brands into a new team, specializing in research and development in various fields of intelligent driving.
According to public information, the new team department structure will be installed in the BYD Planning Institute under BYD's automotive business, involving areas including but not limited to algorithms, applications, software development, architecture, embedded systems, chips and so on.
The headquarters of the new division will be located in Shanghai, but it seems that there will be relevant research and development teams in Shenzhen and BYD's hometown of Xi'an.
The recruitment process has been underway since the beginning of last year. For example, the picture below is a job advertisement that circulated in the market last year.
Recently, there have also been media reports that Wang Huan, head of intelligent driving research and development at BYD Planning Institute, has left, and the department in charge of it has once again ushered in structural restructuring. It is reported that all software and hardware research and development work related to BYD's autonomous driving will be under Han Bing, director of the electronic integration department.
According to Reuters, BYD's recruitment in autonomous driving has not stopped and is still ongoing.
From Li Ke's statement, we also know that this department has recruited at least four or five thousand people.
As of April this year, BYD had 660,000 employees worldwide. In other words, "four or five thousand" is less than one percent.
However, even so, this number is already quite high in the country, and even in the global car companies.
This cooperation is ultimately self-sufficient
In fact, as China's top local car brand, BYD is still very advanced in autonomous driving.
In the early years, BYD and Beijing University of Technology, as well as Baidu, AutoX and other companies, have made a lot of attempts in automatic driving.
However, these early years of tossing and turning do not seem to really bear fruit, or at least did not bring much help to BYD to reinvest in related fields today - of course, this cannot be blamed on BYD. It can be said that the first wave of companies that tossed automatic driving, in the end, because of insufficient computing power, too many shackles in the scheme, and the wrong direction, eventually led to the change of route.
Image source: Minsheng Securities July 2022 report
Minsheng Securities revealed in the weekly report of the automobile and auto parts industry in July last year that BYD has achieved good results in self-research + cooperation, and has achieved self-research and L2 level assisted driving ability on some models with medium and low-end prices of 250,000 and below.
However, L2 still has not reached the general level of intelligence of China's independent new energy vehicles this year. This creates a rather awkward situation:
Some Chinese local brands with relatively low sales volume rolled up the sky on the automatic driving function, and BYD, Volkswagen, Tesla and other brands that "failed" the level of domestic automatic driving, but rubbed the volume in China...
BYD, which is not good, still needs to work automatic driving.
In 2021, BYD and autonomous driving company Momenta established a joint venture, Dipai Zhixing, relying on BYD's vertical integration capabilities and Momenta's autonomous driving technology accumulation to jointly create intelligent driving solutions.
Last year, BYD once again signed a deep partnership with Horizon and NVIDIA, two of the most well-known domestic and foreign companies, in autonomous driving chips.
On March 23 this year, NVIDIA announced at the GPU Technology Summit that BYD will use the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin high-performance computing platform in multiple next-generation models. In addition, from the first half of 2023, BYD will equip some of its new energy vehicles with the NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion platform to realize intelligent driving and intelligent parking of vehicles.
These nearly two-year cooperation is BYD's official announcement to the industry and consumers again: we have been making up for the shortcomings of autonomous driving.
On the horizon side, BYD's self-developed bird's-eye view (BEV) fusion perception solution based on its Journey 5 chip will be mass-produced within this year and is expected to be installed on the new Han series cars.
BEV is arguably a core feature of autonomous vehicles. Only with BEV can BYD truly integrate the data of various autonomous driving sensors on the car, so that the car can have a more accurate judgment of the current environment, and further effectively and safely plan the driving trajectory of the vehicle.
According to the plan, BYD models equipped with the Horizon Journey 5 chip and related solutions will be launched as early as mid-2023.
At present, there is a common view in China's new energy industry: the first half of new energy vehicles is electric, which has ended. In the second half, it was the turn of intelligence.
As the two key components of intelligent driving, BYD really wants to accelerate the pursuit of new forces in car manufacturing and other traditional car companies that move faster.