Volvo actively refused Musk: FSD is not used, full-stack self-research, Polestar 3 within the year
Musk was openly rejected!
As soon as Lao Ma finished saying that FSD authorization was opened to the outside world, a well-known mainstream OEM publicly stated on the back foot:
Don't worry about it, we can develop it ourselves.
Looking at the world, the full-stack self-developed smart car, Tesla one, Xiaopeng second, Zerorun claims to be the third, and nothing else.
Who else has the courage to say a "no" in front of the strongest automated driving system, FSD?
Under Li Shufu, Volvo is also.
Volvo publicly rejected FSD
Not long ago, Musk dropped this rim nuclear bomb - Tesla FSD is open to other car companies for use.
Needless to say, its influence is likely to become the "Android" moment of smart cars, and Tesla is likely to take the lead in achieving AGI breakthroughs and opening a new future cycle.
Tesla's opening of FSD authorization is actually what traditional car companies that have been looking for intelligent transformation for many years and cannot get the essentials are most needed.
Two days ago, Lao Ma also revealed that he had closely discussed licensing matters with a mainstream OEM.
But Volvo was the first to publicly refuse to carry the FSD.
Jim Rowan, president and CEO of Volvo Cars, has just been interviewed by a CNBC show. When asked, "After connecting to Tesla's NACS charging standard, do you consider using Tesla's Autopilot technology?" Luo Wenxian replied as follows:
We have decided to develop our own advanced driver assistance technology completely in-house, and until we have developed a complete autonomous driving software, we will continue to write, continue to invest, and continue to develop.
That is to say, at present, even the pure electric platform has not fully mastered the proficiency, and Volvo, which is still tired of coping with the new energy revolution with oil to electricity, suddenly pulled the future expectations of intelligence to the same height as Tesla.
This scene seems familiar... Volvo took SAIC's script and re-enacted.
Chen Hong, chairman of SAIC at the time, publicly rejected Huawei's automatic driving, saying that SAIC could not accept Huawei as a soul and a shell by itself.
Although Volvo's refusal to Tesla is not explicitly stated, its intention is the same as SAIC's.
Later, we found out that the "soul" of SAIC was actually given by the autonomous driving company Momenta, and SAIC invested in the shares.
So where does Volvo's "soul" come from?
Volvo confidence, color geometry?
Volvo is now one step slower in the automotive industry revolution, and even electrification is still half-baked, let alone intelligent.
This year's latest pure electric model EX90 is officially announced to be the latest pure electric institution, but in fact, it is still a platform born from the previous fuel architecture SPA.
Despite the front trunk, the EX90 and XC90 are identical in terms of body, chassis, and especially axle length ratio.
Therefore, the so-called SPA2 platform is actually a continuation of the characteristics of the SPA platform in the period of fuel vehicles, that is, it can only cope with models with large body sizes such as medium and large ones.
The freed up front trunk was heavily cost optimized on the XC90 platform.
Therefore, the essence of EX90 is a "boutique" oil to electricity, which can also see that Volvo's attitude towards the new energy revolution is no better than the BBA that perfunctory users have vague concepts.
Intelligent... It can only be said that Volvo is mainly relying on procurement suppliers to implement basic L2 assisted driving functions and intelligent cockpit functions with basic interaction capabilities.
As for the underlying on-board OS, SOA architecture, on-board software ecology, and the autonomous driving R&D system of the positive data closed-loop, Volvo is still blank.
The willingness to transform, Volvo is positive. But there are not many means of transformation. So in theory, Volvo should have been a potential ideal customer for FSD.
But Volvo put on a posture of "the big husband does not eat the food that comes".
Its confidence mainly comes from two points.
The basic condition is that Volvo's own performance is eye-catching and the growth rate is gratifying, which can support independent research and development.
According to Volvo's second-quarter financial report, the group's net sales increased by 18% to SEK 140.8 billion (approximately 97.568 billion yuan). Operating profit was SEK 21,732 million (previous year: SEK 13,745 million).
Of course, Volvo is backed by the big tree of Lishu Fujili Automobile, so naturally there is no need to worry about money.
In particular, Volvo is now the only profitable high-end brand under Geely that has been recognized both at home and abroad.
This is reflected in the fact that Volvo is privileged and favored by Li Shufu within Geely.
For example, Geely already has a good pure electric vast architecture, extreme krypton in use, smart in use, Lotus in use, but Volvo put this ready-made, that is, do not use, even if the progress is behind, it must be self-developed.
Li Shufu allowed.
Intelligently, the "own son" Extreme Krypton can only obey the unified arrangement of Geely Group and use the scheme of the supplier Mobileye, which has become the biggest shortcoming and is complained by users, and Extreme Krypton is also very helpless about this.
But Volvo said that it would develop itself, and Li Shufu immediately coordinated resources and really built a new self-driving company for Volvo - Zenseact.
Chinese is called Zhexi Software Technology Co., Ltd., nominally a Swedish autonomous driving company, controlled by Zenseact AB, registered in Sweden, which is actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of Volvo.
The predecessor of Zenseact, which can be traced back to Swedish automotive safety systems supplier Autoliv, is also one of the suppliers of Volvo.
Autoliv first spun off its assisted driving division, named Veoneer, and listed it on the New York Stock Exchange.
Veoneer later formed Zenuity, a joint venture with Volvo, to form a self-driving company in 2017.
However, according to foreign media reports, Volvo is obsessed with autonomous driving research and development, while Veoneer focuses on ADAS solutions that can be commercialized and quickly monetized in a short period of time, and established an advanced driver assistance brand Arriver.
In 2020, the two sides parted ways, Veoneer completely withdrew, once ready to sell Magna, but was cut off by Qualcomm... But that's another story.
On Volvo's side, after Veoneer withdrew, Li Shufu, the father of the gold owner, saw the opportunity to let his ECARCOM take a stake in Zenuity and changed his name to Zenseact. When Volvo was in a dilemma when it developed its own autonomous driving, it saved its life.
Just last year, ECARCOM withdrew its shares to focus on intelligent computing hardware, and Zenseact became a Volvo subsidiary entirely.
It can be understood that Li Shufu gave Volvo full trust and autonomy to develop its own automatic driving system.
At present, Zenseact has two headquarters, respectively in Shanghai and Gothenburg, Sweden, and has been hanging job advertisements in China.
From the homepage, its autonomous driving solution OnePilot will soon be installed on Polestar 3, which belongs to the L2+ function, covering high-speed NOA, which can realize autonomous on/off ramps and autonomous navigation.
But you need to rely on HD maps.
So you can make a bold guess that Zenseact is actually divided into two sets of domestic and foreign team operations, adapting to the overseas and Chinese markets respectively. For example, the OnePilot system to be equipped by Volvo in China in the future is likely to go to HD maps.
In general, Volvo still has some accumulation compared with other car companies in transition, but overall it has not exceeded L2 assisted driving, and the most important data closed-loop capabilities, computing power resources, whether there are big bulls leading the team, etc., are all mysteries.
As for the data accumulation and collection ability, it is not a secret, the current OnePilot installed capacity is very small, almost in the beginning state.
Volvo's rejection of Tesla has any impact
So Volvo's rejection of Tesla FSD can be understood like this:
A fledgling, ignorant and fearless young man who refuses the intelligent shortcut of taking a fast train.
The future is worrying, but courage is admirable.
In particular, the spirit of self-improvement is not scarce in the car circle at present, and there are many car companies that want to self-develop and control their own destiny, but they can really have the support of healthy operating cash flow, and have the ability to pull up the regular army that has been developing AI systems themselves, and can come up with mass-produced car products, and count them on one hand.
Volvo has crossed this threshold, which is enough to show that its transformation progress and strength have been greatly ahead of Volkswagen, Toyota, Ford, General Motors and other old car companies.
As for Tesla, being rejected by Volvo does not have much impact in the short term, because Volvo is not a first-line big name in the world and in China. Losing this single order is actually not a big loss.
You Ma Ge may not care much either.
But the value and luxury positioning of the Volvo brand itself is there, and it is not easy to say whether the public rejection of Tesla will have an impact on the future FSD authorized export sales.
But the most important impact is that another self-driving full-stack self-developed player indicates his identity, the hole card is unknown, but behind the "big tree", the potential cannot be underestimated.
Tesla's long-term intelligent core capability competitor, +1.
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