BYD made its own intelligent family bucket and gambled on the dignity of 90,000 engineers
Text: Chen Liang
Edit | Shi Zhiliang
"To accelerate the intelligent transformation of the automotive industry and accelerate the popularization of intelligent driving, BYD has the confidence and ability. Wang Chuanfu, chairman and president of BYD Group, sounded the charge of BYD's intelligent acceleration at the Shenzhen headquarters on January 16.
As a brand with annual sales of 3 million units, entering the markets of developed countries and exploring the high-end market, BYD has taken the lead in electrification, but to further consolidate its product advantages, expand its market share, and improve its brand value, BYD must make up for the shortcomings of intelligence in 2024.
BYD's intelligent driving engineer told Caijing Auto (ID: caijingqiche) that BYD began to lay out intelligent driving very early and has been researching and developing, and the overall development of intelligent driving has accelerated since last year.
The rapid implementation of intelligence is not only the only way for BYD to maintain its status as the king, but also the demand of potential consumers. It's not just Chinese consumers in the digital age who need smart cars, BYD's product manager has a high demand for smart cars (ID: caijingqiche), European consumers also have a high demand for smart cars, and voice interaction is popular in Europe.
As Wang Chuanfu said in the early years, the first half of the competition in the automobile industry is electrification, and the second half is intelligence. The first engineer of BYD must lead more than 90,000 engineers and invest 100 billion yuan to catch up with the current first echelon in intelligence.
Photo/Chen Liang
01 Intelligence is only vertically integrated
As a company that manufactures new energy vehicles from scratch, BYD has carried out the layout of the whole value chain from the beginning of electrification, from batteries to electric drives to semiconductors, BYD has mastered all core hardware and technologies in its own hands.
This vertically integrated mindset is now being placed on intelligent R&D. This intelligent achievement display is not a single-point display, BYD will integrate various technologies and release the "vehicle intelligence" strategy.
Wang Chuanfu believes that at present, the industry equates intelligent vehicles with intelligent cabin intelligent driving, resulting in a narrowing of the concept. In fact, intelligence is not only about intelligent cabin intelligent driving, but also vehicle intelligence breaks the inherent thinking and redefines intelligent vehicles.
To this end, BYD started from the underlying system architecture of smart cars and gradually built intelligent vehicle capabilities. As BYD's intelligent driving engineer said, BYD began to develop its own software and hardware, and many core hardware were independently developed and produced by BYD, without relying on external suppliers.
The most important product of self-development of vehicle intelligent capabilities is the intelligent architecture "Xuanji" of intelligent and electric integration. The Xuanji architecture can be understood as a combination of the human brain and the nerve center.
According to Caijing Automobile, the Xuanji architecture can be considered as a brain, two ends, three networks, and four chains. One brain, that is, the central brain, it is the strongest brain of the intelligent car, which participates in and dominates all perception, decision-making, and execution. BYD said that the central brain is the central brain independently designed and produced by BYD.
According to the plan, the central brain can not only achieve compatibility with a variety of SoC chips, but also bring about the expansion of computing power through chip decoupling. The AI module of the main control chip is a general-purpose GPU architecture with a modular design, which can realize the arbitrary allocation of storage and computing, adjust the computing power mode according to functional requirements, and achieve seamless switching and adaptation to future algorithm models.
At both ends are the vehicle-side AI and cloud AI of the Xuanji AI model. When AI on the car has become the mainstream external publicity product of major car manufacturers this year, BYD will naturally not let go of this new technology. Based on the characteristics of personalized driving, the vehicle-side AI model realizes a small closed loop of bicycle data to meet the needs of thousands of people, while the cloud AI model empowers all car owners through training and inference of massive data, iterates new functions, and optimizes old functions.
Photo/Chen Liang
It is worth mentioning that in order to better strengthen the training of the Xuanji AI large model, BYD has built its own AI supercomputing center, which in addition to its own use, also hopes to accelerate the intelligent transformation of the automotive industry.
The three networks are BYD's self-developed strength based on the full stack of hardware and software, which has opened up the Internet of Vehicles, 5G network, and satellite network to achieve the integration and interconnection of the three networks. The high-speed and low-speed communication of the Internet of Vehicles is combined with the advantages of high bandwidth and low latency of the 5G network, as well as the characteristics of the satellite network without blind spots, so that the vehicle signal is fully covered without dead ends.
The four chains are the sensor chain, the control chain, the mechanical chain and the data chain. The sensor chain is the perception system of the whole vehicle, which contains hundreds of physical sensors and soft sensing of multi-modal algorithms of the whole vehicle.
Photo/Chen Liang
The data chain relies on BYD's more than 6 million delivered vehicles equipped with intelligent cockpits and more than 2.6 million delivered vehicles equipped with L2 or above intelligent driving assistance to build a data base.
02 The whole family bucket set is large and full
If the underlying architecture is the guarantee of BYD's intelligence, then the application layer is an important criterion for the market to judge whether BYD's intelligence is good or not.
As a latecomer, BYD can be said to be the culmination of intelligent capabilities on the market, and has achieved "dessert" innovation after collecting various functions.
Taking digital keys as an example, from NFC keys to UWB digital keys, BYD can provide all the mainstream vehicle entry methods on the market, and on this basis, it has launched biometrics - palm vein unlocking.
The vein lines are recorded through the image acquisition module on the B-pillar, and then the vehicle can be quickly unlocked with palm information when you are not carrying any other form of physical key such as mobile phone or car key.
In the field of cockpit voice, BYD provides a no-wake function, continuous dialogue capability, cross-screen voice control, cross-sound command inheritance, and visible and speaking functions. In addition, BYD also provides intelligent travel itinerary planning, which allows the AI model of the car machine to generate a scenic spot guide through voice.
In addition, in the team mode provided by other car companies, BYD will expand the team function, which can realize cross-regional voice interaction. After the vehicle establishes a point-to-point vehicle contact through VIN, there is no need to open any app, and the Yangwang U8 in Shenzhen can send voice to the seal test vehicle in Xi'an through the on-board voice assistant, and can receive a reply from the other party within 10 seconds.
Huawei's mobile phone, which previously amazed the outside world, can make calls through satellites has also been transplanted to cars by BYD. BYD's first full-scene on-board satellite communication provides full signal coverage whether it is outdoor travel, off-road in uninhabited areas or hiking adventures. With the map tracking function, you can return along the same road.
On July 21, 2023, BYD obtained a conditional autonomous driving (L3) test license for high-speed road sections in Shenzhen, becoming the first car company in China to obtain a conditional autonomous driving (L3) test license.
In terms of intelligent driving, in July 2023, BYD's "Eye of the Gods" high-end intelligent driving assistance system was released. Until yesterday, BYD officially released the new DiPilot intelligent driving platform. For the high-end intelligent driving assistance system of the Eye of the Gods, it is uniformly named DiPilot 100, 300, and 600, which are already installed in various models.
Photo/Chen Liang
Judging from the actual experience on site, BYD has the ability of high-speed intelligent driving and urban intelligent driving, which can realize mainstream scenarios on the market such as parking on broken roads, ramp recognition and merging, traffic light recognition, congestion scene response, construction road recognition, and overtaking.
At the same time, BYD uses Yi Sifang technology to make the traditional smart parking open the "cheating" mode. In the vertical parking space, the Yi Sifang model can be rotated around the inner front/rear wheels, with a minimum parking space length of +0.8 meters and a narrowest aisle width of 2.8 meters.
Photo / Courtesy of the enterprise
Of course, these technologies are just a demonstration of BYD's intelligent technology, not mass production. According to the plan, different models will have OTA different intelligent capabilities, and the Yangwang U8 and Denza N7 will be the first to be equipped with high-end intelligent capabilities. In addition, many capabilities are still in the process of development and iteration.
According to Caijing Automobile (ID: caijingqiche), BYD's intelligent technology research and development team has more than 10,000 people, including more than 4,000 engineers in the field of intelligent driving. At the same time, a steady stream of new engineers are joining BYD.
Photo/Chen Liang
In this battle of dignity that gambled on tens of thousands of engineers, BYD must win the first battle.