Introduction | One V2X, one HIGH-definition map
On October 29, Che Jujun received two press releases.
One article was titled: "Start Independent Operation!" The first sentence of the text is: "Today, the R brand ushered in an important milestone in development, and it is proposed to establish Feifan Automobile Technology Company (hereinafter referred to as Feifan Automobile) to carry out market-oriented operation in the form of an independent company." ”
First, from R car to Feifan car
It is a big deal and should be shared. There are just two small questions:
▎The R brand has always claimed to be "R car" before, and has also corrected media teachers not to use "R brand". For example, the press release at the time " R Car's first supercharging station is put into operation, and 100 will be built within this year!" 》。 But now that it is about to withdraw from the stage of history, why do you call yourself the R brand?
▎ The backbone of the first sentence is: R brand intends to set up Feifan Automobile. This is the first time I have heard of a brand setting up a company, generally not all of them set up a company first and then set up a brand? Of course, we understand that the R brand was originally a new brand launched by SAIC Last Year, and now it has set up a company to operate independently, but this expression still makes people who do not know a little confused.
Last year, the R brand was unveiled at the Guangzhou Auto Show, and Che Jujun had the honor of taking some photos while visiting the museum.
The theme on the screen at that time was: the new strength of the national team. The brand vision is: technology to cash in on the imagination. The stage protagonist is the Marvel R, a pure electric SUV. In front of the right side of the stage is a cool pure electric concept car: R-Aura Concept, positioned as a pure electric flagship intelligent body.
At that time, I thought that if the R brand was still affiliated with SAIC Motor, it would not be able to set up a separate booth to hold a grand press conference. The greatest possibility should be like the Polar Fox to BAIC, WEY to the Great Wall, and Eian to GAC, sooner or later it will stand on its own.
Sure enough, a year later, the R brand announced its independence and changed its name to "Feifan Motors".
Feifan Automobile was invested and established by SAIC Motor With a registered capital of 7 billion yuan, of which SAIC Motor contributed 6.65 billion yuan, accounting for 95% of the shares, and the employee shareholding platform subscribed to contribute 350 million yuan, accounting for 5% of the shares.
Feifan Automobile is still affiliated with SAIC, but it adopts a fashionable employee shareholding method, which is the same as the "user co-creation" idea of management innovation.
The press release said: As a "user-oriented data-driven technology company", Feifan Automobile is committed to creating a high-end new energy intelligent mobile space, integrating fashion into the intelligent pure electric driving experience, using technology to honor human beings' beautiful imagination of future travel, and achieving extraordinary life with co-creation partners.
There are three keywords in company positioning: user-oriented, data-driven, and technology companies, all of which are the hottest words nowadays.
The brand positioning is: high-end new energy. Seeing this, everyone will have the same question as Che Jujun: What is the difference between that and the "Zhiji Automobile" that is also saic.
Second, what is the difference between FeiFan and Zhiji?
Zhiji Automobile was established on December 25, 2020 with a registered capital of 10 billion yuan, and the legal representative is Wang Xiaoqiu, who is also the vice president of SAIC Motor.
The largest shareholder of Zhiji is Yuanjie Intelligent Technology, accounting for 72%. The other three shareholders are Alibaba 18%, Shanghai Yuanshi AutoMotive Technology Partnership 5.1%, and Shanghai Yuannei Automotive Technology Partnership 4.9%.
Shanghai Yuanjie Intelligent Technology Equity Investment Fund Partnership, established in November 2020, has three partners: SAIC Motor Group Co., Ltd. holds 74.99% of the shares, Shanghai Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park Development Co., Ltd. accounts for 25%, and Shanghai SAIC Hengxu Investment Management Co., Ltd. accounts for 0.01%. With a capital contribution of 7.2 billion yuan, SAIC Hengxu is the managing partner.
The business scope of Shanghai Yuanjie is equity investment, industrial investment, investment management, etc., and it currently invests in only one project: Zhiji Automobile Technology Co., Ltd.
If the shareholding structure is opened, the main shareholders of Zhiji Automobile are actually: SAIC (54%), Zhangjiang Hi-Tech (18%), Alibaba (18%).
Zhiji's positioning is a high-end intelligent pure electric car brand, and its mission is to make users the core driver of the automobile value chain through artificial intelligence and big data, open up the whole vehicle ECU from the bottom, fully integrate user scenarios and car perception, and encourage user customization. The chairman is still: Wang Xiaoqiu.
From this point of view, although Fei Fan and Zhi Ji are said to be siblings, there are at least three differences.
▎First of all, In the early stage, Feifan Automobile will still rely more on SAIC Group's R&D, manufacturing, service and other resources, and will be manufactured by passenger car companies; in the future, it will try to operate independently in a new way to achieve brand upwards. It is an endogenous, progressive new brand, a bit like Xingtu to Chery and Geometry to Geely.
At the beginning, Zhiji Automobile was a multi-party joint venture, newly built, and operated independently; and the shareholders had no car-making experience except SAIC, and invested funds and resources. It is a crowdfunded, high-starting, sudden new brand, a bit like Qoros to Chery, NIO to NIO NextEV.
▎ Secondly, the brand positioning is slightly different. Another press release described it as follows: SAIC Motor followed the trend and joined hands with Alibaba and Zhangjiang Hi-Tech to jointly create a high-end intelligent pure electric brand "Zhiji Automobile" in 2020; after a year, it officially launched "Feifan Automobile" to deeply cultivate the high-end intelligent electric market.
Obviously, Feifan is high-end and Zhiji is high-end. If you button the words again, you will find that Zhiji is a smart pure electric brand, and Feifan is a smart electric brand. Obviously, Zhiji, like Tesla and Weilai, only does pure electric vehicles, while Feifan may be like Ideal, Lantu, and BYD, and also take into account some extended range and plug-in models.
▎ Again, the product is not the same as the delivery. Feifan Automobile's first model, the Marvel R, was launched in February this year, with a wheelbase of 2800mm positioned in a pure electric medium-sized SUV, featuring 5G smart cars with zero hundred acceleration of 4.8 seconds. The first two models were launched, priced at 219,800 and 239,800. At present, in Hongqiao Airport and other places, the "R car user parking charging service station" has been opened. After the Marvel R is replaced by the Feifan brand, it will be officially unveiled at the Guangzhou Auto Show in November.
The Zhiji L7 debuted at this year's Shanghai Auto Show, with a wheelbase of 3100mm positioned in a medium-sized pure electric sedan, pre-priced at 408,800, and delivered in the first half of 2022. It focuses on extreme performance, accelerating 3.9 seconds from 100 km/h, braking 33 m from 100 km/h, and resistivity coefficient Cd 0.21. Williams' forward-looking engineering team also made all-round tuning of the chassis, focusing on improving the handling. Other highlights include a 39-inch triple screen that can be automatically lifted and lowered, a rear wheel steering that can achieve 12 degrees of steering, and silicon-doped lithium-filled technology that can increase the endurance to 1000 km of NEDC.
Judging from the promotional materials, Feifan Automobile and Zhiji Automobile are excellent. If we must distinguish between the two, we can roughly understand that Fei Fan is like Guo Qilin and is a pro-son; Zhiji is like Yue Yunpeng, a dry son who has been taught by partnership.
V2X and HD maps together span L3
In fact, whether it is Feifan or Zhiji, the two brands are practicing the different routes of SAIC Group's intelligent driving across L3 levels.
Marvel R is equipped with R Pilot 3.0 intelligent driving system, including 11 cameras, 5 millimeter wave radar, 12 ultrasonic radars, a total of 28 perception hardware, with Mobileye EyeQ4H chip, Huawei Baron 5G chip, can achieve 0-150km/h full speed domain assisted driving.
The biggest highlight of this set of intelligent driving is the use of vision + radar + V2X triple fusion perception system. V2X, also called the car to connect all things, through 5G technology can allow vehicles and infrastructure, other vehicles, personnel to communicate in a timely manner, in advance of the road conditions, effectively avoid accidents, but also increase the convenience of driving. It will take the lead in implementing 17 V2X scenarios such as traffic light information push, parking start guidance, and vehicle speed guidance.
Marvel R has obtained the China 5G terminal telecommunications equipment access license, SRRC Radio Regulatory Commission certification, becoming the only 5G dual certification car company. It has thus become a mass production model that can achieve vehicle-grade 5G V2X technology, and it is one of the reasons why it has labeled its own 5G car.
The intelligent driving function of Zhiji L7 is upgradeable, and the basic solution includes 15 cameras, 5 millimeter wave radars, 12 ultrasonic radars, an NVIDIA Xavier chip with a computing power of 30-60TOPS, as well as high-precision IMUs (inertial measurement units) and high-precision maps, which can realize full-scene, over-the-horizon and all-road condition perception.
In addition, the roof and A-pillar combination of reserved lidar assembly port, up to 3 1550nm wavelength lidar can be installed, the corresponding chip is the same level as the NIO ET7 NVIDIA Orin X, has a computing power of 500-1000 TOPS. Officials say that by the end of 2021, a Door-to-Door Pilot can be taken over .00-point-to-zero.
In fact, only one high-precision map is already very powerful. Unexpectedly, lidar was also reserved.
Che Jujun's judgment is that in order to achieve the leap of autonomous driving technology from L2 to L3, it is necessary to either add a set of high-precision maps or add V2X technology on the basis of high-precision visual perception. Looking at it now, Feifan Automobile uses V2X, and Zhiji Automobile uses a high-precision map, which can be described as two flowers each choosing a branch.
It shows that SAIC motor's bet on the development path of automatic driving is very comprehensive. In the words of the official press release, they will jointly contribute to the "brand up, leapfrog and stand up" of their own brands.
Car gathering summary
Why was R Car renamed Feifan Car?
People close to SAIC said that the brand was previously bundled with Roewe, and R was born out of Roewe's core product RX5, which was not high-end and high-end. In addition, according to the relevant regulations, the new brand should have Chinese name.
So why Fei Fan? Good sounds good, but not afraid of duplicate names?
According to the third-party inquiry platform, there are more than 6,000 companies named after "Feifan". There was a small and micro enterprise called "Shanghai Feifan Automobile Service Co., Ltd." that did illegal inquiries, which was renamed "Shanghai Yuncha Information Technology Co., Ltd." on June 23, 2021. Not sure if this name change will make way for today's Feifan cars?
At present, Che Jujun's query of "Feifan Automobile Technology Co., Ltd." on the public platform has no results.
On October 29, SAIC Motor (600104) closed at 20.28 yuan, up 2.22%.