Ideal Auto 2020 Autumn Communication Meeting Held at Its Beijing Delivery Center
Today, Ideal Auto held its 2020 Autumn Communication Meeting at its Beijing delivery center, where it unveiled new updates to its in-car system, ADAS, and hardware upgrades.
The Beijing delivery center of Ideal Auto, which experienced the IPO cloud striking ceremony and marked an important moment, has recorded Ideal Auto’s first admission of a mistake.
“Hardware Upgrade” or “Recall”?
Although the hardware upgrade was presented at the end of this communication meeting, it did not in any way reduce the online heat it generated.
At the meeting, Liu Jie, the Vice President of Ideal Auto’s Sales and Service, announced that the company would offer a free upgrade for the front suspension lower arm ball joint for Ideal One vehicles produced before June 1st, to reduce the probability of ball joint detachment in collision accidents.
At the same time, Ideal Auto also made public the decision-making process about the upgrade, with a level of detail that left little room for the media present to ask questions.
After this announcement, many people on the internet criticized Ideal Auto for being dishonest by downplaying the recall as an “upgrade.” Liu Jie responded to this issue in a group interview after the meeting:
“The safety and reliability of normal driving can be independently guaranteed. In fact, this hardware upgrade has been reported and communicated with the relevant regulatory authorities. Therefore, upgrading the software in this way to improve the safety of users is different from the recall of vehicles with quality problems and malfunctions that we have seen before.”
As for whether it is a recall or an upgrade, I don’t want to spend too much space discussing it here. The official announcement called it an upgrade, and the reason given was reasonable. Many people think that it is a recall, which is also reasonable. No matter how you battle it out, both sides have their own reasons. Therefore, spending too much time debating this word is not meaningful, and what we really want to seize with this opportunity is to take a look at how Ideal Auto deals with problems.
In January 2020, a baby blue Ideal One collided with a BMW 3 Series, causing a collision with a similar 25% offset between the right front side of Ideal One and the left front side of the BMW 3 Series. The right front wheel of Ideal One was bent into a figure-eight shape, and the airbag was deployed.
In the face of this accident, there were not many doubts. In the comment section of related news, some netizens even expressed that losing a wheel in a 25% offset collision is a good thing as it can prevent the wheel from invading the passenger compartment too much and causing danger to passengers.
In May 2020, a Shanghai-made Li ONE collided with a 15 cm-high curb at a speed of 50 km/h, and the right front wheel also turned out in a distorted figure. At this time, some people on the Internet began to question whether there was a risk of axle fracture in the Li ONE.
At this moment, Li Auto has started to pay attention to this situation and has silently upgraded the hardware. The detachment force of the control arm ball joint on the front suspension of the original model was about 35 kN, and the detachment force of the control arm ball joint on the upgraded model was about 50 kN.
However, by June 1st, there were only two cases of the control arm ball joint detachment on more than 8,000 sold Li ONE, and both occurred only after a collision. It is difficult to draw a definite conclusion based solely on the examples at that time. Therefore, Li Auto did not recall or upgrade the sold models.
However, as time goes by, more and more cases of “axle fracture” similar to the accidents have emerged. From June to October, four accidents were exposed, and the actual number of occurrences has reached 8 times, with a frequency of 1 incident per 2 months. More and more questions about the quality of the Li ONE have been raised on the Internet. In our editorial department, colleagues interested in the Li ONE have also started to change their minds.
At today’s autumn communication conference, Li Auto finally announced a free upgrade plan, which can be considered a remedy but it is not too late.
In the media interview after the conference, Li Xiang also admitted: “Because such a fracture scene, I think it will bring new hidden dangers to car owners, so we must replace this part. When conflicts arise between gross profit, quality, and safety, it is necessary to abandon gross profit in favor of quality and safety. It’s that simple.”
After announcing the upgrade plan, we also published a poll on the official website of Garage 42. More than 95% of the users expressed satisfaction with Li Auto’s upgrade plan.
The hardware upgrade has happened for the second time in Ideanomics. Earlier this year, Ideanomics announced free replacement of suspension lower arms and new seats for car owners.
Although Ideanomics promised to replace seats for vehicles in the corresponding batch, it was discovered in subsequent investigations at Garage 42 that the replacement of seats required first testing for hardness. Nearly half of the car owners in the vote did not get their seats replaced.
At today’s communication meeting, we questioned this and Ideanomics officials responded that they will replace every car manufactured before June 1st.
The first hardware upgrade was to provide a more comfortable riding experience for car owners, and the second was to eliminate potential hazards, reduce doubts and troubles for car owners, and provide a more secure user experience.
Ideanomics responded to user queries and provided a satisfactory solution. This kind of openness is the best way to respond to online public opinion. Other car companies should learn from this example. However, Ideanomics also needs to note that user forgiveness is limited.
After the upgrade plan was released, I interviewed Jademo, a prestigious Ideanomics ONE car owner in the Garage 42 car owner group, to see how he felt about this.
Although Jademo is satisfied with the upgrade plan, he expressed his concerns, “I had concerns about the ‘axles breaking’ incident, and I also believe that it was due to collision-related accidents, not the composite arm. I specifically ask Ideanomics staff at the user day at the end of August, and their explanation was that the ball joint was the unloading point, and the design was okay.”
“Today, Ideanomics announced that it has already made improvements since June, which shows that their judgment on the design and subsequent issues was wrong, and that they lack experience. They only admitted that there were design deficiencies after the breakout rate was visibly higher than that of similar cars. Although they have made improvements more quickly, it still appears that they were passive. It is easy for old car owners to think, will there be similar design problems in the future? Once it appears, both car owners and Ideanomics themselves will be under pressure.”
From the media perspective, as a new car maker, it is understandable for Ideanomics to make design and judgment mistakes due to lack of experience. The initiative to replace hardware also demonstrates their responsibility to car owners. However, from the car owner’s perspective, this can also consume their tolerance for the brand.
To improve brand loyalty, it is necessary to bring more surprises to car owners to exceed their expectations, rather than always making up for deficiencies after the fact.
As for the second point of focus in this communication meeting, the upgrade of the car computer and ADAS system, this is like the “iOS 14” moment for Ideanomics car owners.When chatting with Jademo, he complained that IDEAL should not mix hardware updates with software updates. Now the entire focus of communication is on the front suspension, and for ordinary car owners, it has a big impact on normal use. The direct correlation should be the upgrade of the vehicle system.
So now we need to spend more time to see what surprises IDEAL has prepared for this major upgrade.
Simpler, Better, More Features
These three phrases in the subtitle are a summary of the content of this vehicle system upgrade by the Vice President of Intelligence and System, Fan Haoyu.
The above picture details all the content of this software upgrade.
Among them, IDEAL has adjusted the position of all function keys according to user feedback, with the core purpose of making the entire UI interface simpler and easier to use. There are many places for optimization in this area, and I’ll briefly mention three of my favorite places.
- The FM radio and telephone keys, which were very low-frequency, have been removed from the original dock bar, and the seat adjustment has been moved to the lower car control screen.
As the car system becomes more and more feature-rich, keys in the car system have been increasing. Although having more features is a good thing, adding more features is easy whereas, removing features is not easy.
Putting the features on the first screen is to reduce the cost of users searching, but when the first screen displays too many functions, it conflicts with the original idea.
Cutting off the low-frequency keys in the original dock bar can not only make the entire main interface more concise, but also allow more valuable functions to have room for development.
- Optimization of the central control card bar.
There are two core changes. The unimportant card area has been reduced, and the card can display relevant content on the first screen, such as navigation.
These two changes greatly improve the information displayed on the first screen, which is also an important difference between car systems and tablets. There is not much opportunity to interact with the screen during driving, so it is very important to display the information that needs to be known during the driving process in an organized manner at one time.### Added Dash Cam Viewing Feature
In previous versions, although Ideal Car supports dash cams, users can only view the contents by taking out the storage card and accessing it from their phone or computer. This creates a high threshold for accessing dash cam footage to identify fault during accidents.
Furthermore, at the end of Fan Haoyu’s speech, Ideal Car revealed that they will be updating their full-duplex free dialogue voice feature in the V2.2 version.
After XPeng Motors released their “Full-Scene Voice” at the end of October, which was highly praised by users and media, Ideal Car responded quickly by introducing this feature in their latest update. As for the user experience, we can only share it with you after conducting further tests.
During the launch event, Ideal Car employees revealed to us that the voice function has a very high requirement on the car’s chip processing power. However, the 820A chip used in the Ideal ONE can currently meet the demand for upgrading the voice function, allowing Ideal Car to quickly introduce this feature.
To summarize, this update focuses on optimizing the UI design, integrating more new clients, and adding some highly requested features. For Ideal ONE owners, they can expect a brand new in-car system by the end of December.
No Upgrade Plan for ADAS Hardware of Ideal ONE
Regarding ADAS, the most concerning issue for the public and car owners is whether the hardware can be upgraded.
Regarding this matter, Li Xiang stated that there is no such plan currently, and the main focus is to optimize the current L2 to the extreme.
During Lang Xianpeng’s nearly 20-minute introduction of the ADAS upgrade, over half of the content was spent on explaining the differences between assisted driving, autonomous driving, and unmanned driving. This indicates that Ideal Car currently places more importance on educating car owners on how to correctly use L2 ADAS functions.
So the only new feature added to Ideal ONE’s assisted driving system today is the “Truck Lane Change Warning.” When the vehicle speed is between 60-135 km/h, the system will alert the driver when a truck ahead is driving over the lane, when encountering an extra-wide vehicle, or when a truck changes lanes. This will avoid unnecessary danger caused by the driver’s negligence.
In addition, there is a seemingly insignificant change in the ADAS function: ACC/LKA has reduced the opening speed from 15 km/h to 0 km/h. In our opinion, a lower opening speed of the ADAS greatly improves the tolerance for the use of ADAS in congested road conditions, and enhances the user experience of ADAS in such conditions.
Conclusion
Today’s Ideal Auto’s one-hour autumn communication meeting was very rich in content. In addition to responding to the front suspension issue that most people are concerned about, there are also many optimizations in the car machine and ADAS. However, upon closer scrutiny of the update content, it can be found that this update focuses more on “optimization” and does not bring too many things that are beyond everyone’s imagination.
While optimizing the current features is certainly important, facing XPeng’s release of “Full-Scene Voice” and NIO’s release of “NOP Navigation Assistance,” it is apparent that Ideal’s major update this time lacks sincerity.
The first step of Ideal ONE has been very successful, but going forward there needs to be a sense of urgency. Falling behind will inevitably be detrimental to future development.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.