On Children’s Day, Jidu Auto held its first media communication conference in Beijing. CEO Xia Yiping clarified doubts from the outside world.
Is it too late to enter the car-making industry now?
No, it’s not.
In the past 3-5 years, a group of new powers have done a great thing, which is to successfully commercialize electric cars and make consumers accept them.
In the early stages of electric car development, there were many external challenges, from products to technologies, to the maturity of the supply chain. Therefore, in the early days of electric car development, both Tesla and NIO would develop their own motors and batteries. However, these technologies and products that were previously seen as barriers and obstacles to development have gradually become standardized.
With the appearance of relatively standardized parts, acceleration and endurance will become homogenized. In other words, on the product and technology level, these things are getting closer and closer, and it is difficult for them to become the core barriers to competition in the next stage.
Jidu believes that in the next 3-5 years, the core of competition for electric cars will be in the field of “intelligence”.
The competition in intelligence is not only in the form of products, but also in the underlying technology of the entire electric vehicle, from the chassis, motor, hardware controllers, to OS and application level, everything from bottom to top will be reconstructed. This reconstruction will make the competition in intelligence more efficient and fierce in the future.
Jidu also believes that the “competition for intelligence” in the next 3-5 years can also be seen as the “competition for unmanned driving”. However, in the competition for unmanned driving, intelligence is an essential bridge, because intelligence will bring changes to the underlying software and hardware, platform technology of the entire intelligent car.
An analogy to the development history of smartphones can be made here. The competition in smartphones has evolved from purely hardware competition to ecological competition. This means that a mobile phone company needs to have strong competitiveness in chip, OS, cloud big data analysis (AI), user ecology and other aspects in order to maintain an unbeaten position in modern competition. These aspects have also become the core competitiveness of smartphone technology companies.
Jidu believes that the core of intelligence is a high-end technological ecosystem. And these technological ecosystems are deeply integrated into today’s intelligent cars, such as the chassis, platform, etc., which can be deeply integrated with electric car technology. This will be the most core competitiveness of the electric car or intelligent electric car industry in the next 3-5 years.
What are the core advantages of Jidu Auto and how to play them?
Jidu Auto was jointly initiated by Baidu and Geely. Baidu’s Apollo is an open platform for the future of intelligent cars, while Geely’s SEA Haohan platform is also an open hardware platform in the direction of chassis or platformization.
Xpeng compares Apollo to Lego. Just like Lego with its various sized modules, which serve as the foundation before being assembled, Apollo has end-to-end technical support, from autonomous driving to intelligent cockpit, all the way up to cloud integration and mapping.
Apollo provides assistance to every joint effort company, while each company aligns to their own user understanding and definition of products by selecting the capabilities to support their product based on Apollo expertise. However, differences may arise in the end-user experience depending on how other companies develop their products, based on software and hardware.
For Xpeng products based on Apollo, it can deeply integrate the most advanced autonomous driving capabilities end-to-end, with the required V2X supercomputing platform, algorithms, high precision maps, and smart driving clouds. This enables Xpeng to have a better integration of technical completeness and user experience, with Xpeng and Apollo working closely together throughout the development process.
For intelligent cockpit development, Xpeng’s cooperation with Apollo integrates the hardware, OS, voice, application ecology, human-machine interface, and co-driving maps into an overall solution. Only by implementing end-to-end the most advanced technology combination can we achieve better product performance in the future and ensure efficient evolution for product development.
Xpeng and Geely will jointly develop a fully L4-oriented intelligent architecture- JET.
This architecture seamlessly integrates Apollo’s most advanced capabilities with Geely’s platform. With this architecture, software and application levels can be iterated quickly. Xpeng’s work is to resolve problems related to integrating Apollo onto SOA. JET can be seen equivalently as the neural system of future intelligent vehicles, which is prepared to drive the entire vehicle when a more intelligent “brain” is mounted on it in the future.
Based on the JET architecture, Xpeng will develop software architecture based on this SOA and will work together with Apollo and Geely.
About Product Form
Robin (Robin Li) said, “The robotic futuristic design is very unique. On the one hand, it represents advanced user experience, and on the other hand, it can well showcase the advanced technology of Baidu Apollo.”
Regarding product design, Jidu has summarized three major DNAs: ROBOTIC, EMOTIONAL, and FUTURISTIC. According to the products that integrate these three design DNAs, innovations can be seen in appearance, interior, and internal and external interactions, and everyone can perceive that these are cars made by Jidu.
Jidu has basically determined the exterior and interior design scheme based on these three DNAs last week, and it has entered the 3D modeling research and development stage.
The new car will take into account the needs of female users in terms of appearance and interior, with a focus on youth, and its target consumer group being people born in the 1990s and 2000s, and its selling price will be over 200,000 yuan.
The concept car will debut at the Beijing Auto Show in 2022, and its appearance will have a 90% similarity to the mass-produced version.
The current plan is to launch a new car every year after the first one is on the market.
Regarding sales channels, Jidu tends to be self-built but also considers other new models.
Others
-
The company’s formal employees have exceeded 100, and the product team has dozens of people. The core members of the company have been recruited. Some members come from traditional host factories, and others come from Internet consumer companies. The team will be expanded to about 200 people in the next one or two months.
-
Jidu will start an external financing plan in the third quarter of this year.
-
Jidu chose to use Geely’s supply chain.
-
In October of this year, Jidu will also have a large brand launch event.
Source: Jidu Q2 communication meeting
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.