Introduction
On October 31st, Geely Automobile unveiled its new power brand, Thunder Power, and its 2021-2025 intelligent development plan at the Geely Research Institute in Longwan. Setting aside Thunder Power, Geely’s plan in the intelligent field is very exciting and worth looking forward to. By 2025, Geely will achieve commercialization of L4 autonomous driving that is fully self-developed, and completely master L5 autonomous driving. At the same time, Geely’s self-built low-orbit satellite high-precision navigation system will achieve global communication coverage without dead zones and centimeter-level high-precision positioning coverage.
The Ambitious Sales Target Relies on the Progress of Intelligent Connected Technology
From the perspective of sales volume, Geely reiterates its 2025 sales target, which is that Geely Automobile’s annual sales volume will reach 3.65 million vehicles by 2025. Among them, Geely brand sales will reach 1.3 million vehicles, Zeekr brand will reach 650,000 vehicles, Lynk & Co brand will achieve 600,000 vehicles, and in addition, Geometry and battery swap new brands will contribute 300,000 vehicles and 200,000 vehicles respectively. It is especially noteworthy that Geely Automobile has also set a target of 600,000 vehicles in overseas markets. In order to achieve such sales performance, Geely must have its core competitiveness in intelligent connected technology and reach a leading level in the industry. Both the vehicle networking and high-level autonomous driving are indispensable to Geely.
It is particularly noteworthy that, in addition to developing pure electric vehicles, Geely will also continue to promote the full popularization of OTA functions for traditional fuel vehicles, achieving continuous updates of intelligent driving assistance systems and other software applications that require large computing power. From Geely’s perspective, it will still invest in hybrid models in the market for a long time to come. Ensuring that hybrid models have the same level of intelligence as pure electric vehicles is the key to Thunder Power’s system being able to occupy a place in the domestic market for a long time to come. After all, at present, there is no fundamental solution to the problem of insufficient energy density of lithium batteries, and the demand for electricity during the future charging of electric vehicles will impose a huge load on the power grid. Therefore, it is strategically significant for Geely to have a certain quantity of hybrid vehicles with outstanding energy-saving performance.
Self-developed Chips Become a Microcosm for Geely’s Layout in the Intelligent Connected Field# The Importance of Chips in the Automotive Industry
The current chip shortage crisis has made all domestic car companies in China realize the importance of chips. For autonomous driving, the AI control chip it requires is far superior in performance and design difficulty compared to currently scarce automotive chips. As a necessary hardware condition for car companies to achieve high-level autonomous driving technology, the importance of dedicated autonomous driving chips is self-evident. Earlier, Tesla showcased its self-developed autonomous driving chip to the public, which is far ahead of Nvidia’s general-purpose chip in terms of performance.
Currently, the first 7nm automotive-grade SOC chip in China, independently developed by Geely’s subsidiary Hangzhou Xinqu, has been lit up. This chip integrates 87 layers of circuits and 8.8 billion transistors on a 83 square millimeter substrate. After completing the relevant automotive-grade certification, this chip will start mass production next year. By 2025, Geely’s self-developed 5nm integrated automotive supercomputer platform chip will be launched, with a computing power of 256TOPS for autonomous driving chips, which will also help Geely make its mark on high-level autonomous driving. The planning of these, as well as the supercomputer platform and dedicated autonomous driving chips announced by Tesla earlier this year, are very similar. In the near future, Geely will achieve fully self-developed core intelligent elements such as chip design and testing, operating systems and software, and big data collection and analysis, completely get rid of the bottleneck technology, and help Geely rapidly develop in the global automotive market.
Geely’s big investment establishes difficult-to-replicate core competitiveness. In Geely’s plan, the company hopes to retain the best engineering and R&D personnel, especially talents in software, by investing 150 billion yuan in R&D over 5 years or offering 350 million shares of Geely Auto, which has already listed in Hong Kong, to reward employees, to help Geely realize a complete transformation in the era of automotive new four modernizations. 2021 is about to pass, and Geely only has four years to realize the 2025 plan. Perhaps in another two or three years, we will be able to see the true technological capabilities of Geely Auto. If L4-level autonomous driving can be commercially implemented by 2025, Geely Auto will be able to compete on the same starting line with other new automakers.As the leader of domestic independent brands, Geely has its own understanding and awareness of the former SAIC leader’s soulful questioning. Therefore, Geely chose to achieve full stack self-research in the field of intelligent network connection. In the field of autonomous driving, this includes not only algorithm platforms with billions of lines of code, but also Geely’s attempts to explore chips. Furthermore, Geely has constructed a low-orbit satellite high-precision navigation system, creating a technological moat that is difficult for other car companies to surpass in the short term. Among all global car companies, only Tesla has the same courage. Geely’s efforts are not only to make its own products more competitive, but also to promote the development of China’s independent brand automobile industry. If China’s automobile industry wants to achieve centralization of the whole industry in the global trend of intelligentization, it must rely on its own independent brands to continuously break through in core technologies.
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.