Yesterday was Halloween in the West.
While other automotive companies’ PR teams were struggling with how to combine their brand with Halloween for publicity, Geely took a very strong stance: “No need to ride the wave of the trend!”
They went ahead and created something big themselves: “Intelligent Geely 2025”. The content this time exceeded all previous efforts in terms of information density.
Let’s start with the investment of 150 billion dollars over the next five years and total sales of 3.65 million:
Over the next five years, Geely’s R&D will invest 150 billion yuan, maintaining its position as the top R&D investor among Chinese automotive brands. This certainly seems to be the case so far:
Great Wall: Over the next five years, cumulative R&D investment will be 100 billion yuan, or 20 billion yuan per year;
GAC: At the 2021 Investor Day, GAC Group Chairman Zeng Qinghong stated that in the future, GAC Group will implement major R&D and industrialization projects through a cumulative investment of 85-100 billion yuan, achieving industry leadership in intelligent connectivity and new energy vehicle core technologies;
Changan: Over the next five years, 150 billion yuan will be invested in the entire supply chain;
Dongfeng: 100 billion yuan will be invested before 2025;
…
Leveraging its five major R&D centers and five major styling centers worldwide, Geely will build a globally leading international R&D system and fully transition to the era of intelligent technology. Next, they will create 10 internationally leading key laboratories to accelerate the transformation of scientific and technological achievements into real-world applications.
By 2025, the software talent ratio in the industry will be the highest and the software development efficiency will be the highest.
With money and personnel in place, it is now time to take action.
Do you remember Geely’s 2025 strategy? At that time, Geely just casually mentioned: “By 2025, its market share will be the highest among Chinese brands, and its sales volume will reach 3.65 million units (including Lynk & Co.)”.
Now, a more detailed plan has been released.
Of the 3.65 million sales, 650,000 vehicles will be from Lynk & Co. and 3 million vehicles from Geely Automobile Group.
In the domestic market, Geely brand sales will reach 1.3 million units; Geometry brand sales will reach 300,000 units; Lynk & Co. brand sales will reach 600,000 units; the brand new technological battery-changing travel brand will reach 200,000 units; and overall overseas sales by the group will reach 600,000 units.By 2025, the sales volume of Geely new energy vehicles will reach 900,000, accounting for 30% of the total sales volume. With the addition of the Zeekr brand, the overall sales volume of Geely new energy vehicles will exceed 40%.
intelligent, intelligent, and intelligent
This is the content that Geely spends a lot of space describing: intelligence.
“At present, Geely is the only automobile company in the world that has self-developed satellite communication and positioning, high-precision maps and navigation, and a full stack of self-developed hardware and software for automobile chips.”
This is a sentence that Geely brought up during the press conference. It also truly demonstrates Geely’s confidence.
At first, I didn’t quite understand the significance of Geely’s layout for satellite communication and positioning.
Until I saw this: “Geely’s self-built low-orbit satellite high-precision navigation system has now completed the deployment of 305 high-precision space-time benchmark stations. It plans to achieve ‘global no blind zone’ communication and centimeter-level high-precision positioning coverage before 2026.”
Geely’s high-precision maps cover major cities in China in 2021 and will cover the entire country by 2023.
It turns out that Geely wants to self-develop high-precision maps.
In terms of vehicle architecture, the StarLion L has introduced the GEEA2.0 electronic and electrical architecture. Geely, Lynk&Co, and Geometry’s new smart cars will all be equipped with this architecture.
By 2025, Geely will launch the GEEA3.0 central computing platform architecture, which will evolve from “domain control” to “central super-brain”.
In terms of chips, chip-engineering technology has self-developed a 7nm automotive-grade SOC chip, which is only 83 square millimeters in size, integrating 87 layers of circuits and 8.8 billion transistors.
Many people may not be very familiar with this company. It was jointly established by Geely Holding’s strategic investment Y-King, Arm China, and other companies, focusing on the design, development, and sales of advanced automotive electronic chips.
Geely Auto Group CEO An Conghui said: “After this chip completes the automotive-grade certification, it will be put into mass production next year.”
After this 7nm SOC chip, we will launch a series of 5nm vehicle-mounted integrated supercomputing platform chips and high-computing power automatic driving chips by 2024 to 2025, with a computing power of up to 256TOPS.
What is this concept? The currently popular Nvidia Orin chip has a computing power of 254 TOPS.
However, considering that this is three to four years later, it actually has little reference value. After all, Nvidia will not be standing still during these three to four years. Moreover, there is Tesla’s self-developed FSD chip.
Under the overall vehicle architecture, chip, and high-precision map layout, by 2025, Geely aims to achieve commercialization of L4 level autonomous driving and fully master L5 level autonomous driving.
The tone is quite ambitious.
As mentioned earlier, Geely will go all-out on software: building a full-stack self-developed system for electronic and electrical architecture, vehicle basic software, intelligent cabin software, and autonomous driving software at the Geely Automotive Research Institute. Together with Geely’s ecological partners such as YEEKITONG and Zenseact, it will realize the self-developed capability of the entire vehicle operating system and core software algorithm.
At the ecological level, it will apply the SOA software service architecture, open more than 1,000 API interfaces, provide software tools and platforms to developers worldwide, construct over 1,000 vehicle application scenario engines, and work with over 1,000 digital partners worldwide to build proactive scene services.
Now, from software to hardware, Geely will adopt a full-stack self-developed mode and fully enter the era of software-defined vehicles.
Smart Energy System: Three Lines in Parallel
Do you still remember the Blue Geely Action? Not the failed one back in 2015, but the two new Blue Geely Action plans released in March this year.
One of them focuses on intelligent energy conservation and small-displacement new energy vehicles, including hybrid, extended-range plug-in hybrid.
The other is to attack the high-end intelligent pure electric vehicles. The brand-new JEEKITONG intelligent technology company will participate in the competition in the field of intelligent pure electric vehicles.
“The two plans not only retain Geely’s advantages in intelligent energy conservation and new energy vehicles but also open up new prospects for high-end intelligent pure electric vehicles, pushing forward Geely’s strategic layout of comprehensive electrification with ‘dual-wheel drive.'”
Now, the offensive has further detailed unfold.
Hybrid:
Geely launched the brand-new global power technology brand “Linghui Power”. By the end of this year, the Linghui hybrid engine will be first installed on Geely’s Chinese Star.
Over the next three years, more than 20 models of vehicles equipped with Thunder Intelligence hybrid technology will be produced, and Geely aims to achieve the highest sales volume of hybrid vehicles in the mainstream market.
Pure Electric:
Geely has already mastered the module and pack technology of batteries, as well as the ability to design battery cores. Together with strategic partners, it has established joint ventures, including Time Geely, to form a diversified layout of batteries, achieving mass production.
For electric driving, Geely will use an 800V controller and high-efficiency oil-cooled motor based on silicon carbide power devices, achieving a comprehensive efficiency of more than 92%. The maximum power exceeds 475 kW, and its ultimate product can achieve a high-performance experience with an acceleration of less than 3 seconds per hundred kilometers. Geely’s self-developed silicon carbide power chip will also be put into mass production by 2023.
Furthermore, Geely has also entered the field of battery swapping. Based on its own battery-swapping architecture, Geely will launch a “battery-swapping travel brand”, which is named as Maple Leaf Automobile under the Geely family.
Geely’s battery swapping station can achieve a battery swap within 60 seconds, serving 1000 cars per day per station. In comparison, NIO’s second-generation battery swapping station has a daily service capacity of 312 times.
As another enterprise that has laid out battery swapping, as of October 31st, NIO has set up 598 battery swapping stations nationwide. It took them one year and six months to achieve this result. “By the end of 2025, the total number of NIO battery swapping stations worldwide will exceed 4,000, of which about 1,000 will be located outside of China.”
On Geely’s side, by 2025, it will lay out 5,000 battery swapping stations, cover 100 core cities, and meet the needs of 1 million vehicles for battery swapping. In other words, they need to set up 1,000 battery swapping stations per year.
It has to be said that big factories are big factories with deep heritage and abundant resources. Moreover, their action speed is remarkably fast.
New Fuel Field:
As early as the Two Sessions in 2019, Li Shufu, Chairman of Geely Holding Group, proposed to increase the popularization of methanol-powered vehicles. Now, Geely’s methanol-powered vehicles are about to come.In 2022, Geely will launch the “Thunder God Intelligent Engine Methanol Hybrid” model, with a methanol consumption of about 9L per 100 km, a reduction of over 40% in methanol consumption, and a cost of less than 0.3 RMB per kilometer.
By 2025, the methanol consumption will be reduced to 7.6L per 100 km, equivalent to 3.5L per 100 km of petrol consumption, with a travel cost of only 0.2 RMB per kilometer.
On the specific product level, over the next five years, more than 25 new intelligent new energy products will be launched.
Geely brand: More than 10 new products will be launched successively, with the main models being fully intelligent and new energy vehicles. The Thunder God Super Hybrid will be introduced with long-endurance series-parallel, range-extended, direct-drive, and electric-drive options, with a pure electric range of over 200 km.
Geometry brand: Starting in 2022, more than 5 new star products will be launched, all built on pure electric architecture (including the expanded architecture) to cover the mainstream pure electric market.
Lynk & Co brand: More than 5 new intelligent technology products will be launched successively, and the market layout will be continuously improved. In 2023, the first electric SUV product will be launched in Europe, realizing the globalization and high-end development of intelligent new energy products.
A new technology and new energy exchangeable travel brand: Based on an exclusive architecture platform, 5 intelligent pure electric products suitable for exchangeable batteries will be launched successively by 2025, becoming a new force in the technology ecosystem of exchangeable travel.
Geely plans to adopt a multi-pronged strategy to achieve its 2025 strategy.
Too Radical
The theme of this press conference is “Smart Geely 2025, We Are In Action!”
We have indeed seen the action of Geely.
If Geely successfully implements these plans and visions by 2025, it can be said that Li Shufu has already secured the position of China’s richest man.
However, there is still a “but,” and I feel that the strategy being developed is somewhat radical, specifically in terms of sales and autonomous driving.
Here is a very real example. Looking at the new high-end brand Lynk & Co, which was jointly developed by Geely and Volvo, Lynk & Co just celebrated its fifth birthday, with a cumulative sales volume of nearly 600,000.
Now, Geely’s new power brand JiKe wants to achieve sales of 650,000 within five years. Considering that new energy has become a battlefield, with Tesla and Nio leading the way, and other traditional car companies also fiercely entering the new energy market, this challenge is not small for JiKe.
Let’s forget about the extremely rare krypton position that comes with a golden spoon, and focus on Geometry instead. By 2025, the sales target for Geometry is set to reach 300,000 units, which means that the annual sales of Geometry in the near future need to reach 60,000 units.
However, what we currently see is that the new brand of Geometry Automobile, which was established as early as 2019, has not gained much attention or sales volume: Geometry sold 12,000 vehicles in 2019 and only 10,328 vehicles in 2020. Currently, Geometry’s sales volume is not outstanding (Geometry A has an average monthly sales of over 700, and Geometry C has over 800).
Looking at the details allows us to see the whole picture, which inevitably raises questions about the sales strategy of Geometry and even Geely.
In terms of autonomous driving, Geely has set a goal of achieving L4 commercialization of autonomous driving and fully mastering L5 level autonomous driving by 2025.
Let’s not talk about the first half of the sentence, but when it comes to the latter half, it just seems overblown.
To put it bluntly, even Waymo, the leader in the field of autonomous driving, dare not make such a claim.
By the way, Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, who served for more than five years, has already resigned, and the reasons for his departure boil down to several factors: slow progress in technology research and development at Waymo and slow commercialization…
So, can Geely solve the problems that even Waymo can’t solve in five years?
In any case, it is a good thing for Geely to have the lofty ambition to continue to push forward. However, plans need to be made based on reality, and we must not blindly jump ahead.
Hopefully, this time, Geely will not repeat the mistakes of its previous Blue Geely program.
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.