A colleague of mine, who is usually very cautious about big consumer purchases, recently bought an Avita 11. In my impression, even an entry-level model at the price range of 350,000 to 450,000 RMB is a significant amount for us.
When I asked why he chose the Avita within the 300,000 to 400,000 RMB range, I expected him to mention performance-related features such as high-pressure fast charging and Huawei ADS. However, to my surprise, he immediately said “freshness.” Although the definition of this word is somewhat vague, it seems fitting for the Avita.
I also had a sense that when a rational person starts paying for sensory experiences, their rationality has already been overridden.
On the occasion of the launch of a new car today, I would like to share some recent thoughts on Avita products and the market based on my previous test drive and communication with executives.
Before getting into the topic, I will list the top ten concerns of potential buyers:
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Three models are currently available: Long-Endurance Dual-Motor version at 349,900 RMB, Long-Endurance Dual-Motor luxury version at 369,900 RMB, and Ultra-Long-Endurance Dual-Motor luxury version at 409,900 RMB.
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Initially, the dual-motor version was promoted, however, a single-motor version is confirmed to be available in the future.
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All models come standard with ventilation, heating, and massage functions.
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The electric door, which everyone is worried about, is an optional accessory and not included in the standard equipment package. Apart from this, the four-seater, 116 kWh battery, city navigation, and advanced parking functions are optional.
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The car’s HMI has been redesigned based on user feedback.
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All models come standard with HI hardware and NCA high-speed navigation, which can be used immediately upon vehicle delivery.
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City navigation is delayed due to high-precision map license issues and is expected to be available in Q1 2023.
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The 750 V high-pressure fast charging is downward compatible and can be used with other third-party charging stations.
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The high-pressure fast charging stations, which are in collaboration with BP, will be available in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou by the end of 2022, and 100 stations will be established in 19 cities by the end of 2023.
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All warranty benefits are not limited to the first car owner but are tied to the car.
What You Need to Know About Avita
Instead of discussing the product, I would like to quote a sentence from Avita CEO Tan Benhong during the communication meeting: “What we (Avita) have and what we can do.”The consumers’ sense of safety towards a new brand is heavily influenced by the company background. AVTA is backed by Changan, Huawei, and CATL, so it is easy to understand what AVTA can offer in terms of:
- Changan’s vehicle development capabilities
- Huawei’s intelligent connected vehicle capabilities
- CATL’s power battery capabilities
These capabilities can be applied to the following major aspects of AVTA’s product development: new architecture, strong computing power, and high-voltage charging.
AVTA’s Three Ceilings
In addition, when Tan Benhong introduced AVTA’s core product strength for the AVTA 11, he emphasized the importance of aesthetics, stating that AVTA aims to reach three “ceilings” in the 350,000 to 450,000 RMB price range, with aesthetics being the first one.
Tan Benhong: AVTA is definitely founded on aesthetics. I have been in the automotive industry for many years, and I have always believed that cars evolve for aesthetics. Even some of the traditional technologies are developed for aesthetics. We say 0.61; it is best to be 0.618 because it is the most beautiful and feels the best. It is not easy to achieve the optimal length ratio, such as the placement of the front and rear collision airbags, the control of the front and rear electric drive systems equipped with Huawei’s dual motors, the spatial layout, and safety arrangements. Can these arrangements be balanced and coordinated in this car to achieve 0.618? I think not every vehicle development capability can achieve this. This is my understanding after more than 20 years in the automotive industry, because I used to work in Changan’s styling department. In every challenge to proportions and ratios, there are always continuous challenges in engineering and design, and there are always compromises. But when we designed the AVTA 11, there were almost no compromises. The second ratio is width-to-height, which is 1.23. Friends who have experienced the AVTA 11 should feel that this ratio can provide very good interior space, including headroom, legroom, and floor height. The third ratio is wheel height compared to body height, which is 0.48. We equipped it with large-size tires, so it is not easy to control the handling of such large-diameter tires. It is like wearing a pair of very big shoes, it is not easy to run or be agile. The aesthetics represent the capabilities of the three companies behind us.
Returning to the architecture, we used to use the term platform, but now in smart EVs there is not only the model platform, but also the electrical and electronic architecture and the three-electric architecture, and each link is very important.The importance of architecture lies in the fact that it is the bottom layer of the product, which determines how many branches the product’s skill tree can expand and how far each branch can extend. In our previous discussion, we introduced the Avita CHN architecture, which excels in deep software and hardware decoupling capabilities, powerful and modular hardware. This has laid a good foundation for Avita’s intelligent driving and subsequent deep OTA capability. It is also an essential core capability for Avita 11’s entry into the 350,000 to 450,000 RMB price range.
On this basis, Tan Benhong described in detail the two other “ceilings” of Avita 11 in this price range, which are the “Assisted Driving” and “Comprehensive Performance”. The key information of this part is summarized as follows:
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Huawei ADS intelligent driving, equipped with MDC810 computing platform, with a processing power of 400 TOPS;
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Three 96-line semi-solid-state lidars, high-pixel omnidirectional perception system;
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Huawei DriveONE dual-motor four-wheel drive, with a maximum power of 425 kW and a 0-100 km/h acceleration of 3.98 seconds;
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CATL CTP 2.0 battery pack, 523 system, with a capacity of 90/116 kWh;
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750 V voltage platform, supporting 240 kW high-voltage fast charging;
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RNC active road noise cancellation technology, with a total sound pressure reduction of 3 decibels and a peak sound pressure reduction of 13 decibels.
When introducing the RNC active noise reduction part, Tan Benhong used the words “proud” to describe the final function completion degree, because compared with static noise reduction processing, the difficulty of dynamic noise reduction processing is greater. Therefore, Avita 11 is equipped with sensors on the chassis and utilizes algorithms to dynamically actively reduce road noise along some critical noise propagation paths.
Wang Jun, the Chief Operating Officer of Huawei Intelligent Automotive Solutions Business Unit, also confidently stated in the subsequent presentation session that “our car’s NVH performance may not be the best, but it is definitely one of the best.”
The Model with the Highest Amount of Huawei Technology and the Four-motor Model Abandoned
Avita 11 adopts the deepest HI (Huawei Inside) mode in Huawei’s partnership model. Huawei provides the vehicle with:
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High-voltage electric drive system & thermal management system;
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Vehicle computer chips and related cabin hardware;
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HarmonyOS underlying software, including voice, sound effects, vision, interconnection, driving safety, mobile phone projection, and vehicle control components;
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Huawei ADS high-end intelligent driving system.When talking about the cooperation between Huawei and Arcfox, Wang Jun mentioned that the project began three years ago with the original plan of adopting a four-motor scheme, which would allow the vehicle to accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h in 2 seconds. However, later on, in order to balance space and energy consumption, a more balanced dual-motor scheme was adopted, which could achieve 0 to 100 km/h acceleration in less than 4 seconds. Implicitly, the four-motor scheme may still meet the public in the future if necessary.
Wang Jun also stated that the motor on the Arcfox 11 adopts an oil-cooled cooling method, with a maximum speed of 18,000 rpm. The long-term reliability of the motor is excellent, and it has outstanding NVH performance.
In addition, on the planning of the vehicle voltage platform, the Arcfox 11 planned to use a high-voltage platform three years ago. However, it was discovered later that many of the built high-speed charging stations did not use high-voltage charging piles. In the end, the planning of the vehicle voltage platform was ahead of the planning of infrastructure, so a boost module was added later to balance the compatibility with third-party DC charging piles while preserving the high-voltage fast charging ability.
As previously mentioned, the cockpit section of the Arcfox 11 is provided with fundamental abilities by Huawei HarmonyOS, with the upper-level development still carried out by Arcfox. Wang Jun explained this model as follow:
Wang Jun: Huawei HarmonyOS provides fundamental abilities in sound, vision, connectivity, and vehicle control. Intelligent driving has no ceiling, but there is no ceiling in the cockpit, where a variety of innovative technologies will appear radically. Huawei cannot cover all technologies and applications. Based on our operating system and the underlying capabilities of the chip, we can provide our partners and Arcfox with voice, sound and vision capabilities. This will allow them to develop their own applications on the car, even enable the end-users to develop their own apps based on their preferences, with no more than an app developed that can link all the underlying capabilities together optimally, which is the core purpose of Huawei HarmonyOS.
In addition to software, the cockpit section also includes hardware, with the performance of the Kirin 990A on the Arcfox Alpha-S Hycan, as well as the Arcfox Alpha S Mark 1, already widely acknowledged. Moreover, with the increasing functionality of the cockpit, the increasing demand for performance has become an area of concern for users. As such, Huawei has designed the cockpit of the Arcfox 11 to be modular, allowing for the vehicle’s cockpit capabilities to be iterated through relatively simple hardware module upgrades.
Finally, the most core business of Huawei’s smart car is advanced intelligent driving.
The main difference between the Avita and other HI models in terms of hardware is the arrangement and design optimization of the perception hardware, in other words, how to integrate the perception hardware as well as possible with the vehicle’s appearance without sacrificing system performance.
When recalling the design of the Avita 11, Wang Jun gave the example of the LiDAR:
Wang Jun: You can see the design now. As Tan mentioned, we refused to compromise on appearance, which made it very difficult for us. We tried many plans, including slanted ones, but we had to put another one at the back because the measurement angle was not enough. We suggested putting it at the back, but Tan and Hu said that it was not suitable because rain and mud could easily splatter on it and make it difficult to clean. Today, this car is very beautiful, and the LiDAR is not only not unsightly, but also serves as the finishing touch.
As for why so many sensors are used, aside from preparing for advanced intelligent driving in the future, a large part of the consideration is for safety.
Wang Jun: Let me give you an example. An irregularly shaped truck, including cameras integrated into it, cannot be distinguished by a pure visual system. It’s like a construction fence; it relies on learning for vision, and without learning, you don’t know what it is. But with LiDAR, you know there is something there just by reflection. Even large dropped corrugated boxes can be detected by LiDAR, as well as curbsides. Why do we say we need so many lines to introduce this, that it’s all about resolution. Including avoiding large vehicles, why can’t they be distinguished? It’s because you see a small car with your visual system, but when you change lanes, you rear-end it. Even when entering and exiting tunnels, there will be places where pure visual systems will cause eye strain. I wanted to buy this car so that I could drive it at night, because its abilities can be demonstrated at night.
The highlights of advanced intelligent driving include active pedestrian right-of-way, unprotected left turn, traffic light recognition, and so on, which we have already experienced on other HI models before. This time, the official also released a demonstration video of the Avita 11.
The parking part includes three parts: automatic parking, valet parking, and remote parking. The system supported by Huawei ADS supports a wide range of parking types, including side parking, vertical parking, narrow parking, dead-end parking, and diagonal parking.In the remote parking function, the A-level intelligent driving system of the Avita 11 supports front-in and rear-out parking. Due to the limited sensing capability at the rear end of the vehicle caused by the placement of the laser radar sensor and wide-angle lens at the front, this function poses a great challenge for safety and requires higher algorithm requirements.
A thousand words condensed into one sentence, Huawei-backed high-level intelligent driving will be an essential component of the Avita 11 product excellence and will provide sufficient confidence for the car’s competition in the high-end intelligent electric vehicle market.
The latest battery from major shareholder CATL
The battery part was introduced by Xiang Yanhuo, President of CATL’s Passenger Vehicle Solution Department in China. Regarding the battery used in the Avita 11, Xiang stated that it is the first domestically produced high-voltage three-element system 2.2C fast-charging battery, which, in addition to the current 90 kWh and 116 kWh versions, will have higher capacity versions in the future, with a maximum support of 135 kWh.
According to Xiang, this battery uses a special negative electrode structure in research and development, and its negative electrode surface constructs a fast transmission channel for lithium ions, which improves the charging capacity of the graphite negative electrode. The positive electrode uses nano-rivet technology to link the material’s microstructure like rivets, ensuring material stability, high energy density and high safety.
Regarding the battery’s performance parameters, its energy density is 245 Wh/kg, and the system energy density for two different battery packs is 180 Wh/kg and 190 Wh/kg.
With regard to fast charging capability, the 30%-80% charging time is less than 15 minutes. What’s even more remarkable is that this battery also has excellent low-temperature activity, taking only 60 minutes to be fully charged from 0 at -10℃.
Xiang gave a detailed introduction to the safety and manufacturing of the battery, and the summarized information is as follows:
- It adopts special multi-channel water-cooling design, and the temperature difference within the battery pack can be controlled within 3℃;
2) It is equipped with CATL’s CTP technology, which increases the energy density by more than 10% compared to traditional battery packs;
3) In the product manufacturing process, more than 6,800 quality control points are set up, and data can be uploaded to the cloud for traceability of over 20 years.4) The battery system is equipped with 24-hour all-weather monitoring. Upon failure, an alert signal can be sent within 30 seconds and protective measures will be taken.
5) The reliability of NINGDE TIMES’ battery manufacturing is transitioning from PPM to PPB, ensuring the safety of the battery’s foundation.
On the AVITA 11, the technical capabilities exhibited by Changan, Huawei, and NINGDE TIMES have already made it clear to the market that this is a high-end product created from a collaboration of these three companies’ abilities in vehicle design, intelligence, and electrification. The current state of the AVITA 11 demonstrates industry-leading standards in these three categories.
Considering this product capability, let’s take a look at AVITA’s current market situation.
AVITA’s Market Competition
AVITA defines its products as SEVs, namely smart electric vehicles. Currently, there are few SEV players in China’s domestic market with prices above 300,000 RMB, aside from Tesla and the car models from Huawei’s HI collaboration.
Adding in two further requirements, “SUV” and “between 350,000-450,000 RMB,” the competitors of AVITA 11 are locked down to these few models:
- Tesla Model Y
2) NIO ES6/EC6
3) NIO ES7
4) Xpeng G9
NIO
Compared to the top-end 116 kWh model of AVITA 11, the price of NIO ES7 is relatively high. The two cars have opposite directions in high-efficiency energy replenishment, one utilizing high-voltage fast charging, and the other swapping batteries. However, NIO’s current energy replenishment system of over 1,000 battery swapping stations is much larger compared to the newly developed AVITA, which will likely still face limitations in high-voltage fast charging abilities due to limited charging infrastructure for some time to come. However, at a comparable price point, AVITA 11’s top-end model features a battery capacity 41 kWh larger than that of the ES7, providing superior endurance. Therefore, the strengths and weaknesses of the two vehicles complement each other.
In terms of exterior and interior design, the two vehicles also have opposite directions. ES7’s style is a sleek, angular futuristic look, while AVITA 11 features a European-style 3D design. Objectively speaking, both cars’ designs are highly-rated among domestic brands, and it’s hard to determine which is superior; mainly depending on the user’s aesthetic preferences. One major point to note is that within the current market of horizontal competitors, AVITA 11 may be the only product that can compare with NIO in luxury and design. This was once NIO’s non-quantitative competitive advantage over its peers.Compared with ES6/EC6, the products are relatively old, but there will be more overlap with Avita 11’s mid-low-end models. At this point, Avita 11’s advanced intelligent driving has become a critical differentiation advantage, while the differences between the two cars in the battery and energy supplement systems are similar to ES7.
XPeng (XPeng)
Although XPeng G9 has not been released, it may be the most direct competitor with Avita 11 among the above four cars. The price range of the two cars will have a foreseeable overlap. They are both positioned as large five-seat SUVs, and the core of their product strength is both advanced intelligent driving and high-voltage charging. Such two strong horizontally comparable cars will definitely trigger consumers’ strong comparative associations.
I have seen both cars offline, and I personally think that Avita 11 is better in design and temperament than G9. However, it should also be pointed out that Avita 11’s design is quite unique and has a very obvious group preference. Those who like it really like it, and those who do not like it really do not like it. G9 is more mainstream in design, and its standard SUV design makes it have a more usable trunk than the three-box structured Avita 11.
As for high-voltage fast charging, G9 is almost twice as much as Avita 11 in terms of maximum charging power, but the 480 kW fast charging refers to the maximum power. The actual charging curve and the duration of high power are more important to influence user experience. Then it comes back to the discussion of energy supplement system. XPeng already has a relatively large-scale fast charging system, which will have more advantages. However, the construction of high-voltage fast charging stations of the two companies started at different times, and the competition between the two companies in this regard will undoubtedly be very fierce.
Regarding advanced intelligent driving and intelligent cockpit, at present, Huawei’s HiCar and XPeng are comparable. The royal city war between G9 and Avita 11 may not have a conclusion until both cars are delivered for testing.
Therefore, under the balance of power, how the balance between these two cars will tilt will depend on G9’s final price.
Tesla
The reason why Tesla Model Y is placed at last is that Avita 11 has a greater differentiation advantage over Model Y in terms of products, with higher configuration, larger body size, more localized cockpit, more luxurious design, better interior, and almost the same price.
But this is almost the advantage of all self-owned brands at the same price compared with Model Y. I think the most crucial victory for Avita 11 under this premise is that it wins more thoroughly. For example, the interior of Avita 11 is even better than Model Y compared to P7 being better than Model 3, to the extent that it can make people make decisions.
The advantages in seat ventilation, excellent NVH, RNC active noise reduction, and large battery high-voltage fast charging are all targeted at Model Y’s weaknesses, which also target the hesitating users of Model Y.Aside from its products, Tesla’s brand influence may hold an overwhelming advantage over Avita’s Model Y at this stage, and potential price reduction strategies in the future may cause the Avita 11 to fall out of the current sweet spot in terms of price difference.
Conclusion
I’ve test driven the Avita 11 before and can tell you that it surpasses traditional luxury brands in terms of mechanical quality. This was once a shortcoming of new energy vehicles, and its focus on comfort sets it apart from current companies that are all moving in the direction of sportiness. I believe this differentiation is viable.
From a corporate standpoint, the collaboration between Changan, Huawei, and Ningde Times is displayed in the Avita 11 with great ambition. This ambition is reflected in both the product itself and the price point. This car is extremely important to all three companies, and the key issue will be the problem of Huawei’s sales channels and Avita’s self-operated channels, which will once again face market verification.
Therefore, the success or failure of Avita 11 is not only related to Avita, but may also become an important reference for the future path selection of China’s intelligent electric vehicle industry.
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.