The first breakthrough marketing event of Jidu happened on June 8th, 2022, when Jidu held its first brand launch event “ROBODAY” and officially released its first concept car – “ROBO-01”. However, the focus on ROBO-01 and its technology was completely overshadowed by the innovative metaverse launch event. This was definitely a first for the automotive industry.
After the event, everyone was discussing why it was so “pixelated” and “weird”, like a Bilibili animation graduate’s work. Even Jidu CEO, Xia Yiping’s metaverse twin image was much slimmer than himself! Xia Yiping responded self-mockingly, saying that it could have been very realistic, but they intentionally made it pixelated for effect, and even deliberately modeled a relatively thin virtual image to motivate himself to lose weight.
From “automotive robots” to “metaverse launch events”, and even the CEO’s lack of self-restraint, all tell me that Jidu is a unique player. On August 8th, I was invited to Jidu’s newly established headquarters, “JIDU ROBO BASE”, which had only been open for a few days, to attend the ecological partner conference held by Jidu in the “Automotive Robot Base”.
At the event, Xia Yiping announced a “2880” strategy: to have the ability to deliver 800,000 automotive products throughout the year by 2028. He also announced plans to enter 46 cities nationwide in 2023, with the first store to be opened in Shanghai within the year.
How did Jidu, founded only 525 days ago, plan to achieve its 2880 goals?
525 days of achievement
In these over 500 days, Jidu completed rapid team expansion, product definition, concept car debut and many other tasks.
Jidu’s newly built headquarters is located at No. 1688 Yecheng Road, Jiading District, Shanghai, close to Jiading city center, with a building area of nearly 20,000 square meters. Currently, there are about 1,400 employees here, and it can accommodate a total of 3,000 people. This year, the construction of the second phase of projects will begin nearby. According to PR’s introduction, during the peak campus recruitment period, hundreds of people would be hired in a single day. She even emphasized that Jidu’s recruitment is completely independent, with not the slightest influence from Baidu and Geely.
From the moment I stepped into Jidu’s ROBO BASE, I felt the overwhelming purple atmosphere, which reminded me of the primary color of EVA’s Unit 01. Officially called “JIDU AI-Purple” by the Jidu brand, the origin of this purple color is also fascinating. It was decided by AI that this color is the blue-purple light color emitted when liquid helium enters an ionized state under extreme low-pressure experiments.
With the official opening of the Shanghai Center, Jidu has completed the construction of dual-headquarters in Beijing and Shanghai. In fact, there are still some personnel stationed in the Hangzhou Bay of Jidu, mainly responsible for connecting with the SEA platform of Geely, while the main functions of the Shanghai headquarters are product design, research and development, and sales. The Beijing headquarters mainly focuses on the application development of intelligent driving, intelligent cabin software, and intelligent network system layout.
Behind Jidu are the leading autonomous driving company Baidu and the traditional automobile giant undergoing transformation, which brings Jidu a more friendly financing environment and excellent hardware and software capabilities, making Jidu expand rapidly. With the release conference of Jidu’s metaverse, many media outside the circle even say that Baidu is going to build a car. Is this really the case?
Jidu, Baidu, and Geely
Jidu was initially initiated and established by Baidu, and then Geely made a strategic investment in Jidu. In my initial idea, Jidu’s existence was to inherit Baidu’s advantages in assisted driving and cabin and quickly land products through the SEA structure provided by Geely. Following this logic, Jidu is essentially being strategically led by Baidu.
However, the fact is that Jidu has a strong independence. This can be seen from the CEO Xia Yiping’s own experience and the emphasis on Jidu employee recruitment system in the PR. So, what is the relationship between Jidu and Baidu, Geely?
Both Baidu and Geely are suppliers to Jidu.
The relationship with Geely is relatively easy to understand. For a brand new brand like Jidu, without the production qualification and wanting to quickly launch products, finding a leading traditional automobile company to cooperate and quickly establish a hardware platform is the most secure decision. Geely is not only a supplier that can provide hardware production capacity but also can teach Jidu the experience of automobile production. For example, this time, the Ecological Partner Conference is telling everyone: we have a good sales goal, and you can make money by cooperating with us.Actually, from the composition of the attending suppliers, most of them are suppliers of Geely SEA, which can be considered as “packaged” and brought to the stage by Jidu. And I have a small idea personally, that is, in the near future, starting from Jidu’s second car, Jidu may choose to produce the hardware part by itself as soon as possible. Because from what I understand, most of the attending suppliers are mainly catering to the needs of Geely, and based on Jidu’s definition of the entire vehicle, Jidu needs to have the right to speak in the hardware part.
And Jidu cannot be regarded as “Baidu’s own car”, because Jidu uses the underlying capabilities of Baidu Apollo. How to present it to the outside world, that is, the final definition of the product, is also Jidu’s own idea. They decide what the final form and capabilities of the product that consumers actually come into contact with will be.
In Xia Yiping’s own words:
We have used Baidu’s voice, including maps, intelligent driving, and Robotaxi’s atomic core technology capabilities, but how to make technical adjustments, such as the order of algorithms that we call on autonomous driving, or the combination of front and back, to create a more suitable product for pushing toward and facing the C-end. This experience is what we are doing.
JIDU ROBO-01
As the first car of Jidu’s entire brand, the production version of ROBO-01 aims to achieve 90% of the design of the concept car in production.
The design of the door without B-pillars on the exterior is difficult to retain in the production car, but many aerodynamic designs of the interactive light group will be retained.
The most eye-catching feature of the interior is this huge one-piece screen that runs through the entire cabin, with a resolution of up to 6k. Although the voice empowered by Baidu has not been experienced in the Demo version, the official promotion has already added full offline voice function, which is more comprehensive in terms of voice coverage.
This expandable steering wheel is unlikely to be put into production, but this “half-cut” steering wheel similar to Tesla’s Yoke may be retained because our laws do not specify the shape of the steering wheel, so it can be passed according to regulations.After the introduction of the Yoke steering wheel, many car owners, including Xia Yiping, replaced their original steering wheels and conducted actual tests. However, the problem is that due to the fixed setting of the steering ratio, when making a U-turn, the Yoke steering wheel requires a turn of more than 90 degrees, which is not as comfortable and handy as a complete steering wheel. Of course, we can solve this problem by changing the steering ratio proportionally through wire control.
Xia Yiping also revealed that Jidu will soon release a limited edition of its first mass-produced car model with a car robot, which will be available for pre-order, and the earliest delivery time will be in the second half of 2023. The exterior design of Jidu’s second car model will be unveiled at the Guangzhou Auto Show at the end of 2022 and is expected to start delivery at the earliest in 2024.
Regarding the price of the ROBO-01, Jidu’s first mass-produced product is positioned in the 200,000-level home market, which can be used as a reference, as revealed by Li Yanhong in Baidu’s Q1 financial report this year.
For the ROBO-01’s assisted driving, both Xia Yiping and Li Yanhong’s statements have aroused consumers’ curiosity:
Xia Yiping emphasized that Jidu’s first car robot product to be delivered in 2023 will have the best “door-to-door, start-to-stop” advanced autonomous driving capability in the industry at that time.
Baidu’s founder, chairman, and CEO Li Yanhong even said: “In terms of autonomous driving technology, Jidu will lead Tesla’s generation!”
The ROBO-01’s perception hardware is as follows:
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12 cameras: 7 8-megapixel + 4 3-megapixel + 1 2-megapixel (the front three cameras are composed of 2 8-megapixel and 1 2-megapixel);
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2 Hesai AT128 semi-solid-state LiDARs;
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5 millimeter-wave radars;
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12 ultrasonic radars;
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2 Orin-X chips (redundant 8295).
Based on this hardware, Jidu aims to create the best “door-to-door, start-to-stop” advanced autonomous driving capability in the industry at that time.## Regarding the Arrangement of Lidars
In our previous Weibo posts, Li Xiang and Xia Yiping expressed different opinions on the arrangement of lidars, essentially because their scenarios require different coverage. For Jidu, these two lidars need to be involved in the “driving and parking” scenarios, especially when parking, because the line of sight that is easily obscured by poles must have a wider angle of lidar perception. The following is Xia Yiping’s original words:
Suppose your car is parked in a scene where there are pillars on both sides, and there is no 180° FOV lidar to help you observe the oncoming vehicles several meters to the left and right. In fact, it is impossible to achieve fully autonomous parking in a parking lot in terms of safety, because your safety level cannot be fully guaranteed.
The lidar hidden under the front hood will probably not appear in the mass production version of ROBO-01 because the patent application period is too long to meet the delivery time. Therefore, the position of the subsequent lidar will most likely appear near the headlights, and the relevant solutions can refer to the position of P5.
Qualcomm’s 8295 will also be involved in the perception hardware platform, which is a proprietary innovation of Jidu. In Jidu’s words, it is paving the way for “L4 legislation.” This is mainly to deal with the processing mechanism when Orin fails in extreme situations. At this time, the perception data will be transported to the cockpit chip 8295 for processing to ensure the safety redundancy of the assisted driving. However, the data channel for the normal cross-domain will not be actively connected.
Whether we can experience the best “door-to-door, start-to-stop” advanced autonomous driving capability still needs to wait for the performance of ROBO-01, which will be officially delivered next year. However, backed by Apollo, our expectations for Jidu’s mass-produced car capabilities may be appropriately raised.
In Conclusion
Jidu is indeed a bit special, as can be seen from their metaverse marketing and conceptual design. A staff member who left Baidu and joined Jidu through normal recruitment told me that Jidu’s corporate culture is very flat and relaxed, unlike Baidu, where there are high barriers between various departments. This is the important reason why Jidu was able to make rapid progress in 500 days.
Based on Baidu Apollo and Geely SEA, Jidu has a good vision at the beginning. For Jidu, which has not yet delivered a car, the delivery target of 800,000 is still far away, but Jidu is already on the road.
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.