Author: French Fries

What is cost-performance ratio dominating the industry?

Two Chinese companies have demonstrated textbook style operations in their respective fields.

On the electric vehicle track, 2020 was a turning point. Before that, the domestic market of electric vehicles was still dominated by niche products. Afterward, Wuling using the Hongguang MINIEV with a starting price of less than 30,000 yuan brought the title of China’s national car to electric vehicles. Today, Wuling’s new energy vehicle sales have exceeded one million, making it the world’s fastest automaker to reach one million new energy vehicle sales.

On the drone track, 2012 was also a turning point. Before that, foreign companies such as 3D Robotics from the United States, Mircrodrones from Germany, and Parrot from France dominated the mainstream with difficult-to-use, low-performance, and expensive products. Afterward, DJI’s first-to-fly Phantom drone easily surpassed all competitors. Today, when it comes to drone brands, only DJI and others are left, with DJI occupying 77% of the global drone market share.

People always expect strong alliances, Wuling x DJI =?

The answer is provided by the 2023 Baojun KiWi EV equipped with DJI’s intelligent driving solution. A recent Wuling “Lingxi Smart Driving System” communication meeting gave us a deeper understanding of this answer.

First, resolve from 0 to 1

For a long time, there are two types of people whose car purchase needs have become increasingly strong among our readers and potential users of our “super charging station”.

One type of person believes that “I want a car with driving assistance, but I want it to be cheaper as well.”

There are two kinds of potential users in this category. One is a technology fan who is crazy about digital products. After all, in this era of uninspired development of handheld digital devices, smart cars are the most popular and interactive technology products in the real world, who wouldn’t want to own one? The other is a regular office worker who needs to commute long distances on congested roads every day.

They have a strong demand for highly effective intelligent driving functions, but their budgets are often limited.

The core demand of another group of people is “I want a small car, but I want it to be powerful.”

Their portraits may be white-collar workers living in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, where congested traffic and scarce parking resources make them prefer small-sized cars. At the same time, their more affluent economic conditions also make them have higher requirements for the quality of small cars.

The slogan of “Wuling designs and produces what the people need” is still valid, and the appearance of the Baojun KiWi EV equipped with the “Lingxi smart driving system” first solves the problem of the existence of the above needs.

Significance over gimmick

The prerequisite for solving the needs is that this smart driving system is really useful.

According to Wuling’s introduction, the Lingxi smart driving system has selected the DJI car-mounted stereo binocular camera as a key component.

Wuling is obviously well-versed in the true essence of maximizing resource utilization. With this core perception hardware structure, they first targeted the high-frequency urban travel scenarios of “parking scene” and “city driving scene”.

In fact, from the simple actual experience of that day, we believe that this “Lingxi smart driving system” actually has great optimization value for many users in their high-frequency scenarios.

For example, parking. KiWi EV itself is a small and exquisite car, which also takes advantage of its size in parking. The addition of a particularly convenient parking assistant makes the already simple task even more convenient.

Firstly, it supports various types of parking spaces, vertical, parallel, and diagonal, and you can park when you see it. Secondly, the efficiency of automatic parking is also a deep memory point. Accurate parking space recognition plus the easy-to-move body size itself allows it to basically end every parking with one move. Thirdly, according to Wuling’s introduction, it can also recognize ground locks and limiters, and automatically avoid unusable parking spaces.

This feature of recognizing special objects is also inherited in the driving state of the Lingxi smart driving system.“The dual-camera stereo vision sensor independently developed by DJI boasts core technology advantages of obstacle recognition and depth estimation. In the aforementioned statement, the word “任意任意” (any) carries the greatest weight, indicating Five Star’s confidence.

The capital of such confidence lies in the fact that the Lingxi Intelligent Driving System can identify overturned cars, modified cars, falling rocks, dropped cardboard boxes, oddly shaped ice cream cones, and construction barriers among other obstacles without the need for learning or training. From a different perspective, this system’s ability to accurately identify irregular objects implies a more sophisticated environment perception capability.

We have always said that precise environmental perception is a necessary prerequisite for intelligent driving. After all, if you can see clearly, the subsequent actions can proceed smoothly; if you can’t, no matter how strong your vehicle control ability is, there’s nowhere to execute it.

And based on accurate environmental perception, the already flexible and compact body of the vehicle performs more intelligently in slow-moving traffic.

Industry Shockwave

A simple test has given us a roughly positive understanding of this system’s capabilities. Based on this, we believe that the combination of Wuling and DJI will bring a significant impact to the intelligent driving industry in terms of cost-effectiveness.

The reason is because one is an experienced cross-industry technology platform and the other is a national giant that is very good at managing the automotive supply chain and reducing costs as well as increasing efficiency.

The former is obviously very good at quickly transplanting technology and algorithms that have been market-tested in other industries into the automotive industry, while the latter’s reputation as a ‘price butcher’ has never disappointed anyone. If they are seen as a Cartesian coordinate system with X-axis representing cost and Y-axis representing intelligent driving capability, the Lingxi Intelligent Driving System will definitely fall into the area where the cost is relatively low and the performance is relatively superior.

“To put it more directly, the goal of Wuling and DJI is definitely to create a more affordable and practical intelligent driving system. These two aspects, low cost and high availability, will lower the cost barrier and raise the performance benchmark for intelligent driving. In combination, the Lingxi intelligent driving system will undoubtedly raise the cost-effectiveness standard of the intelligent driving industry.

“2022 will be the year when intelligent driving becomes popular”.

We may have said this sentence many times, but never has it been so true. After all, popularity requires quantity.

After all, Wuling now proudly wears the badge of “the world’s fastest company to achieve one million sales of new energy vehicles”.

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.