Author: Chen Nianhang

In less than half an hour, Li Yinan’s car project “Ziyoujia Automobile” officially launched its first car, the Ziyoujia NV.

Li Yinan also made his debut on behalf of Ziyoujia Automobile. After four years of car-making, he officially delivered his answer to making four-wheel intelligent electric vehicles, instead of the well-known two-wheeled electric car maker in the past.

Let’s take a look at how Ziyoujia answered the two major questions about intelligence on this answer sheet.

Ziyoujia NV starts at 278,800 yuan and will be delivered in December

Ziyoujia NV is positioned as a luxury mid-to-large-sized urban SUV.

There are six exterior colors, three interior colors, two C-pillar cover colors, and two styles of wheel hub to choose from.

Based on the electrification platform, there are two power systems: pure electric and extended-range versions, with a total of three models:

• Pure electric standard range version: priced at 278,800 yuan, with a CLTC range of 440 kilometers;
• Extended-range version (1.5T four-cylinder extender): priced at 288,800 yuan, with a CLTC range of 1257 kilometers;
• Pure electric long-range version: priced at 318,800 yuan, with a CLTC range of 560 kilometers.

Ziyoujia NV is now available for pre-order, with a deposit of 1000 yuan. The first 20,000 intended owners will have special owner privileges.

According to Ziyoujia’s plan, it will open test drive activities in 20 cities in November, and the first batch of users will be delivered in December. The first batch of Ziyoujia retail centers will officially open in 23 cities across the country on October 9, and 120 stores will be built in 40 cities across the country by the end of 2022.

In terms of energy supply, Ziyoujia Automobile has partnered with 38 top charging operators nationwide, connecting to more than 400,000 charging piles, and also provides home charging for users. However, Ziyoujia will not build charging stations in the short term.Li Yinan’s answer should have been submitted at the end of March this year. Due to various factors, such as the epidemic, it was delayed for half a year, which to some extent also reduces the possibility of Self-Driving Home NV being accepted by more consumers, because in the current Chinese market for intelligent electric cars, the options for large five-seater SUVs at a price point of 300,000 yuan are quite crowded.

In the price range of 278,800 to 318,800 yuan, Self-Driving Home NV has many opponents, and many opponents have strong comprehensive quality, including the LanTu Free pure electric version/extended range version, WenJie M5 pure electric version/extended range version, Tesla Model Y, BYD Tang, Volkswagen ID.6, XPeng G9, RisingAuto R7, and many fossil cars.

Li Yinan, who is calm about making cars, may not have set a particularly high KPI for the first car, after all, it is his trial product.

If we calculate from the official establishment of Self-Driving Home in November 2018, this new car company will be four years old soon. Four years is not too simple for producing a mass-produced car, especially when it is put in the context of 2022, when the new energy automobile arena is extremely crowded. It seems to be difficult to convince consumers to pay without outstanding strength.

Therefore, many outsiders believe that the sales volume of this car will not be too good. On the one hand, it is said that Self-Driving Home NV has too many opponents, and opponents such as ideal and WenJie have an extended-range version that is even more competitive. On the other hand, it also points to the slow pace of Self-Driving Home NV’s product launch, missing the best market opportunity.

Therefore, I don’t want to talk too much about the appearance, interior, space and power performance of Self-Driving Home NV in the future, because these qualities are no longer important selling points for a 2022 car model to stand out in the highly competitive intelligent new energy vehicle market. Doing these things well is just the foundation (if the foundation is not done well, consumers will not vote for you at all, because there are so many fossil fuel vehicle models that consumers can buy). The intelligence part is the important bonus point.

Intelligence was also the main topic of Li Yinan’s speech at the press conference, which shows that he values the intelligent experience of Self-Driving Home NV. However, from the actual performance, intelligence has not become the highlight of Self-Driving Home NV, at least not yet.

Is CarPlay taking the lead?

I still have a lot of regrets and questions about Self-Driving Home NV’s intelligent cockpit section.

• Regretfully, there is no HUD, no co-pilot screen, and the central control screen is vertical;
• The question is, why do you need to use the mobile phone car screen mapping scheme as the focus of intelligent cockpit promotion and product experience?

The dashboard screen of the ZYJ NV is 12.3 inches, and the central control screen is 15.6 inches.

The central control screen can be split into upper and lower screens through software because it uses a dual-car machine system. One system supports the interconnection of mobile phone systems (CarPlay, CarLink, HiCar), and the other system is the self-developed Niutron OS of ZYJ Automobile.

If the car phone interconnection is not performed, then the ZYJ NV’s main interface is a navigation map (Gaode map car version), the card column at the bottom is some vehicle information and audio entertainment, and the bottom is a common Dock bar. At present, there are very few APPs built in the car machine system, and expansion cooperation and OTA are needed in the future.

Once the mobile phone is mirrored, two-thirds of the central control screen will become CarPlay or other mobile connection software. This practice is rare. In ZYJ’s official promotion, Apple CarPlay is emphasized, and CarLink and HiCar are not mentioned much, which is somewhat unfriendly to non-Apple mobile phone users.

Moreover, the CarPlay version supported by the ZYJ NV is not the latest because the latest version of CarPlay involves related functions of vehicle control, which requires Apple and manufacturers to do adaptation in advance. Therefore, the supported CarPlay version is on iOS 15/16, and video cannot be watched when connected to CarPlay.

Since it supports CarPlay, the ZYJ NV also has two sets of voice interaction, one is Apple Siri, and the other is the system’s own voice interaction. However, users who have used Siri know how the voice interaction experience is.

Nowadays, many intelligent auto manufacturers are trying to make consumers put down their phones during driving and complete most of the operations during the journey through the car machine system, such as navigation, listening to music, and various adjustments of the vehicle, so you can see that manufacturers such as NIO are making the car machine system very complete and easy to use, and the computing power of the smart cabin, etc.But ZY NV took a different approach by placing the consumer’s smartphone in an important position, hoping to create a seamless experience between using the car and using the phone, just like when using a traditional fuel-powered car. Many fuel-powered car owners’ first action upon entering the vehicle is to connect their Bluetooth and use their phone for navigation or music. However, ZY NV uses CarPlay, rather than Bluetooth, allowing you to operate the car touchscreen directly instead of using your phone screen.

It is unclear whether ZY NV will continue with this dual-system strategy for their car infotainment systems or wait for their intelligent cockpit team to become more mature and develop a complete and mature infotainment system, rather than relying on phone-to-car screen mirroring products in such an important position.

Why Can’t the Dual Journey 5 be the Standard?

The new automotive forces are dominating the autonomous driving field, from parking scenes to high-speed scenes, from high-speed scenes to urban scenes, using 8 million pixel high-definition cameras, LIDAR sensors, and automatic driving chips with hundreds of TOPS of computing power.

ZY NV has also chosen to lie flat in terms of assisted driving, with a standard L2 assisted driving capability, rather than focusing on the quantity of sensors or calculation platform computing power.

There are 24 advanced assisted driving functions that come standard, such as the Lane Centering Control (LCC), Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), and lever Lane Change Assistance (LCA) that users often use. Although the names of these functions are similar, the experience can vary substantially depending on the individual car.

Currently, these functions on ZY NV are implemented based on the Horizon Journey 2 chip, and the algorithm scheme uses the Horizon Mono single vision ADAS scheme. The functionality of the system still needs to be tested on the road. The company claims that the system has already undergone millions of kilometers of testing.

ZY NV’s assisted driving hardware supports payment-based upgrades from AAD to SuperDrive AAD. The car is equipped with various interfaces, and hardware replacement can be performed at the aftersales center. After upgrading to SuperDrive AAD, assisted navigation functions on both urban and high-speed roads can be achieved.

ZY has since collaborated deeply with Horizon, including:

• Jointly building the SuperDrive AAD supercomputing platform: which uses two Horizon Journey 5 chips, has a computing power of 256 TOPS, and is 1.8 times that of Tesla HW 3.0.

• Jointly building the SuperDrive AAD super-sensing system: consisting of 12 high-definition cameras (2-front view, 4-surround view, 4-side view, 1-rear view, and 1-interior view), 12 ultrasonic sensors, and 5 millimeter-wave radars, without Lidar.

• Jointly build high-integration domain controller: Supports gigabit Ethernet communication, which means faster data transmission, more responsive system feedback, and no significant delay in decision-making and execution.

Without lidar and relying on visual perception, how useful can the navigation assisted driving be based on two Journey 5s on the NV of ZYJ Auto? It depends on the strength of Horizon.

Of course, if consumers want to have such a set of systems, they will need to spend extra money to upgrade, and they will have to wait until the third quarter of 2023.

However, there is a big question about this kind of assisted driving strategy. Why not directly equip the NV with dual Journey 5 as standard, and then update the corresponding functions through OTA later? And when will the lidar be installed? It is worth noting that by the first half of 2021, the 2021 Ideal ONE with dual Journey 3 had already achieved high-speed navigation-assisted driving.

The only explanation may be that Li Yinan believes that consumers do not need these advanced assisted driving functions at the current stage, so he chooses not to equip these hardware to reduce the entry-level price of ZYJ Auto.

Will ZYJ Auto do full-stack self-research in automatic driving in the future? Li Yinan doesn’t have an answer now. At least for now, they will choose existing suppliers on the market. In his logic, there are at least 20 waves of people working hard in the field of automatic driving in China, and at least 20 companies have raised more than 400 million US dollars to cultivate this field. Therefore, in the early stage, ZYJ Auto will still choose external suppliers, and Horizon became the selected supplier on the NV of ZYJ Auto.

As the first car of ZYJ Auto, the market performance of NV is not optimistic. However, as the first attempt, it shoulders the mission of exploration and trial and error, and it is acceptable to make mistakes. It depends on whether the subsequent product definition and marketing strategy can reverse the decline.

In the extremely fast-paced intelligent electric vehicle market, rapid trial and error correction is the right approach. If it cannot be corrected, it can only be the fate of being rolled over.

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.