Author: Cherio Cheng
October 27th is a wild Thursday and also the 605th day of JiDu’s establishment.
Four months ago, JiDu drove its autonomous concept car into the metaverse. Tonight, Xia Yiping drove the ROBO-01 Lunar Edition into the real world. As a car company with the mission of “exploring new ways of human transportation through intelligent technology”, JiDu has finally brought its first mass-produced car.
As soon as Xia Yiping took the stage, he announced that tonight’s press conference was all about substantial content, without any “within 5 million” or “within 500,000” jokes. In the form of video, he remotely invited two big names to support the ROBO-01 Lunar Edition launch.
One was Jia Yang, deputy chief designer of China’s lunar probe of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, who said that the logical concept of the lunar rover is very similar to that of JiDu’s autonomous driving. The other is better known to everyone, Liu Cixin, the author of the science fiction novel “The Three-Body Problem”, and also the owner of the 004th ROBO-01 Lunar Edition, symbolizing moving forward four steps.
As for who is the owner of the 001st ROBO-01 Lunar Edition, there will be a surprise reveal at the end.
After the press conference, the scheduled interview was postponed for half an hour because Xia Yiping had an important remote meeting in the neighboring office, which delayed some time – the CEO of JiDu is very busy.
To Sell Ten Thousand Units Per Month is the Definition of Success
There is no doubt that Xia Yiping is constantly under pressure, as he needs to keep a close eye on various affairs of the company all day long. He often tells his team that it is not enough to just produce the car, as selling ten thousand units per month is the definition of success.
In fact, Jidu was a small-scale company with only a few people when it was founded in March of last year. But now its team has grown to over 2040 employees, with more than half of them working on software development.
For Xia Yiping, he can be more relaxed and only needs to control directional decisions. However, he still pays close attention to certain parts, such as product design, and the most visited meeting room for him is the design review room.
It can be felt that Jidu is a company that pays great attention to the quality of product design, which can also be seen from the media evidence of the metal material used in the launch event.
More than 2000 people are divided between the dual headquarters in Shanghai and Beijing. According to talent recruitment needs, the autonomous driving software team is based in Beijing while the vehicle research and development and manufacturing engineering team is based in Shanghai. Xia Yiping commented that the Jidu team has the highest level of self-motivation and everyone has a strong desire to create a great car, hence the team’s combat effectiveness is particularly strong.
In short, as the saying goes, producing cars is just the beginning, achieving monthly sales of over 10,000 is the goal of this team.
Surpassing Model Y comprehensively?
Does the mass-produced ROBO-01 model surpass Tesla’s Model Y comprehensively? Xia Yiping expressed his strong confidence in this.At a price point of 400,000, there must be a choice between buying the ROBO-01 Lunar Exploration Limited Edition or the Tesla Model Y Performance AWD, and I believe everyone has their own answer in their heart. As for which one is better, since we have not actually test-driven the ROBO-01, we cannot give an objective evaluation at this time.
However, Xia Yiping, who comes from an internet background and shares with Musk a similar methodology of the so-called “first principle of product,” has some similar principles. For instance, he has always emphasized “not to innovate just for the sake of innovation.”
There is an Innovation Committee inside Jidu, responsible for carefully reviewing innovative points that are truly useful for users. Every function undergoes large-scale user experience sharing within the company.
Taking the example of the U-shaped steering wheel, Xia Yiping changed the steering wheel of his Model X to a YOKE steering wheel, and he adapted to it in about two days, feeling that the forward visibility was very good. He even replaced his wife’s steering wheel with it. At first, Xia Tai was very angry and wanted to change it back to a round one, but when Xia Yiping secretly changed it back, Xia Tai had already adapted to it and found it easier to use.
“By including his own wife in the user experience group, Xia Yiping can be said to have achieved a balance between work and family.”In addition, he also raised an interesting point that he believed that currently, in many ways, car products are lagging behind consumer electronics products. Just take automatic doors as an example, which is actually quite common in daily life, but people would find it innovative when installed on cars.
Xia Yiping’s home is also fully automated, and almost everything can be controlled by phone. He said that people will always pay for laziness, they do not need to take out the key, the car door will automatically open, and users are willing to pay for this feature. Fewer steps definitely feel better.
Automation is the core competitiveness
Of course, relying solely on internet methodologies to surpass Tesla is neither reasonable nor feasible. Moreover, Tesla has produced cars for many years and has set an annual sales target of over one million.
Xia Yiping is often asked if Jidu is too late.
To this, he was very calm and said that it’s definitely a bit late, but it may be relatively late. This is because the entire electric vehicle market is still an incremental market, and whether it can catch up with this wave of growth is more important for Jidu.
In fact, after the baptism of the last round of electrification wave, the product competitiveness of electric vehicles has been leveled, for example, Jidu’s first car can achieve an industry-standard acceleration of 3.9 seconds from zero to one hundred kilometers per hour and a range of 600 kilometers.
But the competition in automation has just begun, which is also Jidu’s core competitiveness.If Jidu wants to compete in the electric vehicle industry, it cannot just create a product similar to its competitors. Instead, Jidu must innovate in software and intelligent technology to create its own unique features.
Furthermore, Xia Yiping added that as an AI company, Baidu has a supercomputing platform similar to Tesla’s DOJO that can provide Jidu with an advantage.
About Intelligent Driving
When speaking of Baidu, one cannot ignore Apollo. Xia Yiping stated that Jidu’s intelligent driving algorithm is shared with Apollo Robotaxi and can start from L4 level of basic capability.
In just nine months, Jidu completed high-speed domain and urban domain testing, providing users with an “out-of-the-box” intelligent driving experience. During this process, Jidu’s philosophy of its product as an “intelligent device” was taken into consideration, making intelligent driving a standard feature across all models.
Xia Yiping comes from a technical background and has high requirements for smart technology implementation. Even if the function works, he believes it’s only 60-70% perfect.
We are also looking forward to seeing the advanced assisted driving performance of ROBO-01’s mass-produced vehicles and will bring related video content in the future.
Summer emphasized that the iteration of Jidu Intelligent Driving is very agile and has a high degree of integration with Apollo, sharing backend algorithms. The goal of the two companies is also the same, which is to promote higher-level capabilities for autonomous driving.
In addition, regarding the issue of high-precision maps, asked by the Super Charging Station, whether they have exclusive resources for larger scale high-precision maps, or have turned to a plan of heavy perception and light maps?
In response, Summer said that Jidu and Baidu are actively promoting the industry progress of high-precision maps. Currently, they have been launched in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and when they go online next year, more cities (6 in total) will be available.
From a long-term perspective, Summer believes that in the future, only lightweight high-precision maps may be necessary, which fits the process of technological iteration. At the same time, the scope of high-precision maps will also become more and more extensive.
Jidu’s Next Plan
Regarding Jidu’s future actions, we will answer them in this chapter.
Jidu’s future product Roadmap is to release one new car every year, and they released the second car’s design at this year’s Guangzhou Auto Show. At the same time, an unrestricted version will also be released, with a lower price.
So why is the Lunar Rover Edition priced at nearly 400,000 RMB?
The price range below 200,000 CNY is not a focus for Jidu, as customers in this range are very concerned about cost-effectiveness, and Jidu does not have the ability to produce a low-cost car at the moment. However, when it comes to luxury pure electric vehicles priced at around 500,000 CNY, such as the Mercedes EQE, Xia Yiping believes that Jidu has great product advantages in intelligent interaction. ROBO-01 lunar exploration is the most high-end limited edition of Jidu, and Xia Yiping hopes to demonstrate some competitiveness in the relatively high-end market.
Capacity planning has been established, and the production capacity for next year has been planned as of October this year, as many key components need to be procured 12 months in advance.
In the initial stage, Jidu will mainly adopt a direct sales model, and the construction of the user system will also be an important task in the next step.
Jidu has three key concepts regarding the understanding of car robots: natural communication, free movement, and self-growth.
Xia Yiping believes that in the future, the core competition of automobiles will shift to the ability to control chips, algorithms, and computing power.
ROBO-01 exploration version and Polestar use the same SEA architecture.# Challenges Exist for the Scale of 800V, but It Is Not the Most Important Capability for Xpeng
Xpeng plans to set up charging poles around its sales outlets and cooperate with third parties. There is a big difference between fast-charging electric vehicles and smartphones: the fast charging of smartphones does not rely on infrastructure.
If there were chips integrating cabin and driving, Xpeng’s software architecture capability would be OK (compatible directly).
Xpeng’s target users: young tech-lovers whose user profile highly overlaps with that of Tesla.
Finally, Robin Li, the founder of Baidu, is the first owner of the ROBO-01 Lunar Limited Edition.
In conclusion, during the exclusive interview, although Xia Yiping seemed relaxed somehow, he mentioned a KPI many times, which is a monthly sales volume of ten thousand units. This is Xpeng’s most important current goal. Judging from the delivery volume of 1000+1000 units of the Lunar Limited Edition, Xpeng still has a long way to go to achieve this goal.
If you regard Xpeng as an extension of Baidu, then the easily overlooked significance of this press conference is that this is the first automotive hardware product of the former Internet giants BAT.For a company that has only been established for 605 days, although Jidu has not heard the first gun of electrification, it has already undertaken sufficient advantages in intelligence and is ready to make a full sprint (four gears forward).
“In the new era of exploring human travel methods with intelligence”, Jidu not only faces the moon but also the vast sea of stars.
“Natural Selection” four gears forward!
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.