On May 25, 2022, Xia Yiping, CEO of Jidu, announced the latest progress in car manufacturing. The Jidu engineering team has started the production of mass-produced molds, and Jidu’s first car robot mass-produced vehicle has officially moved from car design to the preparation stage for mass production.
Xia Yiping said that during the mold casting process, in order to achieve the mass production of futuristic designs in the design scheme, the Jidu engineering team has accomplished a technical breakthrough in forming processes by focusing on molding processes and breaking through the depth of ultra-deep drawing.
The futuristic design refers to the shape of the outer panel of the side enclosure of Jidu’s mass-produced cars, with a forming depth of nearly 300 mm. Jidu stated that such a design is usually only seen on supercar bodies.
Jidu explained that the side enclosure outer panel mold has always been the most difficult and largest-sized part in the production of white car bodies. It is extremely difficult to restore the shape and posture of a supercar in mass production processes. The Jidu engineering team optimized the side enclosure forming process and developed a set of domestic leading and self-patented optimization methods for side enclosure forming depth processes, reaching the top level in the industry.
Starting from mold casting, Jidu will gradually initiate a series of practical manufacturing processes such as casting and machining, assembly, research and matching debugging, sample production, and quality optimization to ensure delivery of the vehicle by 2023.
Jidu’s car manufacturing progresses rapidly. On the 101st day of establishment, Jidu’s clay model made an appearance. On the 207th day, Jidu cooperated with the Baidu Apollo team for intelligent cockpit and intelligent driving function development based on SIMUCar 1.0. On the 364th day, Jidu’s SIMUCar 2.0 achieved full integration of intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, and JET architecture, ran automatic driving functions in urban domains and high-speed domains, and began the integration of parking domains. On the 450th day, Jidu started the production of mass-produced molds, and moved towards the preparation stage for mass production.
Jidu’s first car robot concept car, ROBO-01, will be released on “Xilinx,” Baidu’s metaverse platform, on June 8.
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.