Author: Sun Xiaoshu
Jidu was jointly invested by Baidu and Geely and officially established on March 2, 2021. After three months, on June 1, Jidu held its first press conference in Beijing.
From the communication between Jidu CEO Xia Yiping and the media, we can know what Jidu has focused on in the past three months, what is Jidu’s core competitiveness in the future, and the significance of Jidu to Baidu and Geely.
Hiring People and Project Pushing Forward
For the newly established Jidu, the primary task is team building. In early March, Jidu had only three or four people, and even members were distributed in different places without a fixed office location. The project progress had to rely on online meetings.
In April, Jidu settled in an 18-person small office in Zhangjiang, Shanghai, to further accelerate the speed of recruiting people, and moved to Hongqiao in May. Currently, Jidu has 100 formal employees, and with the personnel to be hired in the next two months, the team will exceed 200 people.
“Although Jidu is small, it is complete in all aspects.” As Xia Yiping described, Jidu’s current team structure has covered design, R&D, engineering, software, and operation levels. However, the extremely complicated process of vehicle manufacturing cannot be supported by a team of 200 people.
According to Xia Yiping’s previous disclosure, Jidu will expand the company’s scale to 1,500 people by the end of the year. It can be foreseen that team building will be the top priority throughout the initial year of Jidu.
It is well known that the cycle of car manufacturing is generally three years. However, Xia Yiping said that “this is a relatively conservative estimate,” and Jidu’s first “close-to-production” car model will appear in April next year. In order to achieve this goal, while Jidu is building the team, it is also actively promoting the project’s progress.
In the past three months, Jidu has spent a lot of time communicating with Geely on how to cooperate in terms of design concepts, products, and technology. Last Friday, Li Yanhong participated in Jidu’s product review meeting, confirmed the design selection of appearance and interior, and focused on expressing the sense of technology in the design, which has now entered the 3D modeling and development phase.
Jidu is pushing forward its car manufacturing project at high speed, and the logic behind it is that the timing of new car manufacturing is just right.”At the right time, doing the right things often produces twice the result with half the effort,” Xia Yiping believes that during the early development of electric vehicles, new car makers such as Tesla have made the greatest contribution to educating the market and consumers, as well as fostering the supply chain.
Despite a 20% drop in global car sales in 2020, new energy vehicles have surged by 40% against the trend. The curtain has been raised on the commercialization of electric vehicles, and entering the market at this time can save a considerable amount of market education costs.
On the other hand, during the early stages of electric vehicle development, both Tesla and Nio developed their own motors and batteries, which was another significant cost. However, with the gradual relaxation of industry standardization, these technological and supply chain barriers are now being broken down. Entering at the right time, with the right pace, Jidu can capitalize on this advantage, but only if it moves quickly enough to beat the formation of the new market structure for new energy and autonomous driving.
From the information revealed at the press conference, Jidu is indeed forging ahead at full speed. Jidu will conduct financing and go public in Q3, and will not only unveil its first “near-production” model in April next year, but also release one new model annually.
Jidu’s core competitiveness
In the current revolution of intelligent and electric vehicles, it is not electrification but intelligence that will cause the biggest wave.
The acceleration performance of electric vehicles can easily surpass that of fuel vehicles, and their shortcomings in range and power replenishment are gradually being addressed. However, with the emergence of “standardized parts for electric vehicles” in the industry, the performance of electric vehicles will tend to be homogeneous. In the next stage, the core barriers to competition for electric vehicles will undoubtedly be in the field of intelligence.
Jidu’s core competitiveness in the field of intelligence will inevitably come from Baidu, more precisely, Baidu’s Apollo autonomous driving platform.
The competition in intelligence is not just about product form, but also about the underlying technology of electric vehicles as a whole. From the chassis of the car, to the mechanism of the motor, hardware controllers, OS, and application layers, everything from the bottom up will be restructured. Such a restructuring will make competition in the field of intelligence more efficient and intense in the future.
“A car defined by software” is already a consensus in the automotive industry, and the value of doing software and providing solutions will far exceed that of doing hardware in the future. Taking the example of smartphones, they are currently undergoing a transformation from hardware competition to ecosystem competition, and chip capabilities, OS capabilities, and cloud-based big data analytics capabilities (AI capabilities) are becoming increasingly important.Although the complexity of cars far exceeds that of mobile phones, as the next generation of intelligent mobile terminals, they still follow this logic, requiring a complete solution from top to bottom, which happens to be provided by Apollo open platform.
In fact, Apollo is a domestically strong intelligent driving open platform with a complete architecture. It is divided from the bottom up into a vehicle platform responsible for vehicle control, a hardware platform including computing units and expandable lidars and other sensors, a perception and decision-making software platform, and an upper-level cloud data service platform.
The bandwidth, openness, and flexible expansion of Geely SEA’s architecture will be the guarantee for the landing of the Apollo intelligent driving solution. In addition, in order to meet the future cloud support requirements for intelligent electric vehicles’ self-learning, self-evolution, and self-iteration, JET, an intelligent architecture oriented towards L4, has been jointly developed by Jidu and Geely.
To further address future rapid iterations, Jidu will jointly develop a software architecture based on the JET architecture with Apollo and Geely, which is based on the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to better decouple software and hardware.
Jidu’s Mission
Jidu was founded by Baidu and Geely, but as seen from the title “Baidu Automotive Company” in Baidu’s publicity, it is a new company led by Baidu with Geely as the strategic partner.
This is further reflected in Jidu’s equity and board seats: Baidu holds 55% of the shares, Geely holds 45%; there are five board seats, apart from Xia Yiping, three are from Baidu and one is from Geely.
The primary mission of Jidu is what Xia Yiping emphasized when he was asked if Apollo would be integrated into Jidu in the future: “We are carrying all of Baidu’s technology landing.”
Baidu has long been laying out in the field of intelligent driving and has developed a relatively mature set of technology solutions, accumulating 2.9K related patents and 10 million kilometers of L4 level autonomous driving test data.
But Baidu’s intelligent driving has always been at the “experiment” stage. When one after another advanced “concepts” gradually become products, if Apollo continues to possess “martial arts” but nowhere to display them, the future is not optimistic.The urgency of Baidu’s landing on Apollo autonomous driving can be seen from its emphasis on JITAI. “Robin (Li Yanhong) is very firm about making cars. As you can see from Baidu’s first-quarter financial communication, Robin has three major core strategic directions for cars in the future, one of which is JITAI, which is very important.” JITAI does not build its own supply chain or factories, but chooses to directly utilize Geely’s mature supply and manufacturing system, which is a strategic choice for the fastest landing of Apollo.
As for the product positioning of the JITAI model, although the car has not been manufactured yet, one thing is certain: it will definitely not be less than 200,000 yuan, because “in the era of intelligence, it is very expensive to load the entire AI capability onto the car.” However, Xia Yiping said that he believes that the core cost of cars will continue to decrease in the next two to three years.
As for Geely, it is committed to building the SEA vast architecture into a hardware open platform for the intelligent electrification era, and has successively opened it to more than 20 brands such as Maiteng and Foxconn.
Geely and Baidu, one wants to be a hardware open platform, the other wants to be a software open platform, JITAI is the “cooperative product” that both urgently need, a representative product that can promote their respective platforms.
Conclusion
In November 2020, Ren Xuyang approached Xia Yiping to discuss car making. In February 2021, the car project was officially established, and on March 2nd, “JITAI” was formally established. In April 2021, JITAI’s first “approaching mass production” car model was unveiled, and one car model will be launched every year thereafter.
Whether it is the fast pace of JITAI or Baidu’s emphasis on it, it all reflects Baidu’s expectations for JITAI to carry the landing of Apollo technology. Because whether Baidu can successfully promote the Apollo platform and become the top supplier of solutions for the future intelligent driving era, JITAI, as a demonstration benchmark, is very important.
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.