This article is from the public number: Tencent Technology (ID: qqtech) < span class = "text-remarks">, author: Xiaofeng
In Huawei ’s view,Tired technology and experience can improve the smart car user experience. From the feedback of some car companies, the cooperation priority of this capability is also higher than other capabilities.
A few days ago, Chery Automobile released a poster of a new car with the words “Hongmeng”. Although it was soon deleted, there have been speculations: Huawei is expected to enter the automotive market one year after the high-profile, and it is expected that this year Achieve product landing.
A person in charge of a traditional car manufacturer said, “Since last year, we have been in contact with Huawei. We provide cars, Huawei provides technology, and then continuously tests. Based on the current progress, Huawei ’s HiCar smart interconnect system The car is expected to reach mass production in the second half of the year.
Vehicles equipped with the HiCar system can achieve zero-level close-fit interconnection with 130 million Huawei smart terminal devices.The scope is not limited to the car, but connects people-car-home together. And built a new ecology of smart life.
Huawei’s HiCar ecological partners currently have more than 30 car manufacturers, including BAIC, Chery, JAC and other car companies have joined, more than 120 models of cooperation.
“The goal of their (Huawei) is to achieve Tire1 in the field of intelligent connected new energy vehicles,” said the source. Tire1 is a Tier 1 supplier commonly known by car companies, such as Bosch.
HiCar is only part of Huawei ’s overall smart car solution. When asked about the overall commercialization progress with car companies, Huawei Car BU said that it is still in the confidential stage and it has not yet reached the announcement time.
When will Huawei’s car commercialization be fully implemented? Will car companies buy it? Where are the future opportunities? Over the past year, Huawei spared no effort to enrich its car capabilities to give answers.
Meeting production capacity
Viewing cars as an application scenario of ICT extension is the earliest idea for Huawei to enter the automotive field. In 2013, Huawei launched the in-vehicle module ME909T, and established the “Internet of Vehicles Business Unit” to provide car manufacturers with network connection technology.
As a core supplier of ICT, Huawei’s technology is quickly recognized by the market. In the 4G era, with the cooperation of Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and other automotive modules, at the time NXP, Renesas Electronics and STMicroelectronics controlled automotive electronic cores.In the film market, Huawei has made a living.
Car modules, we seem to be able to see the shadow of smart cars getting up early. Whether it is a car’s OS, central control, intelligent rearview mirror, or intelligent voice interaction module, no doubt it needs a strong in-vehicle network communication technology as the basic support.
Today, with T-BOX (Wireless Gateway) , OBD (Vehicle auto-diagnosis system “) and OTA (Wireless transmission) etc. have gradually become standard equipment for every car, and the corresponding The application and configuration requirements of functions such as vehicle navigation, vehicle terminal dialogue, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, and over-the-air upgrades have also increased significantly in recent years, and the importance of vehicle communication modules is self-evident.
Like HiCar, in-vehicle modules are just the tip of Huawei ’s iceberg in terms of vehicle capabilities.
So, what exactly is the core competence of Huawei’s “building a car”? From the latest situation we have learned, this year, Huawei communicated with car companies the most.
This plan was proposed last year and includes five major parts: Intelligent electric, intelligent network connection, intelligent cockpit, intelligent driving, and intelligent car cloud. Today, these capabilities have changed a lot.
In terms of intelligent electric, which is often referred to as the “battery, motor, and electronic control” three-electric system in the car circle, it is the core technology of new energy vehicles. There are only a handful of car companies in the market that can develop their own three-electricity systems. Such as Tesla, BYD, Weilai and so on.
mPower smart electric is Huawei’s self-developed three-electric system. On March 6, Huawei’s mPower smart electric products obtained the German TüV Rheinland safety certification. This means that mPower’s entire process system from R & D to production meets the requirements of the highest level of automotive functional safety “ASILD”.
Intelligent Networking is Huawei’s mature vehicle module. Last year, Huawei launched the world’s first 5G vehicle module MH5000 module, which is based on the Baron 5000 5G chip development. This module is highly integrated with vehicle-road collaboration C-V2X technology. The role of this module is to help the commercialization of 5G technology in the car. The specific cooperation car company Huawei did not disclose.
Smart cockpit, 2019The year became an industry term. On the one hand is the obscurity of the concept of car networking, and the smart cockpit can better reflect the value of the space in the car and be perceived by users; on the other hand, the car networking has always lacked a clear business model, and the smart cockpit has a wider space.
The smart cockpit covers a wide range, but they all need a foundation. This foundation is actually the car OS that everyone often says. It didn’t take long to announce the entry into the automotive field last year, and Huawei released the Hongmeng OS. This OS for positioning the Internet of Things is an important application scenario in Huawei’s planning.
The founder, Ren Zhengfei, has also publicly disclosed that Hongmeng will first be used in connected cars, watches, and smart 8K large screens, which is enough to show the importance of smart cockpits to Huawei.
Huawei mainly empowers the digital cockpit through “Kirin + Hongmeng OS + HiCar”. In Huawei’s view, the technology and experience accumulated on mobile terminals can improve the smart car user experience. From the feedback of some car companies, the cooperation priority of this capability is also higher than other capabilities. The purpose of entering cars such as BAT is nothing more than preempting car entrance.
“Huawei is now talking about overall solution cooperation, but if one of these capabilities is required, they will mainly promote smart cockpits.” A source from a car company revealed.
Huawei’s rotating CEO Xu Zhijun previously stated that the smart cockpit and other systems in the automotive field should be integrated with the current smart terminal industry chain and ecology. That is to bring the mobile phone experience to the car, and bring the hardware ecology and application ecology of the mobile phone into the smart cockpit.
According to a person familiar with the BU of Huawei, apart from Chery accidentally leaking the Hongmeng OS, Huawei has been testing smart connected car technology in Chinese cities such as Shanghai, Shenzhen and Wuxi, and has cooperated with FAW and many other companies. Automakers have signed a cooperation agreement to conduct Hongmeng OS testing.
“The next few years will be a key strategic turning period for Huawei ’s consumer business. According to Huawei ’s 1 + 8 + N strategic plan, after mobile phones, PADs, wearables, PCs, smart big screens, and VR, Huawei ’s next layout scenario will be cars, and HiCar’s landing is only starting at 5654. “The source said.
In terms of intelligent driving, Huawei MDC (on-board computing platform and intelligent driving subsystem solution) Also just obtained ISO 26262 from TüV Rheinland Functional safety management certification. This marks HuaThe relevant technologies and products have passed the vehicle-level certification, and mass production and commercial use will start soon.
It is worth mentioning that Huawei also built an L4-level full-stack intelligent driving solution based on this platform. (ADS) Designed based on Chinese road and traffic environment. Currently, Huawei has launched the MDC600 to support L4 level autonomous driving capabilities.
Finally is the smart car cloud, Huawei’s self-driving cloud service, also known as HUAWEI Octopus (Huawei Octopus) , it is Huawei The spire of the pyramid structure of the entire smart car networking solution. It, together with Huawei MDC and in-vehicle OS, form a car-cloud collaborative intelligent driving platform, which can effectively help car companies and developers to quickly develop autonomous driving applications and help autonomous driving to achieve rapid commercial implementation.
It is reported that Huawei’s self-driving cloud service has been commercially launched in Hunan Changsha Xiangjiang Intelligent Network Demonstration Zone and other projects, and provides services to ecological enterprises in the region.
It’s not hard to see that compared with the strategy proposed a year ago, Huawei’s automotive capability matrix has been formed today, and it meets the standards of car companies’ production capacity. The next thing is for car companies to verify.
Car companies’ concerns
On March 9th, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the “Recommended National Standards for” Automotive Driving Automation Classification “for public approval” and solicited opinions from the society. According to the announcement, autonomous vehicles will be divided into level 0 (emergency assistance) , level 1 (Some driving assistance) , Level 2 (Combined driving assistance) , Level 3 (Conditional Autonomous Driving) , Level 4 (Fully autonomous driving) A total of 6 different levels.
If the document is approved, China will officially have its own national standard for self-driving car classification, which will help all kinds of enterprises to conduct more targeted R & D and technology deployment, and promote the large-scale application of autonomous driving technology.
Smart cars entering the national top-level development plan is undoubtedly a good thing, but after all, unlike other electronic devices such as smart phones, the manufacture of smart cars involves many links. For any car company and technology company that enters the field, It will be a difficult process.
Industry generally believes that R & D investment in autonomous driving starts at billions of dollars, and its implementation cycle is as long as 10 years or more. Coupled with the expertise in the industry, “destined” autonomous vehicles are not easy for a single player Fun.
In recent years, autonomous driving has become an important label for many car companies to build smart cars. At present, Tesla can achieve the L3 level, and most of the domestically produced are in the L2 and L2.5 levels, so overall it is still exploring at the stage of assisted driving.
Automated driving is inseparable from high-speed computing. Huawei may not have the “car” genes, but Huawei must have the ability to build high-performance computing hardware. Take intelligent driving as an example. In Huawei ’s view, an excellent intelligent driving computing platform should be the deep integration of elements such as chips, hardware platforms, operating systems, and tool chains. The aforementioned Huawei MDC and ADS have the capabilities in the industry. Count one by two.
But this ability can’t rule out the worries in the car companies’ minds. The main concern is safety.
Google’s Waymo is currently recognized as the best company in the industry for autonomous driving. Aside from technology, its road test has traveled 20 million miles. The industry’s highest key is that no major accidents have occurred and its safety has been affected by vehicles. Enterprises are highly recognized.
A person in charge of an Internet car product said that Huawei has brought many technologies that car companies do not have, but smart car safety is the first foundation, and Huawei also lacks effective safety test data. “Huawei started to talk to us about cooperation last year, but due to safety concerns such as autonomous driving, it has since disappeared.” He said.
At present, Huawei’s MDC intelligent driving platform has established cooperation with 18 mainstream car companies and Tier 1 suppliers, covering applications such as passenger cars, commercial vehicles, and special operation vehicles. But no one knows at what stage the cooperation has progressed, and Huawei has not announced. A staff member of BAIC New Energy said that this was a trade secret and could not be notified at this time.
Everything related to safety, car companies have expressed concerns about Huawei, such as smart electric.
Many people are not clear about Huawei’s accumulation on Sanden. In fact, it is a technical extension of existing mature products based on Huawei’s network energy product line. As we all know, the core of automotive electrification is the conversion and management of electrical energy, including rectification, energy storage, and inverters, which are inseparable from Huawei’s accumulation in communications power, photovoltaic inverters, and energy storage management.
But the security level of communication power and car power does not seem to be on the same level.
Another concern for car companies is in data control and operation, which is the issue of smart car entry for BAT.
For the new car-building forces, its core advantage, and even its ability to survive in the future, is how to continuously launch human-vehicle fusion services around user habits, then absolute control of data is required. If access to Huawei products, how to distribute the data will be a problem.
Alibaba’s AliOS, which is not too short of development time, currently has nearly a million Internet cars equipped with Zebra systems on the road. However, due to Ali’s strong control over user data, its partner car companies have begun to try new “Single Flight” launched its own car OS.
The above-mentioned Internet car people said that in the Internet industry, the importance of basic data is undoubted. Whoever can get first-hand data can seize the opportunity in the industry competition. For the cars built by Internet genes like Weilai and Xiaopeng, the core competence in the future will be the mining of user data.
It will take some time to land
It took Huawei eight years to achieve the second place in the world for smartphones. For smart cars, Huawei’s biggest shortcoming now is “time.”
Compared with the new forces of car manufacturing, the intelligent transformation of traditional car companies requires technological forces to participate in innovation and change. This may be an opportunity for Huawei.
Through decades of development of traditional car companies, the number of car models on the market and the annual sales of cars are very large. Once safety problems occur, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of cars will be recalled. Car companies have caused huge losses in terms of reputation and funding.
So, traditional car companies are very conservative when it comes to safety-related matters, let alone intelligence. This is also an important reason why traditional car companies are far behind the new forces of car manufacturing.
Although some major manufacturers have started self-research, for example, Volkswagen took the lead in taking steps last year, announced the establishment of Car.Software software research and development department, and started to develop Volkswagen vw.OS. But rebuilding a brand new set of in-vehicle OS is also unrealistic for traditional car companies. The span is too large, and the cycle is long, which is not what they are good at.
Under this situation, they are more willing to test intelligent water with Huawei, which has been cooperating with on-board modules, because they technically trust Huawei, especially for domestic car companies, they also need a localized Tire1 . “Frankly from another traditional car company.
This can be seen from Huawei’s vehicle partners, almost all of which are BAIC, SAIC, FAW, Changan, Dongfeng, Guangzhou Automobile, Great Wall and other traditional car companies. In this way, Chery’s “accidental leak” is not unexpected.
In fact, as early as last August, Geely Automobile expressed its favor to Hongmeng System. When the Geely Boyue Pro is about to be released, Geely said on the poster: “Welcome Hongmeng to open a new era of Chinese brands’ wisdom.”
In January of this year, at the site of the 2020 China 5G Smart Car Summit, Lu Xiaofeng, general manager of Huawei’s V2X product line, revealed that Huawei is working with SAIC Group on 5G smart cockpit technology.
From the perspective of industry analysis, the car company that has fully implemented Huawei’s smart car network contact solution is likely to be BAIC New Energy. Because of the past year, the two sides have been in contact quite frequently.
BAIC New Energy and Huawei signed cooperation agreements in the fields of cloud computing, connected cars, energy internet, industrial Internet of things, and information security. They also jointly established the “1873 Davidson Innovation Lab” to jointly develop the next-generation intelligent network-connected electric vehicle technology, and jointly launched the world’s first commercial 5G platform-IMC architecture to realize 5G technology and artificial intelligence. Advanced fusion.
Unconfirmed news shows that Huawei has at least contacted SAIC Systems with BAIC New Energy and is already a designated supplier.
In addition, in January of this year, former General Manager of BAIC New Energy Zheng Gang officially joined Huawei as Chief Strategy Officer of Huawei Intelligent Vehicle Solutions BU. This will undoubtedly increase the landing of products from Huawei and BAIC New Energy. In this regard, Huawei Car BU declined to comment.
According to the “China’s Connected Car Industry Market Prospects and Investment Research Report 2020” released by the China Industrial Research Institute, the scale of China’s connected car industry market will exceed 200 billion yuan by 2020. In the intelligent networkIn terms of connected cars: According to Miao Wei, Minister of Industry and Information Technology of China, by 2020, the market size of China’s intelligent connected cars can reach more than 100 billion yuan. According to forecasts, intelligent connected cars will usher in rapid development for 20 years. By 2035, they will account for about 25% of the global new car market.
To some extent, smart cars are just getting started. Luo Zhongsheng, a partner of Rongyi Capital Investment, said that it is not important at present whether it can be landed. Objectively speaking, the automobile industry is now in the stage of mobile phone development from function to smart hands, which requires a process.
“The most important thing for Huawei is to propose a complete and systematic framework for the future development of smart cars, which is a good boost for the development of domestic smart cars.”
Analysts in the industry pointed out that, looking at the current automotive market, traditional car companies are facing operational pressures, and intelligent turn is slow; new forces for car construction have difficulty financing and it is difficult to build an ecology. It can be said that the entire market is in a game, and this process will continue for some time.
For Huawei, through 7 years of exploration, Huawei has basically grasped the overall architecture and key technologies of future smart cars. In their own words, except for the chassis, four wheels, housing and seats, the rest are Huawei-owned technologies.
Hongmeng got into the car, HiCar entered mass production, on-board modules mature, autonomous driving passed authoritative verification and so on. It can be said that Huawei is ready to “get in the car”.
This article is from the public number: Tencent Technology (ID: qqtech) , author: Xiaofeng