60 minutes was the final speech of Li Bin on NIO Day. The PPT prepared by the team for him has been repeatedly revised, and obscure technologies such as the global operating system of the whole vehicle and the autonomous driving chip have only been retained for 1-2 pages of slides.
Even though the communications team was "worried that everyone would not be able to digest it" and had given the executives a preventive shot, the nearly 10,000 people present still had difficulty digesting such a dense output of information.
The day before NIO Day, bloggers who signed a 1 million non-disclosure agreement only dared to leave a few words about ET9 on Moments or Weibo, and everyone was anxiously waiting for the ban to be lifted.
About two weeks ago, a group of KOL KOCs were invited to shoot the ET9, and when they saw this flagship model with a length of 5.3 meters, they were all surprised when NIO quietly built a car.
The muscles exposed on the ET9, such as the intelligent wire-controlled chassis, the global 900V high-voltage architecture, and the self-developed intelligent driving chip, all come from the latest generation of platforms, and many technologies have been approved as early as three years ago.
The latest generation of the platform is a highly integrated library of cutting-edge technologies that shake the industry. For the research and development of the platform, Li Bin split the organizational structure of the three major blocks of intelligence, electric and automobile into dozens of subdivided horizontal organizational structures.
The development of the new platform has also allowed NIO to change the original department-based work system into a team mechanism. That is, experts from various fields are dispatched to form a team to overcome key technologies such as vehicle operating systems, autonomous driving chips, and intelligent wire-controlled chassis.
After the end of NIO Day, Leifeng.com's "New Intelligent Driving" had a dialogue with Bai Jian, vice president of Weilai hardware, and Huang Junjun, head of digital architecture of Weilai.
The new intelligent driving understands that NIO's intelligent driving chip team was established in 2021, and the current team size has exceeded 600 people, and NIO's chip team belongs to the intelligent hardware department, which involves the research and development of self-developed autonomous driving chips, domain controllers, and in-car gateways.
Wei's self-developed chip can be divided into two products, one is the LiDAR main control chip "Yang Ji", which has been mass-produced, which was officially released at the Weilai Technology Day on September 21 this year.
Yang Ji uses an 8-core 64-bit processor, plus an 8-channel 9-bit ADC, and a sampling rate of 1GHz. Li Bin said in the release that "Yang Jian" can reduce the cost of Weilai bicycle's lidar by "a few hundred yuan", and the R&D cost can be recovered in about a year.
Another product is NIO Day, the first self-developed intelligent driving chip released by NIO - Shenji NX9031. According to NIO, this is a smart driving chip manufactured using a 5nm automotive specification process, with more than 50 billion transistors, which can achieve the performance of four current flagship intelligent driving chips in the industry.
It is reported that the core technologies of Shenji NX9031's inference acceleration unit NPU and image signal processor ISP are all self-developed. At the beginning of the formation of the team, the decision was made to "develop each module as much as possible".
Why does NIO develop its own smart driving chip?
In Leifeng's view, on the one hand, it is to match the development of NIO's own intelligent driving algorithm and system, just like Tesla's self-developed intelligent driving chip for FSD, because the industry's general computing platform may not be able to meet all the needs of car companies. On the other hand, self-developed chips need to be counted as an economic account, and their R&D and manufacturing costs will decrease with the increase in ownership.
The following is part of the dialogue between Leifeng.com's "New Intelligent Driving" and Bai Jian:
Tianshu SkyOS is a global operating system for vehicles developed by NIO, and its debut was on September 22 at NIO Technology Day. At this NIO Day, Li Bin mentioned that there should be "a core and a soul", and the "soul" refers to Tianshu Skyos.
To put it simply, Tianshu SkyOS has built a 1+4+N technology cluster, covering multiple fields such as vehicle control, intelligent driving, cockpit, and mobile Internet. "1" refers to "SkyOS-H", which supports the needs of multi-OS virtualization in cockpit, intelligent driving, vehicle control and other domains, and "4" refers to four operating system kernels, namely SkyOS-L, SkyOS-M, SkyOS-R, and SkyOS-C.
SkyOS L corresponds to the "Connected Vehicles" domain, which involves functions such as vehicle-cloud interconnection and V2X
SkyOS M corresponds to the "vehicle control" domain, including body control, chassis control, power control, and power management. The operating system of the vehicle control domain has high requirements for security and reliability, and NIO has developed its own microkernel for this purpose
SkyOS R corresponds to the "Autonomous Driving" domain;SkyOS H corresponds to the "Digital Cockpit" domain.
On the night of NIO Day, the audience at the scene did not respond enthusiastically to the debut of the vehicle operating system technology. This incident made the Weilai communication team a little troubled, and Ma Lin, the head of brand communication of Weilai, also said on Weibo that "the operating system is not easy to talk about, and it is not easy to spread", and asked for advice.
What is the significance of NIO's self-developed vehicle operating system?
A number of industry insiders told Leifeng.com that China's automotive industry has long been plagued by "lack of core" and "lack of soul" (lack of ability to develop its own vehicle operating system). In recent years, the former has been initially relieved, while the latter is still slowly starting.
"Long-termist" and "idealism" are the two major labels that Li Bin and NIO are often labeled.
When asked if he is still an idealist, Li Bin stressed that he does not want to label NIO as idealistic, he said:
The first priority of an enterprise is to win the market competition, individuals can have idealism, and enterprises cannot have idealism. Enterprises can have long-termism, know their own resource boundaries, and also do not make short-term implementation plans, to face the market environment. ”
There is no doubt that NIO has always been a long-term player in technology research and development.
In the past three years, NIO has invested about 24.8 billion yuan in technology research and development, doubling in annual units. Of these, 45 in 2021900 million yuan, 108 in 2022400 million yuan, with a cumulative investment of about 9.4 billion yuan from Q1 to Q3 in 2023.
NIO's R&D talent density is also among the highest in the industry. Xinzhijia learned that in addition to the three electric and vehicle vehicles, the total number of NIO's five first-level departments, including autonomous driving, chips, intelligent hardware, and digital systems, is more than that of the three electric and vehicle engineering.
In addition to self-developed core technologies, NIO is also expanding its technology research and development footprint through investment and cooperation.
At the ** communication meeting on December 24, Li Bin said:
NIO Capital also has a lot of support for companies in the industrial chain, and has invested in more than 70 companies, some of which may not be directly related to us, but are useful in the industry. When CATL, China Innovation Airlines, and Xinwangda were listed, we all supported it, and we also invested in Rongbai Technology, and in terms of equipment, lidar, we invested in Tudatong, and there were many companies supported, and it was very important to promote the development of the industry. ”
According to Li Bin, the NIO Day in 2023 is just an "opening report" after the Science and Technology Day in September this year.
Starting in 2024, NIO will continue to export the latest generation of platform technology. When the ET9 is officially delivered in March 2025, NIO's 12 full-stack self-developed technologies will usher in the real big test - the test from the market.
(Leifeng.com's "New Intelligent Driving" will launch a series of articles on Weilai Technology's self-developed technology in the future, welcome to add the author's WeChat wlx charlene 0905, and edit GRU1993 to communicate.) ）