On December 25th, the 1000th day of Xiaomi's announcement of car manufacturing, Xiaomi Auto officially announced that it would hold a technical conference at 2 pm on December 28. Lei Jun, founder, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi Group, said on his personal Weibo account that the conference only released technology and not products.
The official announced that it would take 1,000 days to build a car, and Lei Jun responded that he was slow to build a car
On March 30, 2021, Xiaomi Group announced that the company's board of directors officially approved the establishment of the smart electric vehicle business. The company plans to establish a wholly-owned subsidiary to be responsible for the smart electric vehicle business. The initial investment is 10 billion yuan, and the investment is expected to be 10 billion US dollars in the next 10 years. Lei Jun, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi Group, will also serve as CEO of the smart electric vehicle business.
In August of the same year, Xiaomi wholly acquired Deepmotion Tech Limited (Deepmotion Technology), an autonomous driving company, to continuously expand its R&D capabilities in intelligent driving perception, positioning, planning, and control.
In August 2022, Xiaomi held an autumn new product launch conference, at which Lei Jun introduced the progress of Xiaomi since it announced that it had built a car for 500 days: Xiaomi autonomous driving will adopt full-stack self-developed algorithms to fully develop autonomous driving technology, and has set up an autonomous driving R&D team of 500 people, with an initial investment of 3.3 billion yuan in R&D expenses, with the goal of entering the first camp of the autonomous driving industry in 2024.
In October this year, Lei Jun announced that Xiaomi Auto is progressing smoothly and will be officially launched in the first half of 2024. Immediately after November 15, Xiaomi Auto landed on the new batch of new car declaration catalogs of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
According to the declaration information, the wheelbase of the new car is 3000mm, and it will use the ternary lithium battery of CATLIn terms of intelligent driving, the car will not be available as an optional LiDAR option. The declaration information also shows that the Xiaomi car brand is the Xiaomi brand, but the name of the declared enterprise is Beijing Automotive Group off-road vehicle, and the tail of the product adopts the words Beijing Xiaomi.
After that, there are more and more rumors about Xiaomi Auto: Xiaomi Auto is recruiting store managers, Xiaomi Auto SU7*** Xiaomi Auto press conference time ......And the official Xiaomi car information is relatively small.
On December 12, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) issued the "Road Motor Vehicle Manufacturers and Products" (Batch 377) and the "Catalogue of New Energy Vehicle Models Exempt from Vehicle Purchase Tax" (Batch 72). Two pure electric sedan models of Xiaomi brand appeared in the batch catalog of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
Today, on the 1000th day of Xiaomi's announcement of the car, the time of Xiaomi's automotive technology conference has finally been officially announced. After the official announcement of the time of the Xiaomi car technology conference, Lei Jun posted on Weibo again that in the past 1000 days, friends are very concerned about the progress of Xiaomi cars, and many people also ask me why Xiaomi cars are so slow. There is even a friend who said, "I heard that electric cars are easy to build, and a small company with two or three hundred people can produce a car in less than two years." ”
In this regard, Lei Jun said that it is indeed not difficult to save a car today. It is to find a car to benchmark the car, do reverse engineering, change the appearance, and it will be completed soon. But with 200 new cars released on the market every year today, do you need Xiaomi to save another one?"So, when the Xiaomi car team was first formed, we had a meeting together for three days and three nights. At this meeting, we all agreed: there is no shortcut to building a car, a century-old track. Adhere to positive development, start from the underlying core technology, invest tenfold, and build a good car. ”
Lei Jun once said that he was worried that no one would buy it, and he was even more afraid that he would come to buy it
Xiaomi Auto will be the last major entrepreneurial project in my life, and I am willing to bet on all the achievements and reputation I have accumulated in my life to fight for Mi Auto!Xiaomi will face this new journey with great dedication, great awe and lasting patience. In 2021, when the car was announced, Lei Jun said.
After more than two years, Lei Jun seems to have been very firm in building cars. On the evening of December 17, 2023, in the program "Face to Face", Lei Jun said, "The chairman of a car company told me that a smart electric car is actually a large mobile phone with four wheels. Of course, it's not accurate, but it shows that the two industries are highly integrated. In Lei Jun's view, entering the automotive industry is challenging, but overall the difficulty is manageable.
For the difficulty is controllable, Lei Jun elaborated, three years ago I still felt that it was very difficult to build a car, I had enough awe, after doing user research, set the principle of "keeping the right and surprising": fully respect the laws of the automotive industry, use mature technology in the industry, ensure that the first car is done well, and then innovate under this premise.
The second strategy is to invest tenfold, "For example, the average car company builds a car, about three or four hundred people, 10-2 billion R&D funds, and our first car invests 3,400 engineers, and the entire R&D investment exceeds 10 billion." Lei Jun said that he was doing it in a way that "ambition must be won".
Talking about the expectations after the car is listed, Lei Jun said: "The car is indeed very complicated, I am particularly worried that it will not be popular, everyone will not buy it, and I am more worried that if everyone comes to buy, it will take a year or two to wait, and it will definitely be scolded miserably, in fact, it is a variety of very anxious emotions." ”
When it comes to Xiaomi's advantages in making cars, Lei Jun also bluntly said: "There are many natural advantages, because the essence of today's smart electric vehicles is the integration of the consumer electronics industry, which is a big integration." ”
Previously, Xiaomi's CFO Lin Shiwei also said in an interview that Xiaomi has two advantages in making cars, the first is that Xiaomi cars have no financial pressure for the time being, and even the financing cost is lower;Second, Xiaomi's brand, offline stores, ** chain, engineers and other resources have a certain degree of reusability, which can save more time and costs.
As of press time, Xiaomi Auto WeChat*** Xiaomi Auto official Weibo, Xiaomi Auto Douyin official account, Xiaomi Auto Xiaohongshu account and Xiaomi Auto B station official account have all been opened. Among them, the official Weibo has more than 80,000 fans.
Mobile phone manufacturers are pouring into the car track
It is no longer a new thing for mobile phone manufacturers to build cars. Following Xiaomi's car-making, the veteran mobile phone manufacturer Xingji Meizu announced its car at its press conference on November 30.
After the integration of Meizu and Xingji Times, Meizu Group was acquired by Li Shufu, and its business direction also expanded from smartphones to XR (extended reality) and smart cars.
In the view of Shen Ziyu, chairman and CEO of Meizu Group, the car is currently changing from a traditional means of transportation to an interconnected mobile platform for intelligent travel, and the ecological model based on "hand-car interconnection" is emerging, and semiconductor technology, operating system, and software ecology are the core advantages and scarce capabilities. At this stage, the real potential players must be those technology companies that integrate mobile phones and automobiles, software and hardware, intelligent terminals and the Internet of Things.
According to the latest announced plan, in 2024, Meizu will launch a Meizu customized car, equipped with Meizu's Flyme Auto in-vehicle system and integrating Meizu's past resources in software, design, and interior. And the car has also become the main landing scene of its first AR smart glasses. In the first quarter of next year, Meizu will also launch the DreamCar co-creation program, where users can co-create personalized details such as the vehicle's coat painting, interior color matching, and Flyme Auto theme, and users can participate in customization. Meizu Custom Cars will be combined with a range of Geely Auto Group's manufacturing capabilities.
Meizu, which is backed by Geely Group, has made certain achievements in the automobile track. According to the first financial report, in October this year, Geely sold 18070,000 units, of which 6 were new energy sales210,000 units, equipped with Meizu's intelligent cockpit system, the Lynk & Co 08 sold more than 1 in 54 days after it was launched20,000 units.
Instead of directly building cars, Huawei is deeply involved in cooperation with car companies as a leading businessman. The cooperation is divided into parts**, HI (Huaweiinside)** mode that provides full-stack intelligent solutions, and smart car (Hongmeng Smart Travel) mode. The existing brands of the smart car model include Wenjie in cooperation with Celis, Zhijie in cooperation with Chery, etc., and are constantly expanding the "circle of friends" of smart cars.
On November 26, Huawei and Changan Automobile both officially announced that Huawei and Changan Automobile signed a "Memorandum of Investment Cooperation" in Shenzhen, and after negotiation, Huawei plans to establish a new company to focus on the R&D, production, sales and service of intelligent driving systems and incremental components of intelligent connected vehicles. Huawei plans to integrate the core technologies and resources of the intelligent vehicle solution business into the new company, and Changan Automobile and related parties will be interested in investing in the company.
Huawei is committed to not building cars, but leveraging its ICT technology advantages and marketing capabilities to help car companies build and sell cars. We will continue to fulfill our commitments to our customers and partners to jointly promote the rise of the automotive industry. Huawei's rotating chairman Xu Zhijun reiterated.
Hua Xiaomei" has poured into the car track, and the new car-making force "Wei Xiaoli" is not idle: last Saturday, at the event day with the theme of "A New Journey Up" by Weilai, Weilai officially released the intelligent electric executive flagship car - ET9 to open reservations, with a pre-sale of 800,000 yuan**, and will be delivered in the first quarter of 2025;Li Auto established a sales and service company in SuzhouXpeng Motors announced that it will discontinue production of the G3 model ...... this year
Musk previously said that it would be an interesting competition if Xiaomi joined the EV market. Nowadays, in addition to the old car manufacturers and new car manufacturers, "Hua Xiaomei" mobile phone manufacturers are also involved, and the competition may only become more and more fierce.
Synthesized from CBN, Jiemian News, China Entrepreneur Magazine, etc.