On December 28, Xiaomi Auto held its first technology conference in Beijing.
During the period, Lei Jun, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi, pointed out that the goal of Xiaomi Auto is to be comparable to Porsche and Tesla, to create the dream car of the new era, and strive to become the world's top five car manufacturers through 15 to 20 years of efforts.
Xiaomi car.
At the same time, Lei Jun also systematically introduced a number of core technologies of Xiaomi Auto at the press conference, including self-developed motors, 800V silicon carbide high-voltage platform, CTB integrated battery technology, etc.
Among them, in the field of intelligence, which has attracted much attention, Lei Jun pointed out that the goal of Xiaomi's intelligent driving is to adhere to the "first camp in the industry in 2024", and strive to open the pilot assistance NOA function in 100 cities by the end of next year, covering major cities across the country.
In terms of intelligent cockpit, the main attraction is the realization of surging OS on the car, making Xiaomi's "people, cars and home full ecology" strategy officially closed-loop.
With the release of this series of technologies, especially at the press conference, Lei Jun even used the first one many times.
First, the most, the only and other extreme terms, to reflect the leading edge of related technologies, the ** issue about Xiaomi Su7 has once again triggered a wide range of discussions. In this regard, Lei Jun also once again emphasized that the Xiaomi SU7 pricing will be a bit expensive.
Don't shout 90,000 anymore (referring to the Xiaomi Su7 pricing), it's impossible!Lei Jun further said, "Anyone with this kind of performance and configuration will have more than 400,000!."So 140,009 doesn't need to talk about it anymore, but we still have to respect technology!”
Despite this, in the smart electric vehicle market, whether it is a radical slogan or a new technology concept, it has actually been common in the past two years, so can Xiaomi Auto, as a new army on the track, bring a different answer to the market in this involution?
Entering the first echelon of intelligent driving, why does Xiaomi?
Regarding intelligent driving, as early as August last year, Lei Jun proposed that Xiaomi's goal is to "enter the first camp of the industry in 2024". At this press conference, Lei Jun once again reaffirmed this goal, to this end, Xiaomi will increase the initial investment in the field of autonomous driving from 3.3 billion yuan to 4.7 billion yuan, and set up a team of more than 1,000 people, put into more than 200 test vehicles, and currently test more than 10 million kilometers.
Judging from the input, it can be said that Xiaomi is not ambiguous at all.
But this is not difficult to understand, after all, there are hundreds of billions of cash reserves as a strong backing. What's more, in the new round of automotive industry reform, electrification is the first half, intelligence is the second half, and the core of intelligence is intelligent driving. Looking at the market, the current major smart electric vehicle brands are all investing heavily in intelligent driving, and strive to gain a greater say in the future market competition, especially Tesla, which Xiaomi Auto wants to be "comparable".
But a fact is that in the past few years, the car companies that have shouted to benchmark Tesla can be described as one after another, what confidence does Xiaomi Auto have?
Xiaomi car.
As far as the intelligent driving system is concerned, according to the information released by Lei Jun, Xiaomi Auto also chose the "best partner" of Nvidia Orin chip + LiDAR, more specifically, 2 Nvidia Orin chips, to achieve 508TOPS, comprehensive computing power, with 1 Hesai's 128-line lidar, 11 high-definition cameras, 3 millimeter-wave radars and 12 ultrasonic radars.
On this basis, Xiaomi Zhijia adopts the latest generation of "BEV+Transformer+Occupy Network" underlying algorithm in terms of perception algorithm, and fully integrates large model technology. At this press conference, Xiaomi Auto also brought three technological innovations in perception.
First, zoom BEV technology, as the name suggests, can zoom like the human eye and dynamically adjust the sensing range, so that you can see farther in high-speed scenes, wider in urban scenes, and more clearly when parking in the basement.
Xiaomi car.
For example, in the parking lot environment, according to Lei Jun, the BEV algorithm can divide the entire parking lot into millions of grids, so as to achieve a minimum parking recognition accuracy of 5cm. In the urban scene, the farthest recognition range can reach 160m, and it supports two-way 10-lane unprotected left turns.
Xiaomi car.
Second, super-resolution occupancy network technology. Traditional occupancy networks rely on natural language models to describe obstacles as squares. In order to further improve the perception accuracy and accurately identify special-shaped obstacles, Xiaomi has added a super-resolution vector algorithm to the occupation network technology, which directly simulates all visible objects seen on the road surface into three-dimensional objects with continuous curved surfaces to improve the recognition accuracy and achieve an accuracy of less than 01m。
Not only that, Xiaomi Smart Drive has also added one-click noise reduction to the algorithm, which is used to eliminate the impact of rain and snow on the occupied network, effectively improving the recognition accuracy of the entire system.
Third, road model technology. The technology supports the generation of road topology in real time without relying on high-precision maps, and can also judge road surface conditions in real time like a human. For example, the road ahead is being repaired, and intelligent guidance lines can be generated in real time to achieve a smooth detour.
At this press conference, Xiaomi Auto also showed several actual road tests of the intelligent driving system**. According to the ** content, in the urban scene of the evening rush hour, the pilot assisted driving of Xiaomi cars can realize 15 major scene applications such as bypassing vehicles and pedestrians occupying the road, avoiding large vehicles, passing through the road, cautious passage at obstacle intersections, automatic lane change overtaking, and avoiding vehicles with congestion, and realize 0 takeover throughout the whole process.
In the parking scenario, Xiaomi's intelligent driving system has successfully realized unmanned parking in a 7-story three-dimensional parking building, including automatic passing through turnstiles, rotating curves, reversing yield, U-turns, etc., and based on the application of end-to-end perception and decision-making models, the vehicle is accurately parked into the surrounding area with only 005m distance mechanical storage location.
Judging from the known information, whether it is hardware configuration or algorithm, Xiaomi's intelligent driving system is not disappointing, but it is not brilliant either. For example, dual orin and lidar have almost become the standard configuration of the head new forces, and the "BEV+Transformer" perception paradigm has been widely recognized by the industry under the drive of Tesla, causing many domestic players to actively follow up, including Huawei, Li Auto, Xiaopeng Motors and other major players are actively deploying.
Xiaomi car.
Of course, Lei Jun also pointed out that the above technologies are only part of Xiaomi's full-stack self-developed intelligent driving territory. According to the Xiaomi Pilot technology framework announced on site, it also includes an embodied intelligence engine, real-time environment modeling, behavioral ** model, spatiotemporal joint decision-making, self-supervised data engine, shadow mode, etc., and more technologies will continue to be released later.
The surging OS is on the car to create a "full ecology of people, cars and homes".
In addition to intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit is also one of the focuses of this technology conference.
In terms of smart cockpit, the Xiaomi Su7 is equipped with 161-inch 3K ultra-clear central control screen, large 56-inch HUD, flip instrument screen, and at the same time, it can also be connected to the Xiaomi PAD ecological expansion screen to create a five-screen linkage cockpit experience.
Xiaomi car.
In order to realize rich cockpit applications, Xiaomi SU7 has also realized the surging OS on the car, and Xiaomi has officially realized the full ecological closed loop of people, cars and homes.
According to Lei Jun, based on the surging OS, Xiaomi Su7 can achieve an immersive interactive experience consistent with the phablet on the car machine, such as 3D digital car models that change with the environment, multi-task flexible frames, support for adjusting window size, etc.
Xiaomi car.
For the interconnection of the car and the machine, The Paper OS also supports the non-inductive connection between the mobile phone and the car machine, realizing the screen sharing between the mobile phone and the car machine, the seamless flow of navigation, the flow of meetings, the seamless boarding of the Xiaomi tablet application ecology, and the pin of the mobile phone application to the car.
Xiaomi car.
Even the application expansion in the screen can no longer meet the requirements of Xiaomi cars,Su7It also supports the expansion of hardware applications through PIN points。
The Surging OS supports the huge Xiaomi hardware ecosystem on the car, including more than 1,000 Mijia devices, and supports continuous application expansion. Xiaomi Su7Pin point expansion interface has been reserved around the large central control screen and the storage space of the center console, and even the seat backs and other positions also support hardware expansion, plug and play.
Not only that, Xiaomi also announced that it will open the Carlot ecosystem to global ecological developers, not only providing unified standardized interfaces, rich communication standard protocols, but also comprehensive empowerment of the underlying system.
In addition to the surging OS-based car-machine interconnection, for Apple mobile phone users, Xiaomi cars not only fully support wireless CarPlay car, but also can realize video and audio streaming based on AirPlay, and even support iPad rear row expansion to control air conditioning, ** and seats.
Xiaomi car.
Supporting the above rich applications is Qualcomm's *** cockpit chip Snapdragon 8295, which has a CPU computing power of up to 230K DMIPS, GPU performance has been improved by 2 times compared with the previous generation of 8155, 3D rendering performance has been increased by 3 times, and AI computing power has been greatly increased from 4TOPS to 30TOPS. Therefore, Qualcomm 8295 is becoming a new benchmark for the intelligent cockpit chip track, causing many new cars to compete for it.
In addition to the Xiaomi SU7, many models such as the Jiyue 01, Zeekrypton 001 FR, Zeekrypton 007, Geely Galaxy E8 and the new Mercedes-Benz E-Class are also equipped with this chip.
Among them, ZEEKR 007 has been officially launched on December 27, with a price of 2099-29.990,000 yuan. In addition to the cockpit, the car is equipped with 8295 chips, and the intelligent driving is also equipped with 2 NVIDIA Orin chips, realizing 508TOPS computing power, and equipped with 1 Suteng Juchuang LiDAR, 12 high-definition cameras, 5 millimeter-wave radars and 12 ultrasonic radars, which are very likely to compete directly with Xiaomi SU7 in the future.
Geely Galaxy E8 has also opened global pre-sales, the car is reported to also be equipped with lidar, which is speculated to also be equipped with intelligent high-end assisted driving systems, the new car provides a total of 5 different configurations, the pre-sale price is 18Starting at 80,000 yuan, I have to say that it is also very attractive.
Next, it depends on whether Xiaomi Su7 can give a more competitive **.
According to Lei Jun, Xiaomi cars are already in small-scale mass production, but it will need to wait a few more months and conduct a lot of verification before it can be officially released. Considering the fierce involution of the current smart electric vehicle market, the road ahead for Xiaomi cars may still be difficult.