Huawei and Weilai, why did they start to squeeze toothpaste ?

Produced by丨Tiger Sniff Automobile Group.

The author is thoughtful.

Header picture丨Visual China.

Although the time has entered the end of 2023, the Chinese auto market has not stopped at all.

On Saturday night, Li Bin, the founder, chairman and CEO of NIO, unveiled the company's first "million-level" flagship model, the ET9, at the annual NIO Day, and announced that it will be delivered in the first quarter of 2025.

Compared with NIO's existing models, this "intelligent electric executive flagship" equipped with a large rear screen, a small table, a four-seat layout, a self-developed chip, three lidars and multiple self-developed modules has been defined as a "million-dollar luxury car" by Li Bin in previous rounds of warm-up. However, the "pre-sale price" of 800,000 yuan for this car has caused a wave of controversy. Some friends said that these configurations of NIO have long been carried on their cars.

Coincidentally. Just three days later, on December 26, Huawei's deeply empowered Wenjie brand also released its first flagship SUV completely designed, defined, and developed in-house - Wenjie M9. Although this full-size SUV has piled up the configuration and technology to the ceiling in the price range of 50-600,000 yuan, these features are not new in the Chinese auto market in 2023.

In fact, as smart car technology enters a bottleneck period, whether it is Huawei, which is strong, or NIO, which is the first to start among the new car-making forces, there is nothing too new in the cards in everyone's hands.

Innovation in deep waters, lack of user perception.

ET9, is it considered a luxury executive flagship car?”

For this issue, NIO's own narrative logic is not completely consistent with the evaluation of the outside world. In fact, if you pull the table alone, the advantages of ET9 are not obvious.

In terms of the most conspicuous size and appearance, the length, width and height of this car are 5325*2016*1620 mm, and the wheelbase is 3250 mm, which is similar to executive sedans such as Mercedes-Benz S-Class and BMW 7 Series. It is worth noting that the ET9 does not adopt the traditional body posture of the latter two sedans, but offers a fusion of elements of both a sedan and a coupe SUV.

In terms of luxury configuration, NIO defines the interior of ET9 as "mobile administrative space + efficient mobile office + business living room", focusing on the concept of a "multi-functional hall". Among them, the vehicle only provides a four-seat layout, and the front and rear rows run through the design of "Sky Island" and "Executive Bridge", dividing all seats into relatively independent spaces. The most exclusive second-row passengers have a folding executive table, a refrigerator and two screens hanging on the back of the front seats.

From the perspective of NIO, the foothold of ET9 as an "executive flagship" lies more in the technical level in addition to configuration. In this car, a number of NIO's "world-only" technologies will also be equipped. One of the most representative is "SKYRIDE·· Tianxing Intelligent Chassis System" and NIO's first 5nm automotive-grade intelligent driving chip, the Shenji NX9031.

Among them, the former integrates the three core hardware of steer-by-wire, rear-wheel steering and fully active suspension. At the same time, each shock absorber is highly integrated with an independent electro-hydraulic pump. The highly responsive brushless motor can process, calculate, and respond to information in less than 1 millisecond.

At the event site, Li Bin also conducted a test of the ET9 test car. On the road with continuous speed bumps, the ET9 with a champagne tower placed on the front hood can still drive smoothly without spilling the champagne.

It can also be regarded as a tribute to the former Japanese luxury - Lexus LS air.

The Shenji NX9031 will be combined with NIO's vehicle-wide operating system, SkyOS Tianshu, to realize cross-domain computing power sharing between intelligent driving and intelligent cockpit. It is speculated that the computing power of this chip will exceed the sum of 4 NVIDIA Orin X, which is 1016TOPS.

In addition, the ET9 is also equipped with a series of new technologies and configurations, including a high-voltage architecture of 900V in the whole domain, 4D millimeter-wave radar, and high-definition projection headlights. In this regard, some good deeds at the event site shouted the words "far ahead" to Li Bin. But the latter smiled and politely declined: "We don't shout such slogans".

However, there are also some people who are not interested in the advanced technology and configuration of ET9 mentioned above. At the same time as the press conference, a friend in the author's circle of friends who works at Hiphi Automobile posted a circle of friends, pointing out that the projection headlights, four-seat layout and executive table case owned by NIO ET9 were equipped on Hiphi X as early as 2021.

To put it bluntly, your "far ahead" is not much new in the eyes of competitors.

As for the ** with champagne tower on the front hood, Dongfeng Venucia, which has not heard from it for a long time, simply used its own VX6 to make a low-cost cos for the advertising film of Weilai. Although the acceleration is a little too obvious, it does not prevent Venucia from poking the lungs of Weilai and Li Bin with "150,000 expenses and 800,000 enjoyment".

So the question is, why did NIO's press conference not achieve the effect of leading the development of the industry as in the past?

Actually, the reason is very simple. On the one hand, when the innovation of smart cars enters the deep water area, the marginal effect of development is emerging. To put it bluntly, it is difficult to find the blank part of the value point that users can perceive from a car. Everyone is competing for the difference in experience, that is, the difference between 70 points and 80 points.

On the other hand, more than 80% of the information released by NIO to ET9 this time is concentrated in the technical link. More importantly, these technologies are more related to vehicle systems and underlying hardware-level innovations, and the improvement in product experience is not large.

For dual motors, everyone's perception is "the car is faster", but few people will think from the perspective of redundancy.

For example, Li Bin, founder, chairman and CEO of NIO, spent a large part of the event explaining the safety of the intelligent vehicle system built by NIO - seven layers of safety redundancy for the whole vehicle. These include drive, braking, steering, perception, computing, communication, and power distribution. From a technical point of view, these redundant designs obviously help to improve the system robustness (i.e., reliability and safety) of smart cars, but at the application level, it is difficult for ordinary consumers to perceive.

In fact, even Li Bin said in the face of the author's question that the security redundancy competition is in 99After 99%, who can do more 9.

It's like an airbag, and we hope you don't need it. Moreover, the vast majority of people will not need it for a lifetime. But you can't say that airbags are useless. Li Bin said. But he also admits that"It's a bit difficult to disseminate these technologies, and the threshold for understanding is indeed a bit high. ”

In this regard, Huawei and Wenjie, as latecomers, are of course much more calm. In particular, relying on years of accumulation in the fields of ICT technology, intelligent hardware, and intelligent new energy vehicles, Huawei has enough cards to achieve "blockbuster". But in the author's opinion, this time the question M9 is no less than "a stud" from another dimension.

To put it bluntly, after this time, there are not so many new things that Huawei can release in cars.

Essentially, Huawei is also squeezing toothpaste.

At the Wenjie M9 press conference on December 25, Huawei summarized the technical selling points of this car as "ten black technologies", including:

"HUAWEI XPIXEL megapixel smart projection headlights, HarmonyOS cockpit with full 10 screens, HUAWEI ARHUD, Huawei Immersive Head-Up Display System, HUAWEI ADS 20 high-end intelligent driving assistance system, ultra-dimensional safety system, Huawei Turing intelligent chassis, Huawei giant whale 800V high-voltage electric platform, new Xiaoyi intelligent assistant, Huawei Sound excellent series, super range extension platform".

Of course, compared with the above 4 cars, the hardware platform of the M9 will be more advanced, but the author speculates that in the short term, the relevant functions of these models will not open up the essential gap.

In the author's opinion, compared with the above, there is only the industry's first automotive-grade projection system on the M9 - the 32-inch lifting projection screen can be called "the only one in the world". But then I thought about it, this is essentially an "incremental innovation" on the basis of the large screen in the rear of the car, which is essentially a "supplement" rather than an "alternative" solution.

Let's see how much the whole family has lost this year."

*Large rear screen of the BMW 7 Series i7.

Of course, it should be pointed out that the author does not deny Huawei's innovation in the M9. In fact, compared with other vendors, Huawei has excellent performance beyond the industry level in terms of the experience of a single function and the interconnection of different functional modules.

For example, the M9 is the smart car that can support the most screens in the car so far. And the interaction logic between these screens is clear, and the experience is smooth, far beyond similar solutions. Not to mention that at the level of intelligent driving, Huawei's ADS 2The 0 intelligent driving system is the intelligent driving product with the highest available mileage in China.

Similarly, NIO is now ahead of its competitors in the fields of intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit and electric power. That's why the company is moving into the deep technology of smart cars. Leaving aside the obscure technology for many people, including this author, NIO is already one of the few automakers that has mass-produced urban smart driving solutions and vehicle-machine mobile phone interconnection products. Not to mention the brand's standard battery swap system, which has become the world's most convenient and efficient electric vehicle energy replenishment solution.

But the problem is that the new car functions released by the two companies have been mass-produced in single or partial quantities on all kinds of Chinese smart cars before. Compared with its own M5 and M7, and NIO ET9 compared with all its second-generation models, their respective improvements are bound to be significant. However, looking at the entire Chinese auto market, especially at the level of configuration that consumers can perceive, these two cars are not so "far ahead".

After all, even if Huawei can achieve a leading position in various advanced technologies through self-development, the implementation of related technologies is still limited by the current human resources in materials science, manufacturing capabilities, processing technology, and other technologies. No matter how advanced a company is, it can't produce products that are ahead of the times.

It's like the famous American economist Tyler Cowen wrote in The Great Stagnation?The reason why the current development of the US economy has stagnated is fundamentally because the "low-hanging fruits" have been picked, and the rest are the fruits that are placed in high places and are more difficult to pick. The current Chinese auto industry seems to have come to a similar situation to a certain extent.

Therefore, in the author's opinion, Huawei has equipped all the technologies it has developed for many years on the M9 in one go, even though it is conducive to adding bricks to the new M7 brand and further increasing sales. But this also, to a certain extent, "empty ammunition" for its own follow-up products.

Even if Huawei has a leading position for more than one year compared with most Chinese car companies in the technical level of electrification and intelligence, this company is not a company that transcends the laws of the industry and comes from the future. Therefore, the author speculates that Huawei's next series of smart car models may not have subversive changes in terms of function and experience compared with the M9.

The reason for the lack of automotive innovation lies in the car companies themselves.

Of course, in addition to being subject to the basic science and the development level of the first chain, the product itself is destined to be unable to achieve rapid iteration and innovation like smart phones and computers like smart hardware.

In the past, many people have discussed this issue around the dimensions of the long cycle, high investment and high safety standards of the automotive industry, and this article will not discuss it here.

However, in the author's opinion, the reason why the automobile industry is always facing innovation is actually in the car companies themselves. Because compared with Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, etc., more focus on the design and manufacture of systems and hardware platformsAutomotive companies need to define not only hardware, but also "applications".

For example, whether it is Apple, Huawei, or Xiaomi, although everyone will develop some functions and applications on mobile phones and computers, in the final analysis, they all provide a hardware platform for the application ecosystem of iOS, Android, or Windows. In fact, the vast majority of the communication, entertainment, office, social and even travel functions used by users on mobile phones and computers are not provided by hardware manufacturers.

Apple's software revenue does not mainly come from the sale of its own application software, but from the "Apple tax".

In fact, even with giant technology companies like Apple and Microsoft, which make both hardware and software, everyone chooses to focus on hardware and operating systems. Most technology companies choose to become a platform-based enterprise, by focusing on building hardware or system-level software that is good and reliable enough, and then form a service ecosystem on top of themselves.

In contrast, automotive companies are not only responsible for building the most complex consumer smart hardware in human history, the car, but also developing the applications on top of it. This includes not only new applications such as intelligent cockpits and intelligent driving, but also "traditional applications" that users can intuitively feel such as driving quality and interior comfort.

Not to mention, car companies also need to spend a lot of resources and energy to carry out car styling design, manufacturing, quality control, chain management and marketing. This is why traditional car companies often choose to cooperate with the best companies and outsource a lot of business, because the energy and resources are really insufficient.

Compared with smart hardware manufacturers, car companies will even outsource the design of some models.

A few years ago, the new car-making forces brought the understanding of technology and products of Internet and technology companies into the automotive industry, which obviously brought different product ideas in the early stage, which also reshaped China's auto industry to a large extent. But this is essentially a comparative advantage, not an absolute technological lead.

In fact, as car companies begin to pay attention to the research and development of intelligent cockpit and intelligent driving, the leading gap of new forces is being quickly caught up by traditional car companies.

This is why auto companies will invariably launch the first battle in 2023. Although there are reasons for the economic downturn and fierce competition, in the final analysis, everyone's products have fallen into homogenization.

To put it bluntly, when everyone's products are similar, the comparison may be who is more ruthless to themselves.

Written at the end: Seeing this, many readers may ask: What about the next technology and product leap in the smart car industry?

Frankly speaking, if the author can give an answer to this question, I'm afraid it will not be in the tiger sniffing code words. But from the perspective of problem solving ideas, there is a direction that is always determined.

That is, the birth and maturity of new technologies will completely subvert the experience and use mode of the car in the past. After all, no matter how high the level of intelligent driving, it is only to assist people to drive. Once the technical and legal barriers of L4 autonomous driving are resolved, then the automotive industry will inevitably usher in a new wave of explosion.

However, it also indicates the demise of the automobile industry as we know it.

Of course, if the flying car is mass-produced one day, it can also subvert the existing automobile industry to a certain extent. After all, who doesn't want a car that can fly?

From this point of view, it is obviously good for Mr. He Xiaopeng.

People who are changing and want to change the world are all on Tiger Sniff app