The independence of Huawei's car BU is the first bullet fired by the first-class division of labor model to full-stack self-development.
2023 is coming to an end, but China's new energy vehicle market is not calm, and a future "behemoth" is gradually taking shape.
On November 25, Changan Automobile signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Investment Cooperation with Huawei Technologies. After negotiation between the two parties, Huawei plans to establish a company engaged in the research and development, design, production, sales and service of automotive intelligent systems and component solutions, and Changan Automobile intends to invest in the target company and carry out strategic cooperation, with a shareholding ratio of no more than 40%.
After receiving the support of Changan Automobile and China Ordnance Equipment Group, on November 28, at the Zhijie S7 and Huawei full-scene press conference, Yu Chengdong, executive director of Huawei and chairman of intelligent vehicle solution BU, "shouted from the air" and issued an invitation to Celis, Chery, JAC, and BAIC to open their shares, and threw an olive branch to China FAW, hoping that FAW Group could also join in.
On the same day, Sailis, which is most deeply bound to Huawei, urgently issued a statement on its official WeChat, saying that it welcomes Huawei to set up an independent company for automotive intelligent systems and component solutions with open equity, and said that it has been invited by the relevant parties and is actively discussing matters related to participation in investment and cooperation.
Three days later, on the evening of December 1, JAC Motors also announced that it would cooperate in product development, manufacturing, sales, service and other fields based on Huawei's intelligent vehicle solution, and strive to build a luxury intelligent networked electric vehicle.
So far, Huawei Chebu has taken an important step at the end of the year to break away from the group, move towards independent operation, and expand the circle of friends.
So, why did Huawei choose to "build cars", and why did it enter the new energy vehicle track in the form of cooperating with car companies and providing technology?And don't choose to build a car in person like Xiaomi?What are the visible difficulties on the way to Huawei's car manufacturing?
Huawei, why do you want to "build cars across borders"?
Looking back at the development process of Huawei's car BU and the evolution history of China's new energy vehicles, the relevant logic can be briefly glimpsed.
From 2016 to provide manufacturers with standardized parts to enter the car, to the launch of HI (Huawei inside), the intelligent selection mode for car companies to choose, and then to the car BU to take an important step towards independence, the choice of this way is not only Huawei is relying on its own technical strength to open up more growth space, the larger background is that China's automotive industry has entered the second half of the intelligent, car companies are still using the "backward" thinking to build cars, at this time, there is a person who wants to integrate the entire industry" Naturally, it is not surprising that Destiny is a company.
From the perspective of industrial process, since the popularization of automobiles, consumer demand for cars has actually experienced the era of joint venture cars and the process of electrification, and is currently evolving to the stage of intelligent penetration.
In this stage, the hard power that determines whether a car company can do or not is mostly reflected in the excellent manufacturing process, quality control, cost, three major parts, etc., on behalf of the enterprises are GAC, SAIC, Changan, etc., they have joint ventures with overseas manufacturers, continue to learn in production and sales, polish their own manufacturing technology and management experience, and create cost-effective and high-sales models with solid quality and controllable costs.
But on the day when fuel vehicles reached their peak, the technical research and development personnel in the electric vehicle industry have also completed the overcoming of many technical problems, including batteries, and gradually started the process of electrification.
After the transformation of the power system from oil to electricity, new energy vehicles are no longer confined to the cycle of electrification, and gradually move towards the second half of intelligent penetration.
But how easy is this iteration?
What we can see isAt present, the biggest problem facing China and even the world's giant car companies is the contradiction between the development model of traditional enterprises and the new demand for new manufacturing in the new era.
In the past, car companies focused on improving the versatility of traditional parts and systems, sharing design parameters, and modular sharing of production molds and auxiliary tools to achieve the purpose of reducing costs. In short, it's about creating a common platform for developing automotive hardware.
However, in the era of intelligence, the weight of new cars in intelligent driving and intelligent cockpit is too high. Taking NIO as an example, its vice president @白剑 nio Weibo posted about related costs, saying that the intelligent hardware it is responsible for roughly accounts for 20% of the cost of the vehicle, and after superimposing the value of intelligent software, the value of related intelligent products in the vehicle has accounted for a huge proportion.
With such a large proportion of intelligent products, it means that even if car companies come to the end of the road in the past, they will not be able to achieve real cost reduction and efficiency increase.
Source: Zhineng Automobile.
From the perspective of expenditure, so many car companies are currently spending money on the research and development of the platform is far from economical, but if the company does not keep up with the intelligent "trend", it will inevitably face the situation of being eliminated by the market, and the result of the scuffle under such a prisoner's dilemma is naturally the "collapse" of the profits of the entire automotive industry.
Source: Zhineng Automobile.
Driven by the combination of technical strength and cost investment, China's automotive intelligence era is destined to need a platform or enterprise that can act as a locomotive, and Huawei's internal "car-making faction" has also turned to this direction after being repeatedly ordered not to build cars in person. When talking about the new platform company established after the spin-off of Chebu, Yu Chengdong expressed the same intention: "We have always believed that China needs to build an open platform for electrification and intelligence with the participation of the automotive industry, an open platform with a 'locomotive'. ”
In addition to the "needs" of the industry, Huawei's experience gained from more than 20 years of deep cultivation of underlying technologies and consumer business has also provided different degrees of software and hardware support for car interconnection.
Among them, in the field of intelligent driving, Huawei ADS 2The 0 perceptual fusion scheme may be "far ahead" to some extent
In terms of data used to train intelligent driving, ADS 20. Huawei's AI training cluster is used to build a rich scenario library for training. As of September 2023, the average mileage of long-distance pilots has increased to 200km, an increase of 75% compared to 114km in April.
In terms of software, Huawei integrates Tesla's BEV bird's-eye perception capabilities to create the industry's first GOD 20 network (general obstacle detection, identification of special-shaped objects), can identify special-shaped objects outside the general obstacle whitelist, and can understand obstacles of different shapes and sizes.
At the same time, with RCR 20 (road topology inference network, matching navigation map and display network) cooperates with each other, using an algorithm architecture similar to Tesla's BEV+ occupation network, reducing the dependence on high-definition maps, covering more mapless scenarios to achieve function landing, and in the implementation of the advancement, according to a number of ** reports, Huawei may open all urban roads by the end of this year without map intelligent driving services.
In the hardware ecosystem, Huawei's LiDAR and millimeter-wave radar are leaders in the industry, and Huawei has also actively deployed related companies for smart car sensors through Hubble Investment, including Zong Hui Xinguang, Focuslight Technology, Nanjing Xinshi, etc.
It can be said that even if you look at the world, in the field of intelligent driving technology, except for Tesla, Xpeng, and Huawei are in the same echelon, other car companies are in a catch-up position.
In the construction of the intelligent cockpit, which is known as the twin stars of the automotive intelligent era together with intelligent driving, Huawei's experience accumulated over the years in consumer business has become the best basis for providing users with better services.
In fact, it can be seen from the name that the intelligent cockpit is an extension of the HarmonyOS operating system in the automotive field, and also inherits the advantages of the HarmonyOS ecosystem, which can be seamlessly shared with other HarmonyOS ecological hardware, making the travel experience of people and vehicles more convenient and intelligent, and providing users with a better interactive experience.
Hongmeng travel in the design of the car machine system,Obviously, it has made a change"Light travel and heavy experience",And the vast majority of car companies choose to divide the car machine interface into functional areas、Application area、Navigation、Vehicle** design,Hongmeng car machine integrates all these functions,Leave the wallpaper to the greatest extent,More similar to a tablet,And then achieve the purpose of giving users a better experience。
In addition, according to Founder**, super desktop, PC collaboration, parking space search and cross-floor parking space navigation, touch easy navigation, cockpit karaoke room, immersive games and other car machine functions are all manifestations of Huawei's empowered car machine system.
Source**: Wenjie official website, Founder ** Research Institute.
In terms of hardware, Huawei is also dedicated to HarmonyOS Zhixing 40 launched the latest generation of automotive-grade cockpit chip Kirin 9610A, which performs well in high performance and low power consumption, with a computing performance of up to 200,000 dmips, which is twice the computing power of the current mainstream automotive-grade chip Qualcomm 8155.
In addition to the related technologies in the second half of intelligence, Huawei is also a leader in the field of intelligent electric vehicles.
It's no surprise that Huawei's strong ICT capabilities and intelligent driving technology are far ahead, but Huawei's all-in-one drive system, DriveOne, is also surprisingly powerful in the field of electric drives.
According to Tram Sky statistics, taking the 150kW motor equipped with the newly released Zhijie S7 as an example, the curb weight of Huawei's DriveOne solution is less than 78kg, which is about 10% lighter than the industry average of 90kg. For electric vehicles, the weight reduction of the drive unit means a larger "thrust-to-weight ratio" and less encroachment on the passenger compartment space, which also allows the Zhijie S7 to accelerate to 3 at the fastest 000In 3 seconds, it is more than the pure electric million-level sports car Porsche Taycan 4S.
Source: Tram Sky.
At the same time, in order to improve the overall efficiency and stability, Huawei's self-developed SiC chip module effectively supports the assembly motor efficiency of 978%, compared with traditional silicon-based IGBT modules, it can significantly reduce power consumption and improve energy efficiencyIn addition to technologies such as intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, and intelligent electronic control, intelligent technologies such as intelligent vehicle cloud, intelligent optics, intelligent networking, and intelligent vehicle control have jointly built the core barriers of Huawei's car manufacturing, and have become the biggest support for Huawei's "cross-border car manufacturing" to empower car companies and join forces with manufacturing partners.
Huawei, why don't you "build a car"?
Since Huawei has such strong technical strength, wouldn't it be better for Xiaomi to use the wave of intelligence to cut into the channel of car manufacturing and have its own car manufacturing capabilities and strength?Such an idea is wonderful, but under the common "strangulation" and "lesson" of internal and external activities, Huawei is still firmly on the road of providing services for other car companies, and such a change starts with a document.
In October 2020, Huawei signed a resolution not to build cars, and it was originally until October this year, Ren Zhengfei's three-year "Huawei Decision not to make cars" was about to expire, and the expiration of this document also means that the ideological steel seal of not making cars is completely liberated.
It is precisely for this reason that a large number of Huawei elements began to appear in the announcement and release of Wenjie Automobile at the beginning of the year, whether it is Huawei AITO, Huawei Wenjie, Huawei Auto, or changing the chrysanthemum logo, they are all trying to highlight Huawei's participation.
But it was precisely when the outside world speculated whether Huawei would completely end up and "transform" China's automotive industry, Ren Zhengfei used Huawei's chairman authority on the day before April Fool's Day to renew this "Huawei Statement on Not Making Cars" for another 5 years, and resolutely reiterated Huawei's concept of not making cars, but only helping car companies build good cars.
At the same time, Xu Zhijun, the rotating chairman, severely criticized the cross-border behavior of some "car makers" within Huawei who actively went out to do their own brands. "Some individuals, departments or partners are abusing Huawei's brand, and in the process of investigating and dealing with these things, the brand that Huawei has built for more than 30 years will not be abused by anyone, Huawei does not make cars, and it does not have any brand of cars. ”
Obviously, Ren Zhengfei's angle is higher.
From Huawei's internal perspective, in recent years, foreign countries have imposed a series of sanctions on Huawei, including banning business dealings with Huawei and restricting Huawei's sales. These sanctions have limited Huawei's global business to a certain extent, and even had to break its wrist to survive, so Huawei needs to be more careful in choosing the direction of its investment.
At the same time, as a capital-intensive industry, the automobile manufacturing industry is a red sea industry that needs to "throw money and listen", from research and development, production to sales, there are too many links involved in car manufacturing, taking BYD, a leading domestic new energy vehicle company, as an example, its performance and net profit margin will increase in 2022, and the net profit margin of sales will only be 418%, and the gross profit margin level is only about 17%.
In contrast, Huawei's return on investment in the field of consumer electronics is simply too amazing, after all, no one wants to do a thankless, unprofitable business, especially for a company that has been "sanctioned" by the Western world.
And the most important thing is Huawei's initial positioning, when it first set foot in the automotive industry, Huawei gave its identity as an "enabler", even if it now says that it does not make cars, the head manufacturers are still unwilling to hand over the "soul" to cooperate with Huawei.
In addition to Huawei's internal considerations, the results of major Internet companies participating in car development are mostly unsatisfactory.
At present, except for companies such as Ali and Tencent that participate in car manufacturing through equity and a small part of technology development, Huawei generally has so many big manufacturers that are engaged in car manufacturing, Didi, and Xiaomi. And Didi has reached a deal with Geely and Xiaopeng, even if it still holds the relevant equity and technology in its hands, but the result is no different from the loss. And Xiaomi, which has not failed at present, is also because its products have not yet been listed, such a road that no major manufacturers have taken is really inconsistent with Huawei's tonality.
Over the past 30 years, Huawei's most important approach has been to think at the target, which is to aim before shooting, which is the core secret of Huawei's ability to span different industries in the past. At present, under the premise that there is no successful precedent for consumer electronics manufacturers to build cars across borders, there is no such target, and it is naturally impossible for Huawei to pull the trigger for building cars in the future.
At this point, Huawei's confidence to participate in the construction of cars and the reasons why it does not build cars have been roughly explained, but the reasonable choice is only the first step to success, even if it is the strongest Huawei in China, it is not smooth sailing on the road to making cars, and there are still many difficult problems in the specific cooperation with car companies.
Large groups are unwilling to give up their "souls", and Huawei's car manufacturing is far from a smooth road
The biggest advantage of Huawei's car manufacturing is that it can provide technical support and services for car companies during the transition from electrification to intelligence. But technology alone does not mean success. On the contrary, the biggest problem in Huawei's cooperation with car companies comes from this.
It stands to reason that if traditional car companies are not willing to be the "Nokia" in the new era, there is such an opportunity to obtain related technology at a lower price from the outside, and car companies should be unable to ask for it. However, for a large and established car company like SAIC, it is really cautious about introducing a company like Huawei that wants to gain greater authority and freedom in vehicle design and system development.
Thus, a debate began over the "soul" of car building.
At the 2020 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders, Chen Hong, Chairman of SAIC, said in response to investors' questions about whether it would cooperate with Huawei in autonomous driving: "This is like a company providing us with a total solution, so that it becomes the soul and SAIC becomes the body." For such a result, SAIC is unacceptable, and wants to take the soul into its own hands. ”
In fact, it is not difficult to understand this situation. For traditional car companies, in the era of intelligence, cooperation with technology companies with technological advantages often have such worries, worried that they will eventually become the foundry of technology companies. This is like a sword of Damocles hanging over the head of an established car company.
If Huawei chooses to build its own car and chooses not to share the most advanced technology, what will SAIC do?
In addition, Huawei said in 2002 that it would not make mobile phones, but in the end it became the most competitive mobile phone manufacturer in China. I also said before that I wouldn't make TVs,But I still launched"Huawei smart screen。 What if Huawei has in-depth cooperation with major automakers and grasps the lifeblood of car companies after the deadline for the non-car manufacturing document signed by Ren Zhengfei has passed, and then it will suddenly come to an end?
Outside SAIC, which represents the old automobile group, new power companies like Wei Xiaoli, who have entered the car manufacturing market with Internet thinking and cutting-edge technology, have given birth to their own tone and soul, and they will definitely not be able to become a company in Huawei's circle of friends that can frankly exchange technology.
It can be said that under the unwillingness to be controlled by others, established car companies will not cooperate with Huawei. After considering the background and technical strength, there is no possibility for the new forces to cooperate with Huawei. Under the influence of external sanctions, companies in the United States, Japan, Germany and South Korea cannot choose Huawei. As a result, only companies like Cialis, which are on the verge of the abyss and choose to "give it a go", are likely to give Huawei great freedom. Even if other car companies cooperate with Huawei, they will only assign a certain project to Huawei, and there is still a long, long way to go from a win-win situation.
However, in addition to the "soul" of car building, Huawei is not the only one that can play the role of helping car companies build cars.
As the first Internet company to enter the car-making market, although Jidu has changed its name to Jiyue, and the leading equity of related car-making companies has also been handed over to Geely, this only means that it has given up the possibility of leading car manufacturing, but has turned to cooperate with mature car companies and use its own intelligent capabilities to provide intelligent driving and other solutions.
Xiaomi, who is also from Huawei's consumer business, has chosen the road of asset-heavy car manufacturing, which can be more like a finger to complete the car, if the car machine is recognized by the market after its debut, it is not excluded that it will not choose the road of exporting "soul" to the outside world.
In this way, Huawei's car manufacturing is not a smooth road.
Write at the end
The independence of Huawei's car BU is not actually the result of a company with advanced technology and wishful thinking to choose to cross borders, but the inevitable situation in the second half of the competition in the world's most volatile automobile market. It can be said that around the independent cash flowThe path of China's intelligent driving car manufacturing has gone from independent development to more possible paths.
For car companies such as Changan and Cialis, through the lock-in at the equity level, it has ensured that there is room for continuous cooperation in platform companies. And now the biggest question is the turn of those SAIC who don't want to lose their souls but can't make souls to answer.
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