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Text by Node Auto, written by Dimensity.On November 25, Huawei and Changan Automobile threw a bombshell into the automotive industry - Huawei Auto BU was split and separated, and Changan Automobile became the first car company to participate in financing, with a shareholding ratio of no more than 40%. This means that Huawei's commercial exploration of car BU has entered the third stage. Initially, Huawei's idea was to become the next "Bosch", so on the one hand, it sells components to car companies, and on the other hand, it provides full-stack integrated solutions for car companies. However, neither of these models can make the car BU profitable, and the car BU is still Huawei's only loss-making business so far, and Huawei has invested a lot of money in the car BU, which has laid the groundwork for the launch of the smart selection model.
There are three basic points in the current changes in China's auto market, one is new energy, the second is intelligence, and the third is market structure and brand remodeling. Even if you don't count the electric drive and electronic control technologies that belong to Huawei Digital Power, Huawei's car BU can cover two of the three points. NopeIn addition to fighting products and channels, car companies may also have to fight for how much "content".
"Chinese content" refers to the proportion of Huawei in a certain model or project, including technology, services, and parts. To put it simply, how deeply Huawei is involved. This can be divided into two observation angles, the first angle is to what extent Huawei intends to participate, the second angle is the extent to which car companies intend to cooperate with Huawei, and the first question has a public and clear answer.
Huawei has prepared three modes of cooperation with car companies, namely the parts ** mode, the HI mode (Huawei inside), and the Hongmeng Zhixing (formerly Huawei Smart Selection mode), and Huawei's participation has deepened in turn. Among them, the parts ** mode is also called tire1 mode, in this mode, car companies mainly purchase software and hardware from the top suppliers, and Huawei does not provide a full set of solutions, which is the lowest content of the three models. At this time, Huawei's role is like Goertek, Sunny Optics and Goodix Technology in the mobile phone industry chain, and car companies are like Xiaomi and Vivo, with a high degree of freedom. This is where Huawei's TiRe1 mode is the same as the traditional TiRe1. 
The difference is that Huawei has been deeply involved in the ICT field for many years, and the components it provides to car companies are also concentrated in this field. For example, BYD Han's 5G module, Geely Geometry G6 and M6's intelligent cockpit system.
In addition, if you go beyond the scope of Huawei's car BU, Huawei can also provide electronic control and battery management technology for car companies (part of Huawei's digital energy business). In addition to not making batteries, Huawei's layout in the three electrics (battery, electric drive and electronic control) is almost the same as that of most car companies. Behind this is the reason why the market attaches importance to Huawei's entry into the automotive industry: Sanden is not on Huawei's main channel, but Huawei can still come up with high-level solutions.
In fact, electronic control and battery management technology are incidental to Huawei. In the nineties of the last century, Huawei began to focus on the power module in communication equipment, and later due to the impact of the bursting of the bubble in the global IT industry, the power supply division (Huawei Electric, renamed "Ansheng Electric" for the needs of the first company) was sold to Emerson. At that time, Huawei's electrical business was dominated by power supply, and it was already the leader in China, with a share of about 40% in the power supply market and about 50% and 60% in the monitoring equipment market.
With the end of the eight-year ban period, Huawei has established a network energy product line to re-enter the energy field. Subsequently, with the development of the photovoltaic and wind energy industries, Huawei once again became an industry giant through inverters and power equipment products.
That is to say,HuaweiThe electric drive and electronic control technology are the same as the HarmonyOS cockpit, which reuses the resources of Huawei's other businesses.
In this mode, Huawei provides full-stack intelligent vehicle solutions to car companies, including computing and communication architecture, intelligent cockpit, and intelligent driving.
Under this model, car companies have a certain degree of freedom to integrate and develop and personalize based on the underlying capabilities provided by Huawei. The car companies that have chosen the HI model include the BAIC Blue Valley sub-brand Jihu, the Changan Automobile sub-brand AVATAR, and the GAC Group sub-brand Aion.
The Smart Selection model is based on the Parts Model and the HI Model, and is the cooperation model with Huawei's deepest participation and the highest level of content. Under this model, in addition to providing components and solutions, Huawei will also participate in product definition, marketing services, and channel sales. At present, the car companies that choose the smart car model include BAIC, Celis, JAC, Chery, etc. The Smart mode is the best of the three. In November, the sales volume of Wenjie exceeded 180,000 units, and it is expected to exceed 20,000 units in December.
At the signing ceremony between the two parties, Changan Automobile dispatched Zhu Huarong, chairman and secretary of the Party Committee, Wang Jun, president of Changan Automobile, and many other senior executives, which shows that Changan Automobile attaches great importance to the independent car bu, and also shows that Huawei's gold content in the eyes of car companies is high enough. So, why do car companies attach so much importance to "Chinese content"?
At this time, we need to first define what "Chinese content" refers to for car companies. We have analyzed what Huawei can provide to car companies from Huawei's perspective, and also mentioned some cooperation cases, now we need to understand what car companies need and how to make appropriate choices from the perspective of car companies.
It can be seen from the content of the three cooperation modelsHuawei can provide car companies with two capabilities, one is technology, and the other is brand, marketing, and channels.
Let's take a look at Huawei's technology first, which can be divided into a structure and seven major sectors as a whole. Among them, the seven major sectors include intelligent networking, intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, intelligent electric, intelligent vehicle control, intelligent vehicle optics, and intelligent vehicle cloud services, and these are all built on a major architecture, which is the CCA architecture (Centralized Control Architecture).
In contrast to the CCA architecture, the traditional distributed EEA (Electrical and Electronic Architecture) architecture. Under the logic of distributed architecture, each assisted driving function needs to be equipped with separate sensors, computing units and software, which brings a large number of components for supporting development, which has the disadvantages of scattered resources, large workload and low efficiency. What's more,Since the data and computing power of each mission area are independent, it is difficult to aggregate, process and analyze the data of the vehicle, and it is difficult to achieve high-level autonomous drivingThe vehicle also doesn't process data quickly, resulting in a poor user experience.
At the same time, this architecture also makes it difficult for Tier1 and OEMs to upgrade software OTA, and it is difficult to improve vehicle performance and functions, which makes the vehicle and software mismatched, and also leads to poor user experience.
The advanced thing about the CCA architecture is that it "builds a car" according to the logic of the computer, which solves these drawbacks.
The first is that the software can be reused in the hands of different models and different car companies, such as the Hongmeng system is equipped with Wenjie, AVATR and Zhijie, which is the same logic as between Windows and PC manufacturers. The second is that the hardware can be upgraded. If a car uses the CCA architecture, the performance of sensors such as lidar and millimeter-wave radar needs to be upgraded, and it can be plug-and-play, just like changing the graphics card and memory for a PC.
Finally, there is cost savings. According to Huawei's estimates, if a 300,000-yuan car adopts the CCA architecture, it can reduce the number of ECUs by 26%, the length of the wiring harness by 17%, the cost of the wiring harness by 19%, and the weight by about 7 kilograms.
Yu Chengdong once said that Huawei wants to be Bosch in the era of intelligent cars, and this big architecture and seven sections mean that Huawei has surpassed "Bosch" to some extent. This is a sweet annoyance for car companies.
On the one hand,The cases of Wenjie and Zhijie show that car companies choosing Huawei's smart selection mode are equivalent to getting tickets to enter the smart car competition, and it is extremely difficult to get tickets on their own。Even the public will have to suffer from deflated, and ultimately with the help of Chinese companies.
On the other hand, the "soul theory" is a factor that car companies have to consider. Not to mention who owns the underlying data, Tesla has made autonomous driving a sustainable business, with an annual revenue of more than $3 billion, which is Huawei's strength and one of the selling points of smart cars
At present, Huawei hopes to take the question world as a benchmark and spread the hero post widely, and the results of the question world are also very attractive. According to Yu Chengdong, after the independence of Chebu, not only cooperated with Changan Automobile, but also cooperated with Huawei's smart car, Celis, Chery, JAC, and BAIC also received invitations to open equity. "We welcome China's powerful car manufacturers, such as FAW, to participate in the joint construction and joint creation of the most advanced and ultimate intelligent vehicle solution products," Yu Chengdong said.
When node Auto visited the Huawei store in Tongzhou Wanda Plaza, Beijing, he saw that there was a new M7 and a M5 in the store, and the number of mobile phones and cars was almost five or five points. As of May this year, Huawei has established more than 60,000 service retail stores and counters, and although these channels cannot all be used for smart car sales, they can also help increase the number of smart cars. As for the brand, Node Auto randomly chatted with a few interested customers on the spot, and they all mentioned their recognition of Huawei technology and brand.
However, in the final analysis, the smart selection model is only suitable for some car companies, and some car companies are destined to choose to do their own strategies. So we will see that BYD's intelligent driving ability is not outstanding, but it will insist on doing it itself, and Geely Automobile will also invest in shares everywhere in the world and gain advantages by integrating resources.