Author |Turbo Cow.
The M7 is on fire! Since its launch in September last year, it has delivered more than 100,000 units, and in January this year, it won the first place in new energy SUV sales, and its sales soared to 30,000 units that month. Under its leadership, Wenjie has been beating the ideal for two consecutive months and has become the number one brother of the new forces.
The popularity of the M7, Huawei ADS20 is undoubtedly the biggest booster, and the same applies to the Wenjie M9 that has just been delivered, and the 50,000 "Dading" in 62 days on the market is unabashedly showing off.
In addition to BYD, Geely, and SAIC, among the traditional car companies, they are unwilling to hand over their "souls", and several other major group car companies are all on the big ship of Huawei, and each of them wants to seize the track of smart trams.
The prophecy of "competitive intelligence in the second half" seems to be coming true.
While domestic smart trams are heating up rapidly, Apple in the Western Hemisphere announced that it would stop its decade-long car-building plan, which directly wasted the billions of dollars invested in L4. A giant as strong as Apple has chosen to withdraw from the AI tram track, which may be a warning sign.
"Overheated" smart cars
The main reason why Apple stopped building cars and announced that it was "focusing on the AI track" was that it had been unable to make a breakthrough in the research and development of autonomous driving, forcing the vehicle release node to be postponed from the original plan of 2026 to 2028, and at the same time downgrading the autonomous driving technology from L4 to L2+.
As early as 2017, when Audi ***A8L was launched, it supported L3 level automatic driving, but the function was not opened until 2020, because at that time, there was no market in the world to confirm L3 and above autonomous driving technology at the legal level, Audi had to give up this technology and turn to the more realistic L2+ and the distant L4 research and development.
L2+ is the best ticket for smart cars, not only because L2+ is technically easier to implement, but most importantly, L2+ is responsible for the driver, which successfully avoids the legal risks of car companies. In this regard, Tesla has the most right to speak, and the accident caused by automatic driving is facing a multi-agency investigation in the United States, which has not ended until now, and in China, Tesla often tears up with users due to automatic driving accidents.
From the periphery, L3 is a big hit this year, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, BYD, Zhiji and Huawei have all obtained L3 test licenses, and cities that open up autonomous driving are also constantly increasing, but there are still three obstacles between testing and industrialization, technology, infrastructure and law, and the popularization of L3 is a social project, which is worth looking forward to but the process is a little longer. In addition, L3 is only a transitional product, and the end of autonomous driving is L4 and above full autonomous driving, not to mention whether the technology can be realized, at least it can be determined that the realization of L4 is a more expensive and longer cycle. The most sensitive capital markets have responded, with public information showing that the total financing of domestic autonomous driving projects in the first three quarters of 2023 was 6.8 billion yuan, compared with 57.5 billion yuan in 2021. Where did all the hot money go? It is the AI track that Apple is talking about, and OpenAI's "gold-absorbing beast" Sora announced plans to raise $7 trillion, shocking the world.
Autonomous driving is cooling rapidly in the capital market, but the frenzy of domestic car companies chasing smart cars is increasing day by day. The reason for this is very simple, in the new forces 1Version 0 and Huawei 2Under the 0 version of training, intelligence, especially high-end intelligent driving, has become the "touchstone" of electric vehicles, and Wenjie is the most successful sample. And BYD Wang Chuanfu contributed a famous scene, a year ago, he bombarded unmanned "it's all, make a vain head, that's all foolishness, it's the emperor's new clothes", a year later, he "defected", announced that he would invest 100 billion yuan in intelligent research and development focusing on intelligent driving. To what extent are smart cars getting involved today? The city pilot is still in public beta, and there is still half a year or a year to land, or only a few cities, and car companies can't wait to grab traffic in advance. Like Yu Chengdong, a drainage master, the operation is even more outrageous, and he would rather be "punished" and disabled than brush a wave of traffic for Huawei's intelligent driving.
"Premature" smart cars
"Overheating" has also brought about a new phenomenon, that is, the iteration speed of smart cars is now comparable to that of mobile phones.
In the past, traditional fuel vehicles were basically 3 years of mid-term facelift, 5-7 years of replacement, this generation of products on the market, the next generation of model research and development, the entire new car development cycle is mostly 48-60 months.
With the continuous penetration of new energy, the pace of the entire automotive industry has begun to accelerate. Last year, Volkswagen decided to compress the original 54-month new car development cycle to 36 months to keep pace with its Chinese rivals. With this as a standard, Volkswagen completed the ID. of the first sketch in December 20222, that is, it is planned to be listed in 2025, with a cycle of exactly 36 months. It's just that Volkswagen didn't expect that there are Chinese opponents who have accelerated again.
Many models only take 18 months from project approval to launch, and even very aggressive manufacturers complete the launch of new cars in 14 or 12 months, which is now a sure thing in the industry. Su Tan, general manager of intelligent driving, was deeply surprised by the serious involution of the rim.
12 months, is a new rhythm of a mobile phone. However, compared with the best cars, no matter the number of parts or the degree of complexity, it is obviously not at the same level, not to mention that the car is related to life safety.
The complete development cycle of a vehicle includes the architecture stage, strategy development, concept development, design development, production introduction and market preparation. Among them, the design and development stage is undoubtedly the core link, from the design of product drawings to the realization of product manufacturing, it generally takes 18 months to 22 months. At this stage, the trial production of prototypes, indoor tests and road tests are the top priority, not to save if you want to save them, such as three highs (high temperature, high humidity and high cold) durability, 24-way durability, comprehensive durability of harsh road sections, crash tests and so on.
Even if an electric car does not have traditional core components such as engines and gearboxes, it is not much different from magic to compress the development cycle of a new car to more than ten months. As for how car companies do it, in addition to forcibly compressing the inherent cycle of each stage, replacing part of the real car test with computer ** test, and starting pre-sales in advance before the production introduction starts, it is not a secret. The speed is fast, but it will be in the hot search headlines every once in a while. News such as the air suspension breaking during a test drive of a "best SUV within 5 million" and the fall of a high-end electric vehicle while testing automatic parking were unlikely to occur in the past.
Finally, let's talk about it
The pace of autonomous driving is too big, coupled with the increasing "premature birth", there are actually many problems to be solved before the carnival of smart cars. For example, the OTA of smart cars is also a double-edged sword, which is similar to the practice of patching the Windows system, and sometimes it makes people not so down-to-earth - who knows if these patches are so friendly, before Xiaopeng, Aion, etc., borrowed OTA to lock the power caused by the battery life shrinkage, pushing the driving safety level, who knows whether the manufacturer has completed the verification through a large number of real car tests in advance.
Don't you see, many smart cars even have factory basic functions such as AEB have been exposed to be ineffective, not to mention the new functions pushed by OTA in the later stage?
Nowadays, some new cars push up to double digits of OTA upgrades to users in a year. This does reflect the advantages of fast iteration of smart cars, but it is followed by extensive road tests and data collection for users to complete certain new functions for manufacturers.
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