Writing |? Zhao Lingwei

Huawei's sense of technology doesn't require blue and purple ambient lighting or TED talks immersed in PPTs, but a series of high-powered product launches is the most hardcore aspect of a tech company.

Since last May, Huawei Intelligent Vehicle Solutions BU was formally established, after which Huawei's cooperation with car companies has become closer.

A year later, Huawei's technology and services have been upgraded again. Not long ago, Huawei released a new generation of MDC 210 and MDC 610 and other series of products and the latest eco-development program.?

If last year's launch is remembered for saying "Huawei will never build a car," this year, Huawei's BU showed its customers what it can do.

Huawei knows its strengths and boundaries well enough to know what not to do. Huawei only tells itself what it doesn't want to do at this stage, and beyond that, it's all about meeting customer needs.

1

Huawei's "do's" and "don'ts"

Where are the boundaries of Huawei's BU? Huawei rotating chairman Xu Zhijun's answer is very clear - "all the components of the traditional car we do not do, the traditional car to the process of intelligent networked electric vehicles, the car needs the components is our main direction."

Huawei is most likely to be one of the object of the standard is the traditional automotive industry Tier 1, previously Huawei Ren Zhengfei has used the battery as an example, "resolutely not allowed to do battery, battery production method is very complex, artificial consumption, we still have to focus on the direction of algorithms and mathematics related to chemistry, physics, or something to be cautious. "

In addition, compared with Internet companies, the latter mainly focus on the application layer, specializing in software and user services, Huawei can do more than that.

Although Huawei doesn't build cars, its business in the automotive industry is virtually endless outside the fence of "something not to do" -- "what the customer needs, what we do. "

Huawei's core business includes communications technology and 5G networks, both of which are an important foundation for smart cars. After all, without high bandwidth and strong computing power, talking about smart cars is a castle in the air.

For functional cars in the past, the demand for communications technology was not high. But for the requirements of smart cars, cameras, LIDAR, millimeter-wave radar, and so on are not met by the speed, latency, and bandwidth of traditional communication architectures. Huawei's many years of technology accumulation in the field of networking allowed it to build a new communication and computing network for the car, which is one of the lowest level infrastructures to make the car smart.?

So last year, Huawei proposed that cars move from EE architecture (centralized automotive electronic and electrical architecture) to CCA (distributed communications computing architecture). "Huawei has been doing communication computing architecture for decades in its history, and 25G, 100G, and 400G speeds are not a problem." Xu Zhijun told Automotive Business.

In addition to this, Huawei has been making base station power supplies, solar inverters, and UPS for data centers, and now by integrating these technologies, it can meet the needs of EVs. "All the technologies we have invested in the past are extended to meet the needs of the scenario of smart connected cars, and you have smart car solutions and components."

And as for profitability, Xu Zhijun said in a media interview, "Huawei has a development curve for each industry, from the project development to move towards current profitability, and then move towards cumulative profitability, this cycle averages eight years. So many years have come over, Huawei's patience for the auto parts industry is still there."

While Huawei's automotive business is not currently in a hurry to make a profit, the attempt to do so in terms of volume is obvious. For example, for the Huawei HiCar base model, its goal is to plan for 2021 to pre-install more than 5 million vehicles. In other words, 20% of new cars sold in China each year in the future will come with the HiCar system.

About intelligent driving, Huawei's goal this year is to do 1,000 kilometers without intervention on city roads. Xu Zhijun said, "This is very leading in the world, and we're doing our best to build such a smart driving system or autopilot system. The next step is to figure out how to get on the car. We are aiming to have cars with these components or systems of ours in early 2022."

In the last year or so, Huawei MDC has been working with more than 50 OEMs, Tier1s, application algorithms, sensors, actuators, and other customers and eco-partners in the industry to realize landing-ready smart driving solutions based on Huawei MDC in the fields of passenger cars (L2+), commercial vehicles (smart heavy trucks, port logistics), and operational vehicles (unmanned mining trucks, unmanned distribution), etc.

For the first time, Huawei's MDC has been used in a variety of applications.

For the attitude of the product, Xu Zhijun believes that meeting the diversified needs of customers is the key, "Customers have needs, we will make products to meet the needs. It's hard to say how big the scale can be, as if we didn't expect the consumer business to be so big at first. Every business definitely has great ideals when planning their business, but it's up to them to make it a reality."

2

How can we help car companies build good cars?

In media interviews, Huawei does not hide the service provider-style "to B" posture, in the traditional industry outside the borderless incremental market to accompany the customer to "do whatever you want".

So far, Huawei Vehicle BU has covered areas including, but not limited to, intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit and vehicle cloud services.

Intelligent driving is a strategic high point for automotive companies to gain a competitive advantage, and faces the challenges of a long investment cycle, high scenario complexity, and high technical difficulty.

Huawei provides the MDC computing platform, operating system AOS/VOS, and automated driving cloud service Octopus to build end-to-end cloud synergistic intelligent driving platform solutions. In the newly released new generation of Huawei's MDC intelligent driving computing platform series, it can support automated driving capabilities from L2+ to L4 level.

In terms of the intelligent cockpit, Huawei builds an intelligent cockpit platform with the Hongmeng car OS as the core, reduces the difficulty of integration and development of the cockpit system by car companies, and provides users with an expandable car platform jointly with hardware and software partners.

In addition to this, effective collaboration between the end, edge, and cloud can realize ubiquitous intelligence. Huawei's Intelligent Vehicle Cloud Service, based on big data and AI capabilities, provides automotive companies with four major solutions: autonomous driving cloud service, high-precision mapping cloud service, Telematics cloud service, and V2X cloud service, which connect people, vehicles, roads, and intelligent transportation and other application systems.

While Wang Jun paved the way several times in the interview that Huawei, as a new entrant to the automotive industry, is still in the process of figuring things out, the first thing that its system guarantees is the safety of the lives of passengers in the car.

At the security level, Xu Zhijun introduced, "the real control of the four wheels of the system security level to be high. vdc to maintain stability, to maintain the highest level of security, to ensure life safety. So we don't recommend putting it on the MDC or the cockpit. We can do all the computing on the car, but in the future we can put three domain controllers as security backups for each other, so if something goes wrong with the VDC, the MDC can back up, and that's architecturally possible."

While there is a high bar to try to compete with Huawei on the same field, the popularity of the smart car industry in recent years has made the competition in it undeniably fierce.

Xu Zhijun's mindset appears to be very calm, "different car companies, based on their own capabilities and strategies will have different choices, some will be based entirely on this platform development; some will do a little more in-depth, such as joint development; some will choose our hardware, and some are completely do it yourself. Each OEM has different choices, and different brands of the same OEM have different choices. We offer a variety of ways for customers to choose. oEMs are hardly all alike, and all kinds of needs should be met."

3

The Evangelists of Intelligent Mobility

The contributors to the evolutionary path that is automotive intelligence are varied.

When we discuss the relationship between smart cars and traditional cars, we often use the example of "Apple knocking over Nokia" to predict the future of smart cars and functional cars. But in the circle of smart devices, Apple and Dyson, car-making action before the beginning of the end, and then turned to the progress of self-driving software has also been secretive, but probably and Baidu, Google unified battlefield. And Huawei, as the leader of domestic cell phones, is more determined than Apple to enter the automotive industry, the layout is also greater.

With the Internet, technology companies contribute to the automotive industry is also different, for example, in addition to some similarities in the car machine, Tencent's responsibility in the intelligent travel is biased towards solving the application level problems through user big data analysis and Internet product logic; and Huawei makes full use of ICT technology advantages to build intelligent travel underlying technology to provide intelligent cockpit and the realization of autonomous driving Functional hardware and arithmetic support.

It is also different from the efforts of the car companies themselves and the traditional Tier1. For example, the acquisition of Cruise by General Motors, Ford's self-driving research and development, SAIC's AliOS car system in marriage with Ali, BYD's release of DiLink, Bosch's continuous refinement of the car control system, etc., are all based on the transformation of the car. Technology companies can be more "broken circle", for each demand for solutions are more open and innovative.

In the future, there are more intelligent travel innovation logic and products to look forward to, to reach the intelligent pathway will be by which side to go on is still unknown. Although the competition is fierce, but the good thing is, until then there are opportunities in anyone's hands.