Editor/Tang Lang

The core of a product/car

The high-end smart car brand jointly built by Changan, Huawei and Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd. just showed the tip of the iceberg last month.

165438+1October14th, Changan Automobile announced that it will jointly build a high-end smart car brand, a smart electric car platform, a series of smart car products, a super "driving" smart life and an intelligent energy ecology.

Behind the official statement, more details are emerging.

At present, three companies are developing an intelligent electric vehicle platform, named CHN platform after the initials of the three companies.

Auto Heart learned from many people familiar with the matter that the brand-new high-end smart car brands will focus on Changan and Huawei, supplemented by Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd.

At present, we can be sure that CHN platform will be equipped with Huawei's intelligent cockpit platform CDC, autopilot domain controller ADC and some three electrical components.

We also know that the first production car of CHN platform is expected to be launched in 2022.

Changan's new high-end brand will not be marked with HI tail like the ARCFOX model that BAIC cooperates with Huawei, which also means that CHN's first car will not be equipped with Huawei's complete smart car solution.

Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd. will provide batteries for Changan's high-end smart car brands, and may cooperate with Huawei and Changan at the capital level.

In terms of company operation, Changan Weilai, established on 20 18, will become a brand-new high-end brand entity.

This company, which was founded by Changan and Weilai in the past, is likely to welcome the shares of Huawei, Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd. and Tencent. Weilai Automobile may quit the company completely.

This means that Changan Weilai will be renamed.

1. What role will Huawei play?

In the tripartite cooperation among Changan, Huawei and Contemporary Ampere Technology, Huawei is the most concerned new variable.

At the end of the same month when Changan CHN platform project was announced, SAIC and Ali also announced the launch of high-end intelligent pure electric brand Zhiji Automobile.

The dispute between pairs Ali and Changan-Huawei, two pairs of CP's high-end electric brands, has become the hottest topic in the industry for a while.

Let's take a look at how Changan lays out high-end brands.

Two-line parallelism is a major feature of Changan's high-end efforts.

"Double high-end" refers to:

One line is the UNI gravity series newly released by Changan this year. At present, UNI gravity series is mainly fuel vehicles.

One line is a brand of new energy vehicles co-operated by Changan, Huawei and Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd..

Behind the double high-end is Changan's diversified layout in intelligent technology.

At present, in the UNI gravity series, Changan cooperates closely with Horizon, a domestic AI chip unicorn company.

For example, the UNI-T car is equipped with the Horizon automotive AI chip Journey 2, which mainly drives the intelligent interactive system in the cockpit.

Coincidentally, on the first day of June, 65438+ February, Horizon just announced that it had shipped more than 65438+million pieces, of which UNI-T cars were the main ones.

UNI-K, the second car in the UNI series, is also equipped with the journey chip.

According to a senior official familiar with the R&D system in Chang 'an, at the level of autonomous driving, at present, the team in Chang 'an pays more attention to the better decision-making, control and fusion algorithms, and will cooperate with Horizon in the perception algorithm.

The high-end brand of new energy vehicles built by Changan in conjunction with Huawei and Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd. will mainly adopt Huawei's scheme in terms of intelligence.

As mentioned above, Changan will adopt Huawei's CDC and ADC.

CDC is Huawei's intelligent cockpit solution, which is based on automobile-grade Kirin chip and HarmonyOS OS operating system, including HiCar car-machine interconnection, 5G car-mounted module and other products, and is a set of overall cockpit solution.

According to the information currently known:

The first car of CHN platform in 2022 will be Huawei's second mass production project after BAIC ARCFOX.

ADC is Huawei's autopilot domain controller, including Huawei's autopilot computing platform MDC and high-order autopilot solution ADS.

Chang 'an put forward the scheme of retaining 36 sensors, carrying high-precision map and positioning, 5G-V2X module, two controllers with high computational force field, redundant braking, redundant steering and redundant power supply.

Among them, 36 sensors include:

The next model of BAIC ARCFOX, code-named HBT, will also be equipped with lidar, including three 96-line lidar and six millimeter-wave radars, and the computing capacity of the airborne computing platform will reach 352 Tops.

Both schemes use Huawei's lidar.

It should be noted that this does not mean that the first production car of CHN platform will completely copy the above sensor scheme.

According to Chang 'an executives, this sensor scheme is Chang 'an's thinking on high-level autonomous driving.

As far as we know, changan internal think:

In order to realize L3 autopilot, lidar is not a necessary sensor, partly because the cost of lidar has not been reduced. But if L4 is to be realized, Chang 'an thinks it is necessary to get on the lidar.

An industry insider close to Huawei's top management told Auto Heart, "Huawei chose Changan because its R&D strength is second only to FAW Hongqi among its own brands. Huawei and Changan are in-depth cooperation to build high-end brands, and Huawei is involved in building cars. 」

In fact, before Chang 'an, Huawei has become an important partner of many car companies.

BYD is a hot-selling model, and Huawei HiCar solution is launched as an important selling point.

ARCFOX, the pioneer brand explored by BAIC, will launch the first model with Huawei's HI tail logo.

However, unlike BAIC ARCFOX, Auto Heart understands that Huawei HI Tail will not appear on high-end smart brand models in Changan.

This means that Changan will not adopt a full set of Huawei smart car solutions. Huawei's complete solutions include intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, intelligent network connection, intelligent Che Yun and intelligent electric, which are collectively referred to as five systems.

According to Huawei's definition, getting on the HI trailer means that all five systems have to get on the bus.

2. Changan still dominates the research and development of new models.

Huawei's smart car solution is very radical.

However, in the tripartite cooperation among Changan, Huawei and Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd., Changan still occupies a dominant position.

We look at it from three levels: intelligence, power generation and capital.

Changan Intelligent R&D chose self-research and integration to walk on two legs.

Changan Global Software Center has more than 400 people, and its research and development scope covers the underlying operating system, intelligent cockpit, application development, cloud platform, OTA and so on.

Changan UNI-K, which just appeared, is equipped with many internal self-developed technologies.

For example, Changan has developed a vehicle software platform VSP 1.0, which includes hardware layer, vehicle operating system layer, vehicle function application layer, OTA layer and cloud big data layer.

Among them, the cockpit operating system CCOS of the on-board operating system layer has been installed on many models such as UNI-K.

Through the "data +AI" mode, UNI-K also forms a cockpit closed loop and a vehicle closed loop at the data level.

At present, this car has 15 ECU, and the OTA of the whole car only takes 20 minutes.

This is shorter than one hour required by Tesla and Weilai car companies.

At the same time, with the help of intelligent cockpit operating system, UNI-K can also realize five-screen linkage and multi-mode interaction.

Then, what is the strength of Changan, which has invested more in R&D, in the field of autonomous driving?

According to Che Xin, there are more than 200 people in Chang 'an autopilot team.

This level is comparable to the new autonomous driving team focusing on autonomous driving research and development.

At present, Xpeng Motors has more than 300 autonomous driving teams.

The number of Weilai autopilot team is 200.

At present, the ideal number is about 60, and the goal is to expand to 200 early next year.

The common feature of the three new cars in autonomous driving is to firmly take the road of deep full-stack self-research

In terms of team size, Changan has the strength of full-stack self-research.

"Changan has enough resources to do self-research, including talents and funds. Now we just pull out the high-end brands of new energy vehicles and cooperate with Huawei and Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd. The aforementioned Changan executives told us.

According to the information disclosed by Chang 'an Home, an internal community in Chang 'an:

"CHN project aims to study platform technologies such as automotive application ecology, on-board OS, computing and communication architecture, high-voltage system and chassis machinery based on three-party capabilities.

CHN project establishes a set of standard software and hardware interfaces, protocols and data through a five-layer layered decoupled central+regional architecture solution, which solves the shortcomings of function expansion and iterative upgrade of automobile enterprises at one time, while improving quality, reducing cost, plug and play, and realizing brand-new platformization, modularization and generalization. 」

From the perspective of technical products, the technologies of Changan and Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd. are very mature, and Huawei's products need further verification.

Let's talk about Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd. first. In September this year, Changan signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd. to establish long-term and in-depth cooperation in the fields of intelligent networked electric vehicles and smart energy ecology.

Changan will adopt the core products such as power battery system and energy storage system of Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd. on some models.

A person familiar with Changan's high-end brand cooperation revealed:

"In this cooperation, the three parties are more likely to put their respective superior technologies together to jointly build a high-end smart car brand.

Huawei's end-to-end technology is very strong, but its technical maturity needs further verification. Changan's hardware, chassis and intelligent technology have been applied in mass production.

How to divide the final high-end products needs to be further determined now. 」

3. Huawei, Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd. and Tencent may become shareholders of Changan Weilai, and Weilai will completely withdraw.

At present, Changan will still be the actual controller of brand-new high-end brands in terms of ownership structure.

The information held by Chexin is that the high-end smart car brand built by the three parties will be operated based on Changan Weilai.

Changan Weilai was founded on 20 18 and 10. Initially, Changan Automobile and Weilai Automobile held 45% of the shares respectively, and 10% was held by the company's senior management team.

Chairman of Changan Weilai is Li Bin, founder, chairman and CEO of Weilai Automobile, vice chairman is Li Wei, executive vice president of Changan Automobile, and CEO is Yang Fang from Changan.

In September this year, Changan Automobile's 2020 semi-annual report showed that "the acquisition of Changan Weilai New Energy Automobile Technology Co., Ltd. was included in the consolidated statement. Changan Automobile's shareholding in the company reached 95.38%, and Weilai Automobile's shareholding fell to 4.62%. 」

At present, Huawei and Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd. are cooperating and communicating with Changan at the capital level, and may inject capital into Changan Weilai.

Che Zhixin also heard that Weilai will completely withdraw from Changan Weilai next. Tencent may take over Weilai's equity in Changan Weilai Company.

After this series of operations, Changan Weilai will be renamed.

It is worth noting that whether Tencent invested in Changan Weilai has not been officially confirmed by Changan.

In fact, it is not new for Internet giants to invest in new cars.

In BAT, Tencent is Weilai's second largest shareholder, Alibaba is betting on Tucki, Baidu has invested in Weimar many times, and Wang Xing and Zhang Yiming are also ideal candidates for multiple rounds of betting.

During this year, Evergrande Automobile received 4 billion yuan of financing from Ali, Tencent and Didi. Alibaba has recently become an investor in SAIC's high-end brand "confidant".

Whether successful or not, these will become important stories in the history of new cars in China.

Once Tencent bets on Changan's high-end smart car brands, Changan, Huawei, contemporary Amperex Technology Co, Limited and Tencent are all in place, and Changan's new high-end brands are gathering more imagination.