In the first quarter when donations, masks, live broadcasts and production qualifications were overwhelmed by the epidemic, Xpeng Motors was not idle at all. The "accident" did not have much impact on the rhythm of Xpeng Motors. On April 27th, Tucki's second new car P7 will be released in the form of live broadcast.
Tucki P7 has been regarded as a Tesla model since it came out? 3' s strong opponent, same model? The localization of 3 and the listing of P7 will inevitably usher in a close hand-to-hand combat. Judging from the available information, P7 is similar to domestic Tesla models in terms of the vehicle itself and the published pre-sale price. 3 constitutes direct competition. The recent endurance performance of 706km has made P7 become the focus again, and at the same time, it has also made the battery life of electric vehicles enter the "700+ era".
But it is not enough to completely surpass Tesla in battery life, and the intelligent field is the last battlefield. Years of technical accumulation and G3 market practice make Tucki capable of competing with Tesla? Can P7, who is full of expectation, hand over a satisfactory answer sheet in a few days? You might as well inquire about the information that has been made public first.
Adequate food and grass is the foundation.
"The soldiers and horses have not moved, and the food and grass go first." The "grain" of autonomous driving is capital and talents. In terms of capital, as a new force to build cars, Xpeng Motors has been widely recognized by capital, and has received several rounds of financing so far. The investors include many well-known investment institutions such as Gaoying Capital, GGV ggv Capital and IDG Capital, as well as technology giants such as Ali and Xiaomi.
Xpeng Motors' ability of "managing the family diligently" is also well-known in the industry, but under the leadership of two scientific men, He and Henry, his core technology investment in R&D is also unambiguous. Founded less than six years ago, it has a team of more than 4,000 people, 60% of whom are R&D personnel. Tucki, which regards autonomous driving as a strategic fortress, has set up autonomous driving R&D teams in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, China, Silicon Valley and San Diego in the United States, bringing together experts from Qualcomm, Google, NVIDIA, Samsung, Huawei, Microsoft and Intel.
The five teams have their own key R&D fields and cooperate with each other. The Beijing team is mainly responsible for AI visual perception; The Shanghai team is mainly responsible for high-precision maps and SLAM；; Guangzhou team is mainly responsible for vehicle integration, planning and control, big data and other work; The Silicon Valley team is responsible for the research and development of perception and behavior norms; The San Diego team is responsible for sensor fusion and high-precision positioning.
In the division of labor between China and the United States, the China team will be more connected with suppliers, complete vehicles, testing and other links to be responsible for technology landing; The American team is responsible for deepening technologies such as perception and planning. Wu Xinzhou, vice president of Xpeng Motors and head of the automatic driving center, said: "Xpeng Motors emphasizes a team and a leader, and tries to keep the Chinese and American teams in step. For example, now the China team in Tucki is the motherboard, the American team is the plug-in, and the final integration and debugging are completed by the Chinese and American teams. "
With the guarantee of funds and talents, the research and development of Xpeng Motors' autonomous driving has maintained a high-speed development trend. 20 18 first issue, XPILOT? 2.0 formal mass production, independent research and development of adaptive cruise system and automatic parking system to achieve mass production; 20 19 phase ii, XPILOT? 2.5 Start, support automatic lane change assistance, and realize remote parking function; 2020 is the third stage of Xpeng Motors' autonomous driving, XPILOT? 3.0 will release L3 autopilot function, and high-speed autopilot will be mass-produced. This time, a self-developed 360-degree sensing scheme and an intelligent cockpit based on AI are adopted.
It can be seen from the update rhythm of a big version of XPILOT every year that the Xpeng Motors autopilot team has not been established for a long time, but its strength cannot be underestimated. According to the statistical analysis list of automobile patent data in China in 20 19 jointly released by the Information Research Institute of China Automotive Technology Research Center Co., Ltd. and the Intellectual Property Branch of China Automotive Engineering Society, Xpeng Automobile ranked in the forefront of automobile patent disclosure in China in 20 19 with 742 automobile patents in 20 19. 20。 Among the invention patents filed in 20 19, the proportion of intelligent network connection and automatic driving patents reached 4 1% and 22% respectively, and this patent structure fully reflected the strength of Xpeng Motors in the field of intelligence.
At present, Xpeng Motors autonomous driving has the advantages of end-to-end closed-loop independent research and development, and has the core algorithm research and development capabilities of perception, positioning, planning and decision-making. At the same time, the data processing and analysis capabilities of vehicles and the cloud are established, which can realize the rapid iteration of algorithms based on actual data and continuously enhance the automatic driving capability through OTA, and P7 is the epitome of these technologies. From this point of view, P7 has surpassed the meaning of a car for Xpeng Motors, and it is the first comprehensive display of its independent research and development strength.
Redundancy design is the guarantee.
Tucki P7 adopts SEPA (intelligent? Electric? Platform? Architecture) The platform architecture has the characteristics of modularization, light weight, large variable bandwidth and high space utilization. SEPA platform architecture realizes controller 100% networking, which enables P7 to realize OTA of the whole vehicle. At the same time, 100 Mbps Ethernet topology is adopted, and the independent central gateway supports the information exchange of multi-channel communication data, and the transmission rate is 200 times that of the traditional 500K high-speed CAN bus.
Different from traditional ADAS? The building in L2 cannot be upgraded. P7 adopts automatic driving architecture scheme. Its most important feature is that it has a central computing platform, more complete modules, and the system has the ability to upgrade and expand. It can upgrade data capability, map capability and upgrade and expand capability through OTA. In terms of information security, the core computing platform of autonomous driving has reached the ASIL with the highest functional safety of automobiles. Class D, the computing power of the information security chip is 8 times higher than that of the previous generation of smart cars, and at the same time, it has the expansion ability to support L4 automatic driving and 5G communication.
In addition to the information disclosed above, we also found that P7 is completely redundant through horizontal comparison. The sensing scheme of P7 includes 13 cameras, 5 millimeter-wave radars and 12 ultrasonic radars, and the number of sensors is as high as 30. The sensing scheme of Changan UNI-T consists of 23 sensors, including 5 millimeter-wave radars, 6 cameras and 12 ultrasonic radars. Guangzhou automobile Aion? The perception scheme of LX consists of 23 sensors, namely 17 radar, 4 panoramic cameras, 1 smart camera and 1 driver fatigue monitoring sensor. The sensing scheme of Tesla Autopilot3.0 consists of 2 1 sensor, including 8 cameras, 12 ultrasonic radars, 1 front radar and a driver fatigue monitoring sensor. The number of P7 sensors in Tucki far exceeds Tesla Autopilot3.0 and L3 schemes of other car companies. The reason is that P7 has two sets of ring vision systems, which are redundant.
Of course, the number of sensors is not simple, the more the better. The more the number, the higher the requirements for the perceptual fusion algorithm and the computing power of the chip will be. In order to ensure the redundancy of computing power, P7 is equipped with NVIDIA? Driving? Xavier computing platform, which can achieve 30 trillion operations per second, and the power consumption is only? 30? Watt, the energy efficiency is 15 times of the previous generation architecture, and it has L4-level automatic driving computing capability. P7 has also become the first self-driving mass production scheme equipped with Xavier computing platform in China.
This is only known information, so it can be inferred that P7 has also made full preparations in battery power supply, positioning, algorithm and control. On the one hand, these redundant designs can ensure the safety of L3 autopilot after mass production, and at the same time, P7 can be iteratively upgraded to XPILOT? Hardware capabilities of 4.0. A lot of money of the autopilot system seems to be spent on redundant systems that may not be used for a lifetime, but this is the guarantee for autopilot landing and the reassurance for consumers to dare to use these functions. Xu Daquan, executive vice president of Bosch China, once bluntly said: "The autopilot scheme without redundant design is nonsense."
Localizing data is an advantage.
Xpeng Motors has always emphasized the importance of localized research and development, and has been independently developing software algorithms for China's driving scenes and user habits. XPILOT？ 3.0 is specially developed for road conditions in China, and is also applicable to urban roads and expressways. P7' s autonomous navigation and driving function can realize the scene expression of L3-level automatic driving of expressway, and can automatically select the optimal lane and lane change according to navigation and road conditions. Compared with the traditional scheme, the self-parking function can only be found after the vehicle passes through the parking space (by looking around the camera from the side). P7 can find the parking space in advance by using the side front camera, which makes parking more efficient and easier to "grab the parking space".
Compared with Tesla, the biggest advantage of Tucki P7 is that it has accumulated a lot of localized data. The roads in China are very special, and the diversified means of transportation and Chinese-style crossing make the efficiency of vehicles very low. Compared with the United States, there are many kinds of obstacles on the roads in China, such as logistics vehicles, express vehicles and electric donkeys, which Autopilot, who grew up in the United States, could not know. To solve these problems, it is necessary to have real road data of China, and the data should be as comprehensive as possible. The design algorithm should be based on data, and the data comes from the scene. Without data, the algorithm can only be an armchair strategist.
According to the road environment in China, Xpeng has developed a solution suitable for local road conditions, which mainly solves three major problems: road environment, traffic environment and driver habits. Xpeng Motors has its own test vehicle resources and tens of thousands of G3 vehicles in Tucki, and has also formed a set of technical architecture that can be continuously evolved, so that new data can promote the growth of intelligent driving and form a positive cycle.
As can be seen from the autopilot test video released by Xpeng Motors, the XPILOT of P7? 3.0 The system accurately identifies and defines buses, cars, trucks, two-wheeled vehicles, tricycles and pedestrians, and can also read the traffic lights corresponding to the current lane. In the high-speed scene, under the condition that the abandoned lane lines are not cleaned up, the LCC (Lane Centering Assistance) of P7 can also complete the task of driving in the lane and changing lanes well. For this road with China characteristics, P7 can be said to have a thorough understanding.
Tesla is undeniably a benchmark in the field of autonomous driving, but the phrase "foreign monks like to recite scriptures" is not suitable for autonomous driving technology with super localization attributes. At present, it seems that P7, a "China hand", is not only betting on Tesla models in cruising range? At one end, the two sides will also stage a wonderful confrontation in the field of autonomous driving.
This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.