There are two domestic technology giants who have always maintained a close distance from each other in terms of car manufacturing. One of them is Xiaomi, which claims that "anyone who says Xiaomi builds cars is fake news" while developing car technology. Recently, its remarks have changed to "wait and see". I believe that in the near future, Xiaomi's attitude towards car building will become "building cars is great!".
The other company is Huawei, which has always insisted that it will never build cars, but has developed a lot of technologies related to smart cars. Recently, Huawei disclosed two more patents on autonomous driving technology. These two patents are "a lidar" and "training method of pedestrian re-identification network, pedestrian re-identification method and device".
Huawei’s research and development of intelligent driving technology is nothing new. It had already released lidar and related intelligent driving solutions as early as December 22 last year, and had completed product mass production. car stage. The first model equipped with Huawei lidar is the ARCFOX αS HBT. This new car will be displayed at the Shanghai International Auto Show in April this year.
Huawei’s smart driving solution provides three types of lidar configurations: single, 2, and 3 lidars. The ARCFOX αS HBT uses the most advanced 3 lidars. The lidar solution is matched with Huawei's self-developed chip with a computing power of up to 352 Tops, and a horizontal detection angle of up to 300. Combined with the "pedestrian re-identification method", the new car can respond quickly to scenes such as the delivery man's motorcycle and pedestrians crossing the road.
It is worth mentioning that for Huawei, lidar is only a small part of the smart driving solution, and smart driving is only a part of its HI brand of smart car solutions. In addition to intelligent driving technology, the HI brand also includes intelligent cockpit, intelligent electric, intelligent vehicle cloud, intelligent network connection and a computing and communication architecture. It is a comprehensive set of cutting-edge technologies such as AI, 5G and cloud. Stacked smart car solution.
It is hard to imagine that Huawei has such a rich reserve of smart car technology, but it still wants to be a die-hard who insists on "not building cars". What exactly is it worried about? Since the issue of "Huawei builds cars" is still in doubt, we can analyze "Why Huawei does not build cars" through reverse thinking.
Judging from the technologies that Huawei has released to the outside world, its deepest involvement in the automotive field is the HI brand mentioned earlier. This brand provides a complete set of smart car solutions, and the reason why Huawei Not building cars is reflected in this sentence.
Why is it said that Huawei HI provides a complete set of smart car solutions instead of saying that Huawei HI provides a smart car? You must know that there is an essential difference between smart car solutions and smart cars. The so-called solution is like a set of software. Any software requires hardware as a carrier. It is meaningless to have software without hardware. This is just like we all know that WeChat is very useful, but without hardware such as mobile phones and computers as carriers, no matter how powerful WeChat is, it will be just out of reach for consumers.
"Huawei builds cars" is also the same situation. Although HI's full-stack smart car solution is very powerful and has very powerful functions, Huawei currently does not have a corresponding complete vehicle platform as a supporting tool. Hardware support is the fundamental reason that restricts Huawei from building cars.
In terms of "helping car companies build good cars", Huawei has obviously taken the first step in becoming an incremental component supplier for smart cars. In addition to cooperating with BAIC's ARCFOX brand to develop αS HBT, it has also been recognized by more than 30 car companies including Chery, BYD, JAC, Volvo, FAW and GAC.
As a top domestic technology company, Huawei has always claimed that it does not build cars, and it does lack the technology to manufacture complete vehicles, but does this mean that it does not want to build cars? In fact, Huawei has long been coveting the field of car manufacturing.
In fact, there is a huge bug in Xiaolei’s use of the case of “WeChat and mobile phones” to analyze the relationship between software and hardware, because although software requires hardware as a carrier, Tencent has never produced any mobile phone. and computers. By the same token, in this era of powerful alliances between technology giants and car companies, having their own vehicle platform is no longer a necessary condition for technology giants to build cars. The cooperation between Huawei and ARCFOX is the first time it has participated in car manufacturing. try.
In the cooperation between Huawei and ARCFOX, the former provides the latter with cutting-edge "software" technology in aspects such as intelligent driving, intelligent electric power, and intelligent networking, while the latter is responsible for integrating the manufacturing experience accumulated over the years. Car heritage is injected into new models, providing hardware support for the software technology delivered by the former. Although from the perspective of cooperation model, Huawei still maintains its identity as a supplier of incremental components for smart cars, but if Huawei really wants to end up building cars, then this is just a matter of words for it.
Since Huawei currently lacks "hardware" support, and the cost for technology companies to develop a set of automotive "hardware" architecture is very high and unnecessary; therefore, Xiaolei believes that if Huawei wants to enter the industry to build cars, the biggest challenge is The most likely possibility is to directly seek cooperation with OEMs, such as the automobile OEM that Geely and Foxconn are about to establish. So why does Xiao Lei think that Huawei will choose to find OEMs to solve hardware problems, instead of looking for cooperation with traditional car companies like Baidu? This is about the difference between the two.
In fact, the situations of Baidu and Huawei are somewhat similar. They are both technology giants, and they are both trying their best to develop automobile "software" and have not made much achievements in the research and development of "hardware". Of course, there are specialties in the technical industry. Let those who are good at hardware do hardware, and let those who are good at software do software. This is the future development trend of automobiles.
Compared with cooperation between technology giants and traditional car companies, Xiaolei believes that handing over hardware to OEMs is more in line with the development of future cars. Because the cooperation between technology giants and traditional car companies will always be limited to the technology of this car company, and the purpose of OEM is more pure, the development of hardware is bound to be more in-depth.
If Huawei cooperates with Geely, then all Geely can provide Huawei is SEA’s vast architecture; but when Huawei cooperates with OEMs, it will get 1 (Huawei) + 1 (OEM) = 3 ( Huawei Technology + Geely SEA + Foxconn MIH), and after the automobile OEM industry achieves further development in the future, the cooperation between technology companies and OEMs may even achieve the effect of 1+1=N.
Whether to build a car or not is not actually a dilemma for Huawei. If Huawei insists on developing into a smart car technology supplier, it will not be difficult for it to break into this field with its brand influence and product research and development capabilities. In today's era of great changes in automobiles, Huawei has used its technological advantages to catch up and may even become a top automotive technology supplier such as Bosch and Continental.
Of course, if Huawei wants to build its own car brand, it will not be difficult for it. Because in today's great automobile revolution, what is changing is far more than just the powertrain of automobiles. What is also changing is the production and manufacturing model of automobiles. In today's automobile manufacturing model, car manufacturing is not an unattainable barrier.
Note: The material of this article comes from the Internet