The other is Huawei, which has always insisted that it will never build a car, but has developed many technologies related to smart cars. Recently, Huawei announced two patents on autonomous driving technology, namely "a kind of lidar" and "training method of pedestrian recognition network, method and device of pedestrian recognition".
Huawei's research and development of intelligent driving technology is nothing new. As early as 65438+ February 22 last year, lidar and related intelligent driving solutions were released, and the mass production and boarding stages have been completed. The first model equipped with Huawei lidar is ARCFOX Extreme Fox αS HBT, which will be exhibited at Shanghai International Auto Show in April this year.
Huawei's intelligent driving solution * * * provides boarding configurations of single, double and three kinds of lidar. ARCFOX polar fox αS HBT adopts the most advanced three kinds of lidar solutions, matching Huawei's self-developed chips, with a computing power of up to 352Tops and a horizontal detection angle of up to 300. Combined with the "pedestrian re-identification method", the new car can respond quickly to the scenes of express brother's motorcycle and pedestrians crossing the road.
It is worth mentioning that for Huawei, lidar is only a small part of intelligent driving solution, and intelligent driving is only a part of its smart car solution HI brand. In addition to intelligent driving technology, HI brand also includes intelligent cockpit, intelligent electric vehicle, intelligent Che Yun, intelligent network connection and computing and communication architecture. It is a full-stack smart car solution that integrates many cutting-edge technologies such as AI, 5G and cloud.
It is hard to imagine that Huawei has such a rich reserve of smart car technology, but it still has to be a diehard who insists on "not making cars". What is it worried about? Since the question of "Huawei makes cars" is still in doubt, we can analyze "why Huawei doesn't make cars" through reverse thinking.
Judging from the technology released by Huawei, its deepest involvement in the automotive field is the HI brand mentioned above, which provides a complete smart car solution, and the reason why Huawei does not build a car has been reflected in this sentence.
Why does Huawei HI provide a complete smart car solution instead of a smart car? You know, there are essential differences between smart car solutions and smart cars. The so-called solution is like a set of software, any software needs hardware as the carrier, and it is meaningless to have software without hardware. It's like we all know that WeChat is easy to use, but without mobile phones, computers and other hardware as carriers, no matter how powerful WeChat is, it is just empty talk for consumers.
The same is true of "Huawei makes cars". Although the HI full-stack smart car solution is quite powerful in performance and function, Huawei does not have a corresponding in-vehicle platform as a supporting hardware support at present, which is the fundamental reason that restricts Huawei from building a car.
In terms of "helping car companies build good cars", Huawei has obviously taken the first step to become a supplier of incremental parts for smart cars. In addition to cooperating with BAIC arc fox brand to develop αS HBT, it has also been recognized by more than 30 car companies such as Chery, BYD, JAC, Volvo, FAW and Guangzhou Automobile.
As the top technology enterprise in China, Huawei has always claimed that it does not build cars, and it really lacks the technology of vehicle manufacturing, but does this mean that it does not want to build cars? In fact, Huawei has long coveted the field of automobile manufacturing.
In fact, Xiao Lei used the case of "WeChat and mobile phone" to analyze the relationship between software and hardware. There is a huge bug, because although the software needs hardware as the carrier, Tencent has never produced any mobile phones or computers. Similarly, in this era of strong alliance between technology giants and car companies, it is no longer a necessary condition for technology giants to build cars, and the cooperation between Huawei and ARCFOX is an attempt for them to participate in building cars.
In the cooperation between Huawei and ARCFOX Polar Fox, the former provides the latter with cutting-edge "software" technologies such as intelligent driving, intelligent power and intelligent network connection, while the latter is responsible for injecting the accumulated car-building information into new models and providing hardware support for the software technology delivered by the former. Although from the perspective of cooperation mode, Huawei still maintains its identity as a supplier of incremental parts for smart cars, if Huawei really wants to build a car in the end, it is a matter of words.
Because Huawei still lacks "hardware" support, it is very expensive and unnecessary for technology companies to develop a set of "hardware" architecture for automobiles. Therefore, Xiao Lei believes that if Huawei wants to build a car, the biggest possibility will be to directly cooperate with OEMs, such as the automobile OEMs to be established by Geely and Foxconn. So why does Xiao Lei think that Huawei will choose to find an OEM in order to solve the hardware problem, instead of cooperating with a traditional car company like Baidu? This is probably the difference between the two.
In fact, the situation of Baidu and Huawei is somewhat similar. They are all technology giants, and they are all working hard to develop automobile "software", but they have not made much achievements in the research and development of "hardware". Of course, there are specialties in the industry, so that people who are good at making hardware can make hardware and those who are good at making software can make software. This is the future development trend of automobiles.
Compared with the cooperation between technology giants and traditional car companies, Xiao Lei thinks that it is more in line with the future development of the car to hand over the hardware to the foundry. Because the cooperation between technology giants and traditional car companies is always limited to the technology of this car company, and the purpose of OEM is more pure, and the development of hardware is bound to be deeper.
If Huawei cooperates with Geely, then Geely can only provide Huawei with a broad framework of SEA; However, the cooperation between Huawei and OEM will get the effect of 1 (Huawei)+1 (OEM) =3 (Huawei technology+Geely Sea+Foxconn MIH), and the cooperation between technology enterprises and OEM may even get the effect of 1+ 1 = N after the further development of the automobile OEM industry in the future.
Whether to build a car or not is actually not a dilemma for Huawei. If Huawei insists on developing in the direction of smart car technology suppliers, it is not difficult to find a world in this field with its brand influence and product research and development capabilities. In today's era of great changes in automobiles, Huawei has given full play to its scientific and technological advantages, and may even become a top automotive technology supplier such as Bosch and China.
Of course, if Huawei wants to build its own car brand, it is not difficult for it. Because in today's automobile leather hit, not only the powertrain of the automobile, but also the production and manufacturing mode of the automobile. In today's automobile manufacturing mode, building a car is not an unattainable natural barrier.
Note: The material of this article comes from the Internet.