As black technology invades the automotive field, is the future car still just a four-wheeled transportation tool?
At present, in order to carry out differentiated competition in intelligence, some car companies are building satellites, some car companies are building auto robots, and some car companies are building flying cars...
The competition focus of electric vehicles has gradually changed from the electrification stage to intelligence. Many companies are boldly trying various new technologies to empower them while developing autonomous driving technology.
Once the hands of human beings are freed, the car will have more room for imagination.
According to Chen Qingtai, chairman of the China Electric Vehicle Association of 100, smart cars are subverting functional cars.
It has a wider impact than smartphones subverting feature phones, and its economic and social changes are more profound.
This automobile revolution is not carried out in isolation. Parallel and connected with it are the new energy revolution and the new generation of mobile communications, the transportation revolution and the smart city; what supports this automobile revolution is the rapid development of mobile Internet, digital economy and artificial intelligence technology. Development, these factors blend and interact with automotive changes, providing a technical foundation and rich usage scenarios for the electrification, greening, networking, intelligence and sharing of future vehicles.
Chen Qingtai believes that only by placing the future car in a larger category, evaluating its development prospects from a broader perspective, and deploying its future can we grasp the direction of progress.
He Xiaopeng wants smart cars to fly
He Xiaopeng, chairman of Xiaopeng Motors, firmly believes that smart cars will fly at low altitudes, not just run on the ground.
He would go to Xiaopeng Huitian every one or two weeks to learn about the progress of flying cars.
In July 2020, He Xiaopeng and Xiaopeng Motors jointly invested and controlled Huitian, and Xiaopeng Huitian was officially established. He Xiaopeng also served as the chairman of Xiaopeng Huitian.
In less than two years, Xiaopeng Huitian's employees have expanded from about 20 to 700, and it is expected to reach 1,000 by the end of this year.
Last week, He Xiaopeng said in an interview with a reporter from China Business News that the coupling between flying and cars is very difficult, but China has very good R&D personnel for aircraft, cars and intelligence. The current technology will have an inflection point effect, allowing cars to truly Fly.
It is very challenging to find another way to develop "road and air amphibious" vehicles. Zhao Deli, founder and president of Xiaopeng Huitian, has fallen from low altitude many times, and even nearly took his life.
In order to experience the feeling of the black cat sheriff riding a flying motorcycle or Harry Potter riding a flying broom in the air, he began to build a flying motorcycle in 2013. He personally invested more than 20 million before and after, and was once heavily in debt. Listed as a dishonest executor.
"On the eve of the test flight in 2018, it happened to be my mother's 70th birthday. I went back to Changde to celebrate her birthday. I was still worried about the accident in the test flight three days later. In fact, I was also afraid of death." Zhao Deli said.
Fortunately, the first flight was successful, and the dream that Zhao Deli insisted was seen by more and more people, including He Xiaopeng.
He Xiaopeng believes that once the smart car can fly, it will be even more powerful.
In Zhao Deli's view, the market for cars that can drive and fly will be larger than that of vertical take-off and landing aircraft, and with the injection of funds from He Xiaopeng and Xiaopeng Motors, he no longer has to worry about financial constraints and can focus more on flying. R&D.
The two hit it off.
In October 2021, Xpeng Huitian completed a $500 million Series A financing, many of which are shareholders of Xpeng Motors.
With the increase of funds and R&D personnel, Xiaopeng Huitian has accelerated its pace. Combining the core technology of the fourth-generation product Traveler X1 and the design genes of Xiaopeng Motors P7, the fifth-generation product Traveler X2 has been launched.
This iterative flying car has a battery of 560kg and can carry two passengers with a maximum load of 200kg.
At present, Xiaopeng Huitian is developing the sixth-generation flying car.
It is envisaged that this is a flying car that can really drive on the road and fly in the sky. Its size is comparable to that of a conventional car, and it can drive freely on open roads.
It is designed with the configuration of "road and air", and it can also be switched to the flight mode through the folding deformation system, take off and land vertically under the conditions permitted by regulations and the environment, cross rivers, obstacles, congested roads, etc., to meet people's short distance. Low altitude needs.
At this stage, the research and development direction of the products is still mainly based on car attributes. It is planned that about 90% of the time will be driven on the road, and 10% of the time will be able to fly in the sky; in the long run, with the continuous increase in the battery life and mileage of flying cars, With the increase of flight scenarios and the improvement of flight convenience, coupled with the reduction of user thresholds and costs, flying cars may spend 90% of the time flying in the sky and 10% of the time for short-distance movement on the ground.
At that time, flying cars can realize door-to-door, end-to-end, unsupervised, and autonomous 3D travel scenarios.
Zhao Deli said that Xiaopeng Huitian and CATL are jointly developing power batteries for flying cars. It is the rapid development of domestic batteries, motors, electronic control and other components and smart cars, which will also speed up the intelligent networking of aircraft. Empower.
According to the plan, Xiaopeng Huitian will realize the mass production and delivery of the sixth-generation flying car in 2024.
my country's policy supports the development of flying cars.
Among them, the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Science and Technology jointly released the "Outline of the Medium- and Long-Term Development Plan for Scientific and Technological Innovation in the Transportation Sector (2021-2035)" on January 24 this year, which mentioned: "Deploy the research and development of flying vehicles, break through the integration of aircraft and vehicles, Technologies such as free switching between flight and ground driving.”
At present, there are four main players in the global flying car market: traditional aviation manufacturers such as Boeing, Airbus, and Bell Helicopter; traditional car manufacturers such as Audi, Toyota, Daimler, and Geely; DJI, EHang, etc. Drone companies, as well as emerging startups such as lilium, Archer, and Xiaopeng Huitian.
According to industry research reports such as Roland Berger's "On the Market Potential of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) in the Asia-Pacific Region" published in February 2022, countries in the Asia-Pacific region will implement advanced air mobility (AAM) by 2030. service, the global urban air mobility industry scale will reach 1.5 trillion US dollars in 2040, and by 2050, there will be nearly 100,000 flying cars worldwide for air taxis, airport shuttles and intercity aviation, only in the Asia-Pacific region. AAM services revenue could reach $36.9 billion.
Some companies are optimistic about the prospect of flying cars. However, as a new species that completely subverts the original mode of travel, flying cars still need a long period of development and iteration.
At present, there are still few companies that specialize in the research and development of flying cars. Although there are already ultra-low-altitude aircrafts that have been put into commercial applications, their prices are often in the millions of dollars. The flying car market has just started, and relevant policies and regulations have not yet been established and perfected, which is different from cars. , air traffic needs more sophisticated planning and stricter control, and commercialization will take time.
In addition, flying cars also have various problems to be solved in terms of technology and products.
Xiaopeng Huitian said that it is difficult and right to do the right thing.
Musk and Li Shufu love "God"
Not only He Xiaopeng is eyeing the airspace, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Geely Chairman Li Shufu have already taken action, but their respective offensive directions are different.
At the beginning of June this year, the first orbit of the "Geely Future Travel Constellation" with nine stars was launched at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center with one arrow and nine stars, and the satellite successfully entered the predetermined orbit.
Geely became the first domestic car company to successfully launch a satellite.
As early as 2018, two experimental satellites of SpaceX, Tesla CEO Musk's space exploration technology company, have successfully "goed up" and carried out ground communication tests.
In the same year, Geely strategically invested in the aerospace technology company Zhejiang Space-Time Daoyu Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Space-Time Daoyu"), and officially began to build a high-precision space-time information system integrating space and earth.
The system can provide remote sensing AI services, high-precision positioning, and space-based remote sensing communication services.
This is similar to Musk's "Star Chain" plan, which is to create a "satellite Internet", that is, an air base station.
However, from the current point of view, after Li Shufu and Musk compete for "airspace rights", the focus of applications to be built is different.
A person from Geely told Yicai.com that Geely’s involvement in satellite, chip, mobile phone and other businesses is centered on automobiles, and all work is carried out around the automobile business. Ultimately, it is to strengthen the technology ecosystem and build the core competitiveness of automobiles.
The layout of "Geely's Future Travel Constellation" actually pays more attention to the centimeter-level high-precision positioning it can provide, as well as the enabling role of high-precision positioning in the field of intelligent driving.
The reporter learned from Geely that in terms of the integrated high-precision positioning service of heaven and earth, Lynk & Co and Shikong Daoyu have completed two national road tests for high-precision positioning. For the demand for high-precision positioning, through positioning data collection, data analysis, and high-precision maps, the precise implementation of satellite high-precision positioning technology can be achieved.
The integrated high-precision space-time information system of heaven and earth can realize precise planning of routes, and help various applications of smart travel such as vehicle cloud management, vehicle-road coordination, intelligent driving, and automatic parking.
In the field of intelligent driving, users can obtain real-time high-precision positioning through in-vehicle terminals, as well as higher-precision road features, including zebra crossings, road signs, 3D architectural models, traffic lights, etc., which can help intelligent driving perception, decision-making, and control.
"The car in the future will be a 'super smart mobile terminal' with a high degree of integration between online and offline. The large-scale integration of the aerospace industry and the automotive industry will bring about far-reaching changes in commercial application scenarios." Geely said that it will also comprehensively upgrade Geely's subsidiaries Smart travel experience for users of brands such as Jikr, Lynk & Co, and Yuanyuan New Energy Commercial Vehicles,
Musk's "Starlink" plan has less mention of synergies with Tesla, but focuses on global coverage and low-cost communication services.
The original intention of "Starlink" is to target remote areas, ocean-going ships, aircraft and other areas that have not been covered by ground base stations.
In September last year, Musk said in an interview with the media that he hoped "Star Chain" would get a piece of the cake from global Internet service providers, so as to use the increased profits to provide more funds for SpaceX and provide an income for the next generation of rockets. source.
At present, the cooperation between "Star Chain" and Tesla is on super charging stations.
At the end of last year, Tesla began to deploy the "Starlink" satellite Internet system for its super charging stations, which can replace existing network connections, provide network services for charging car owners, and help Tesla deploy superchargers in more remote areas. charging station.
A person in the commercial aerospace industry told reporters that the current integration of Tesla and SpaceX satellites is mainly concentrated in the upstream, and the two sides have a certain synergy in manufacturing and supply chain management. As for how to apply the "Star Chain" downstream It is all about development, everything is possible in the future, and it will not be ruled out that it will be applied on a large scale in automobiles.
As of mid-May this year, Space X has launched more than 2,500 "Starlink" satellites to provide Internet access services for users in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and other countries.
Musk said that by 2027, the originally planned 12,000 satellites will be increased to 42,000, creating a global "star chain" network on the periphery of the earth.
Geely has not yet announced the specific number of satellites planned, but only said that the high-precision maps collected by Geely Surveying and Mapping will cover the whole country in 2023; before 2026, the satellites deployed by Geely will achieve "global no blind spots" communication and centimeter-level high-precision positioning. cover.
By then, the high-precision space-time information system built by Geely will be mainly used for commercial applications in the fields of intelligent driving, intelligent logistics, and customized remote sensing services.
The boundaries of the automotive industry are gradually blurring
The automotive industry has entered a period of once-in-a-century transformation. With the acceleration of technological innovation and the influx of large amounts of capital, smart cars are subverting functional cars and continue to accelerate their integration with other industries.
"Intelligence has brought great changes to the automotive industry, and the car products that were originally dominated by hardware have undergone essential changes. The joint definition of cars by software and hardware has become an industry consensus. In this great change, the boundaries of the automotive industry have gradually blurred, and automotive products are no longer It is an isolated island, and the entire industry chain has been restructured," said Zhao Fuquan, Dean of the Institute of Automotive Industry and Technology Strategy of Tsinghua University.
Under the industrial transformation, auto companies and technology companies are attacking each other's "private land", and in the face of uncertain risks and uncertain futures, many companies have formed alliances across borders.
In addition to building cars and satellites, Li Shufu is also building automotive robots with Baidu Chairman Li Yanhong.
Li Shufu once publicly stated that the car in his mind is a robot that can drive, maintain, refuel, charge, etc. by itself, and can become a human secretary and security guard. It is very intelligent.
And this coincides with Robin Li's definition of a car robot.
In March last year, Baidu and Geely jointly invested in the establishment of Jidu Automobile.
On June 8 this year, the ROBO-01, the first mass production concept car of Jidu Auto, was unveiled.
Xia Yiping, CEO of Jidu Automobile, believes: "The era of smart cars 3.0 is the era of automotive robots. The starting point of the era is the transfer of the 'driving rights' of cars from humans to AI, and AI drives the evolution of cars."
In other words, the foundation of automotive robots is the landing of high-level autonomous driving.
"With the deepening of intelligence, cars will require less and less human intervention, and vehicles will have the ability to think independently and even predict the needs of passengers." Gu Kang, a development engineer at an autonomous driving company in Shanghai, told Yicai.com Reporter, but the premise of these is the implementation of automatic driving, the attributes of the car have fundamentally changed, and the car wants to realize the concept of a third space, a second living room, and even a robot. Free yourself from the work of driving.
In the past 10 years, the power system, form, and interaction mode of automobiles have undergone tremendous changes, but the attributes of automobiles have not fundamentally changed yet.
"To turn a car into a robot, at least it needs to achieve L4 autonomous driving." Gu Kang said.
At present, although intelligent driving assistance systems emerge in an endless stream, subject to regulations and technical levels, there is still a long way to go before the popularization of autonomous driving.
The difficulty of future cars from dream to reality
Electric vehicles are rapidly encroaching on the fuel vehicle market, but more and more car companies are not only focusing on core components such as motors, motors, and electronic controls, as well as the electric vehicles themselves, but are accelerating the expansion of the boundaries of automobiles, making long-term layouts and integrating the two-dimensional transportation system. Upgrade to 3D traffic system.
"From autonomous driving, wire control, etc., cars are replicating the roads that the aviation industry has taken in the past few decades, but until now aircraft have not yet achieved fully autonomous driving. Compared with the sky, land traffic is more complicated." One person An investor in an assisted driving system company told reporters.
There are still huge differences in the industry when autonomous driving will actually land.
Not only are there still bottlenecks in technological development, but also issues such as the ownership of rights and responsibilities for autonomous driving of smart cars are also very complicated.
Gu Kang believes that before the fundamentals of autonomous driving are clear, "automotive robots" are more of a concept, or even a gimmick.
The flying car, which is also built on the basis of autonomous driving, is even more difficult to turn from a dream into a reality than a "car robot".
Automatic driving in the air and on the ground has its own difficulties. There are various obstacles on the road, and the road conditions are very complex. However, automatic driving in the air requires detection of longer distances and higher safety requirements.
The two are superimposed together, and the difficulty of autonomous driving of flying cars will increase geometrically.
Among Xpeng Huitian employees, about 45% are from the automotive industry, and 20% are from the aviation industry.
A person in charge of technology research and development who has jumped from the aviation industry to Xiaopeng Huitian said in an interview with a reporter from China Business News that there are differences in the way of thinking between aviation people and auto people, and it is a very painful process to run-in. Iterative change is relatively slow. An aviation person often experiences one or two iterations of aircraft products in his career, while the iteration speed in the automotive field is much faster, and more attention must be paid to space, weight, cost, etc. in the design process. Factors such as weight are measured in "grams" and don't directly translate the self-driving technology in aviation to flying cars.
Cross-border integration is a big challenge.
Xiaopeng Motors has experienced the pain of integration of Autobots and Internet people.
The speed of the Internet industry is fast, and the products are brought to the market as soon as possible. Through the extensive participation of users, the products are constantly modified, so as to realize the rapid iteration of the software and hardware of the products.
In the traditional automobile industry, it took about five years to replace a new car in the past.
Although Xpeng Motors has gradually found a balance between Internet thinking and automobile manufacturing through continuous exploration, Xpeng Huitian is now facing the integration of aircraft, automobiles and Internet technologies, which is more difficult.
At present, Xiaopeng Huitian is facing many technical challenges, such as high power density and stable and reliable motor technology, high energy density and high safety power battery technology, aerial autonomous driving technology, lightweight technology, pneumatic technology, etc., but the largest The challenge is the coupling of aviation technology and intelligent electric vehicle technology, which is not only a technical challenge, but also a challenge in company management and systems.
In addition to overcoming these difficulties, the uncertainty of the development of flying cars also includes the policy level.
At present, for the emerging field of flying cars, there is no existing set of special regulations applicable in China.
Therefore, relevant companies need to simultaneously promote the research and formulation of relevant policies and regulations during the journey of flying cars, including the basis for airworthiness certification and operating rules of flying cars.
In addition, the low-altitude airspace opening schedule and the speed of building the low-altitude air traffic control system are also the main challenges for the expansion of product usage scenarios.
Regarding automobile innovation and integration, He Xiaopeng said that automobiles are closely related to everyone's life safety. When talking about innovation in the field of automobiles, we must make automobiles well after we have good ideas. No matter how the automobile industry develops, the essence of automobiles is very short in a short period of time. Difficult to change.
Enterprise innovation requires not only innovative ideas, but also innovative genes, sufficient capital and patience. This year alone, Xiaopeng Motors’ R&D expenses in the ecosystem and automotive system have reached 8 billion yuan. Tesla and Huawei’s Research and development costs are often 7 billion to 8 billion US dollars.
In addition, in the process of innovation, we have to endure long-term loneliness and ridicule from many people, so innovation requires courage.
It took Tesla 17 years to turn a profit in the electric car market.
Xpeng Motors, which was established in 2014, has yet to achieve profitability.
In the first quarter of this year, Xiaopeng Motors’ net loss widened to 1.7 billion yuan.
Xiaopeng Motors explained that this is due to the doubling of R&D expenditures due to the development of new models and the increase in R&D personnel.
In today's smart car system, the time, intensity and investment of research and development are very important.
In the intelligent second half, uncertainties will increase significantly, and the market will be more complicated.
In order to leverage the smart electric vehicle market as soon as possible, Toyota plans to provide a version of the OMG (One Motion Grip) driving control package equipped with a special-shaped steering wheel and a linear transformation system on the new Bz4X pure electric vehicle. However, the Bz4X pure electric vehicle currently on sale is only Whether the round steering wheel version and the special-shaped steering wheel version can pass relevant regulations is still unknown.
The innovation of the car itself is not easy, and it is even more difficult to cross the border.
BYD has tried to build a three-dimensional intelligent transportation system such as cloud rail and cloud bus. As early as 2016, it launched cloud rail with a total investment of 5 billion to build, and plans to put driverless technology on cloud rail first, and then introduce it into electric vehicles. .
However, in the past few years, due to issues such as project approval and commercialization, the progress of the cloud rail project has not been satisfactory.
If the L4 and L5 high-level autonomous driving of smart cars is to be implemented in the future, it must first pass the safety, cost, high integration of intelligent components, dataization, rapid full-scenario intelligent driving, and related policies.
Before the breakthrough of high-level autonomous driving, it is even more difficult for smart cars to land in the direction of automobile robots and flying cars.
Some traditional car companies want to be surprising, and some new car manufacturers want to be unexpected.
The road of innovation is full of thorns, and no company can easily succeed, but there are always brave people who overcome the thorns.