Construct the c dimension of this "basket"

"Software-defined car" (software? Definition? Vehicle? SDV) is becoming a hot word in the post-epidemic era. First, Volkswagen CEO Dr. Diss praised Tesla. Recently, independent brands have also announced that they have sounded the horn of "software-defined cars".

The "software-defined car" mainly faces the understanding of consumers, and there are different opinions in the frontier field of car enterprise research and development.

Because this involves what is the foundation behind the software. For example, what kind of architecture is the software based on? How is the operating system defined? Who will define it? What problems will information islands encounter in the process of opening up the Internet of Everything, and how to solve them? Including how to define the enterprise organizational structure behind software development. This involves a deeper problem.

For example, Huang Shaotang, CTO and Assistant President of jiangling motors, said at a forum in August that "software defines cars and architecture defines software." In his view, software is tactics and architecture is strategy. So, we need to be clear, what exactly defines the future car?

Architecture or software?

Let's talk about why the concept of "software-defined car" appeared. In fact, just give a simple example. What is the "heterogeneous" Tesla that advocates this concept? X or model? After two years of use, the residual value of S can still be maintained at 57.22% and 57.74% (data disclosed at the annual meeting of China Automobile Finance and Hedging Rate Research Committee on 2019). This is a miracle when the residual value of second-hand electric vehicles is terrible.

Besides, have you used it recently? Models? It sells well in the American market. According to the data of the average sales days of used cars in the United States, it takes an average of 68.9 days for a used car to go on the market. Just a model? 3 appears on the website of the car dealer. Car dealers can sell it in an average of 29.3 days if the car is in good condition and the mileage is normal.

Tesla model? 3 quality workmanship, in fact, is not comparable to the top products of domestic independent brands. The reason why used cars can sell fuel cars lies entirely in the powerful functions of car software and intelligent driving assistance. This is enough to explain the function of software FOTA in maintaining and increasing the value of automobile products.

Behind the rise of Tesla is the automobile industry that has experienced "mechanical defined automobile", "electrical defined automobile" and "electronic defined automobile", and is now entering the era of "software defined automobile".

The most obvious thing about "software-defined car" is the change of business model. For example, according to McKinsey's calculation, in 2020 alone, Tesla customers' optional assisted driving and future fully automatic driving software packages will bring them a gross profit of nearly10 ~1200 million US dollars. In addition, McKinsey predicts that by 2030, the automobile market with software and electronic architecture will reach $469 billion. It can be said that the prospects are bright.

So, why do the frontier areas of the automobile industry think that architecture is more important? The reason, as the insiders say, "The key to defining a car with software is to reconstruct the underlying hardware and software infrastructure." Moreover, with the acceleration of the "new four modernizations", the competition of modern car companies has become more intelligent, such as autonomous driving and vehicle FOTA. The basis of this competition also depends on the electrical and electronic architecture (EEA) of the vehicle.

In other words, what kind of architecture is used to carry the operation of the software? The whole automobile industry needs to reconsider the development of in-vehicle software and electronic and electrical architecture and turn to more modular SOA (service-oriented? Architecture, service-oriented architecture), which makes it easier to build modular software components. This is the background of the rise of SOA.

Think about it, a few years ago, cars transmitted 65,438+05,000 pieces of data a second, but in 2020, there were more than 65,438+000,000 pieces of data to be processed. For another example, according to NXP official website's previous forecast, from 20 15 to 2025, the number of automobile codes is expected to increase exponentially, with an average compound annual growth rate of about? 2 1%。 Some car codes have exceeded 200 million lines. In the past, the data speed of cars was about 150 kilobytes per second, but now it is gigabytes per second. In the future, if we enter the era of L5-class fully-automatic driving cars, the required data and operation speed will be even more amazing. Automobile has become an extremely complex software carrier.

Therefore, SOA is becoming an increasingly important architectural design idea, which can also be said to be a problem-solving method or "solution framework". To put it simply, SOA requires all controllers in the car to provide their own capabilities in the form of services, so as to build a flexible platform system independent of vehicle models, chips and operating systems and support various applications.

However, the difficulty is that SOA is difficult to switch to the existing development architecture, because the current mainstream automotive software development variable space based on AUTOSAR is insufficient (I won't go into details for lack of space). However, even though SOA has become the mainstream, traditional car companies are still hesitant because they need to rebuild EEA, that is, the electronic and electrical architecture of the whole vehicle. I can't do it without changing it. For example, in the aspect of autonomous driving, the limit of the traditional EEA distributed architecture is to carry L2-level autonomous driving, and L3-level has gone beyond the scope. So, what about L4 and L5?

Take Volkswagen's Eighth Generation Golf as an example. Is it based on MQB? The first product of the EVO platform, the original architecture is overwhelmed, so a new one can? FD and on-board Ethernet technology increase the bus bandwidth from 500K to 2M, which is equivalent to transforming half the architecture. In other words, it is to solve the problem from a lower level of logic. However, this has also led to software problems, delivery delays and practical difficulties.

Based on the new MEB platform and equipped with E3 cross-domain convergence architecture, Volkswagen ID.3 was finally delivered in September this year after a year's delay. However, according to soochow securities's analysis, because Volkswagen still relies mainly on multiple traditional suppliers to realize a complete software system and is bound by functional safety standards, its software architecture still relies on AUTOSAR architecture, that is, the interface between the upper and lower levels is standardized. Compared with Tesla's software system, the architecture is still worse than Tesla's generation.

After all, Tesla's model? 3 has been upgraded from distributed domain integration architecture to foreign integration architecture, which is a step forward to cloud central computing architecture. You can't help but admit the gap, otherwise Diss won't praise Musk.

Worldwide, as a leading enterprise of domestic independent brands, Jason, deputy general manager of Changan Automobile Intelligent Research Institute and general manager of Changan Automobile Software Technology Co., Ltd. also agreed at a forum that "a good architecture can lay the foundation of software."

In fact, there is another key point. The current situation of software development in automobile enterprises is that most of the software is outsourced. Only through the new architecture can the dominance of software development return to the hands of car companies. Therefore, structural changes require car companies to "spend a lot of money", but they will also move the "cheese" of spare parts supplier Tier 1. This is the deep reason why the public has encountered structural changes, and it is also the background that domestic car companies dare not move easily.

"separation of software and hardware"

We should understand the "software-defined car" and the important concept of "software and hardware decoupling" behind it. This is also an important feature of "architecture definition software".

Decoupling of software and hardware means separation of software and hardware development. Because, with the development of intelligent cockpit and autonomous driving technology, vehicles need more ECU and sensors, and in order to realize FOTA and "software-defined car", if the software and hardware are not separated, the probability of smart cars making mistakes will be very high. In recent years, the electronic and software bugs in automobile recalls have increased greatly, which is proof. A data of 20 18 shows that the proportion of software failures has risen to 15% in all car recalls.

An example of understanding "decoupling" is the mobile phone. At first, the software and hardware in the mobile phone were closely coupled, but with the rise of smart phones, the current mobile phone has already become a software platform without considering the underlying hardware.

The same situation also happens in automotive software, but the original distributed EEA has reached the bottleneck, ECU comes from different suppliers, embedded software is different from the underlying code, and the software ecology is complex, while Tier 1 is naturally resistant to "reinventing its own life" and has no motivation. Therefore, the transition to "software-defined car" means that the relationship between car companies and partners must change.

For example, in the past, ECM was updated according to the development cycle of "model year", including Tier 1 (engineering? Change? Management (engineering change management) is generally a cycle of 2~3 years. Now this method can't keep up with the requirements of the times, and OTA needs to be promoted through "agile method" (agile method is a new software development method that rose from 1990).

For another example, due to the demand for extensive ecosystem interaction brought about by the development of the Internet of Vehicles, the demand for computing is increasing day by day. Automobile companies must develop big data analysis systems to deal with this huge data stream, even close to real-time processing. This requires car companies to attach great importance to the importance of software and the idea of "iteration". When visiting car companies, the reporter also saw that companies such as Changan and Chery have established their own big data analysis centers.

On the other hand, let's look back at the relevant data of Tesla, as the first heterogeneous to realize FOTA. From 20 12 to 20 19 in April, the iteration exceeded 100 times, including 1 1 Bug fixes, 67 full-featured imports and 64 interactive interfaces. In addition, the calling function OTA is implemented from 20 16, and Smart is implemented from 20 19 to 10? Summoning function OTA Every big FOTA has created a leap-forward experience improvement. For users, this kind of smart phone has a common and ever-changing feeling, which cannot be provided by fuel vehicles.

After a narrow escape, Wei Lai also realized the support of SOTA and FOTA, and more importantly, FOTA. SOTA mainly upgrades UI, navigation and audio/video. In FOTA, Weilai has realized the renewal of chassis, assisted driving, power and infotainment, and car body. At present, the iteration speed of Weilai OTA has maintained an average of one version per month. According to statistics, more than 260,000 trains have been pushed and more than 90 new functions have been added.

For example, at the Beijing Auto Show, Li Bin also announced that NOP pilot assistance will be accompanied by NIO? OS？ The upgrade of 2.7.0 was pushed to users in batches through FOTA in the middle of 10. The pace of upgrade of Weilai software version is also beyond the reach of many traditional car companies at present. And this rhythm is making traditional car companies feel tremendous pressure.

Of course, there is also a problem about "software and hardware decoupling" to be considered. With the increasing status of digital module in vehicle architecture, the demand for hardware configuration behind vehicle software is increasing. In other words, software solves the problems in the application layer, but if hardware and communication can't keep up, what must be solved is a deeper and more basic problem. This is the view of some insiders.

Zhu Huarong, Chairman of Changan Automobile, told reporters during the Beijing Auto Show that this round is obviously a rapid change from hardware function to software definition. At this stage, there will be a combination of software and hardware to enhance a series of capabilities of automobile product definition and function. "I can't simply say that hardware is worthless. I think hardware is like a person's basic physical state. In poor health, it is useless to have a good brain. But when you are healthy, software can make people smarter. "

Also holding the same opinion is An Conghui, CEO and President of Geely Automobile Group. In an interview with the commune reporter, he also said that the hardware layer is the advantage of traditional car companies, and the design, development, verification, experiment, simulation and analysis of the whole mechanical architecture. But this advantage should be transformed into the integration of the whole new energy and other software, and reversed. "We think it should be a combination of software and hardware, not only software, but also the hardware of traditional cars we understand now." This will bring a very extreme experience to customers. "And the" integration "he said, of course, also needs software and hardware decoupling, and it is realized under the new architecture.

However, the solution of this basic problem is still easier than software. Because the basic problems are roughly divided into two categories: the lack of computing power of hardware chips in a narrow sense and the lack of communication capabilities in a broad sense. Nowadays, high computing power chips and communication facilities, including 5G, are developing rapidly. For car companies, it is nothing more than finding a balance between performance, quality and cost.

Therefore, we know that behind the "software-defined car", there should be a "basket" based on the definition of advanced architecture. Although consumers can see the software, the "basket" of the architecture developed by car companies is more important, and the traditional underlying logic needs to be subverted and reconstructed. What we need to do is to keep a more open mind and meet the unknown variables.

Postscript: the birth of C dimension

After ten years of development, the automobile commune is now trying to think about the development law of automobile and even pan-science and technology from the source. Since its opening the day before yesterday, we have started to push the "C-Dimension" column on the official WeChat account of the automobile commune every week, and will launch a new official WeChat account in the future, and continue to pay attention to new technologies and new formats from the perspective of in-depth observation.

C is a magic letter. Cars, communications, and chips all start with C. Comments, fees, and challenges all start with this letter. The "case" of the "new four modernizations" is closely related to it. Naturally, the champion is next to them in vocabulary.

Please pay attention to our follow-up unremitting efforts.

Text/Wang Xiaoxi

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This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.