Year-end inventory丨intelligent era, those disappearing car hardware

[? Yio guide?] The first thing you need to do is to get your hands on a new car. This is the era of "mechanical, intelligent", some hardware is destined to be eliminated, but some of them seem to be "not yet arrived" ......

Editor's note2019, the automotive industry is full of pessimism: a number of OEMs are heading for death, the decline in the car market continues to expand, the financial pressure on the new car-making forces is steep, and the time-share industry is dead.

Also in 2019, the automotive industry is bursting with a lot of new opportunities: the national charging network is gradually opened, the door to the export of second-hand cars is opened, L2-level autonomous driving technology is more popular, and the market continues to focus on advantageous enterprises.

2019 is a key year in the transition from the 21st century decade to the 20th century, and reviewing this year is conducive to seeing farther into the future. For this reason, YEEO Automotive has launched a series of articles entitled "Review 2019, Prospect 2020" to help you fully understand the automotive market in 2019. This article is the eighth in the series.

Author: Wang Rui

Editor: Hao Qiuhui

The intelligent era is rapidly approaching, and the definition of automobile is changing from "transportation" to "intelligent product". The automotive hardware that was important in the mechanical and electronic era is gradually losing ground in the intelligent era.

The cake of smart cars is getting bigger and bigger. Accenture research report predicts that by 2020, the world will have 210 million intelligent networked cars, the penetration rate is close to 60%; McKinsey has proposed that by 2025, the global smart car market size will reach 1.9 trillion U.S. dollars.

At the same time, the status of intelligence in the hearts of consumers is getting higher and higher. According to J.D.Power's 2018 Chinese Consumers' Intelligent and Connected Vehicle Awareness Survey, 91% of Chinese consumers will prioritize intelligent and connected vehicles when purchasing a new car, and more than half of Chinese consumers are willing to bear an extra 20% of the price to buy an intelligent and connected vehicle.

The ever-expanding market and consumers' growing emphasis on intelligence have prompted car companies to keep betting on automotive intelligence.

On the other hand, China is also promoting the process of automotive intelligence through the policy dimension.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), and other departments have successively put forward the need to promote the technological innovation of intelligent networked vehicles. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has proposed in the Medium and Long-term Development Plan for the Automobile Industry that the assembly rate of new cars with DA (Driver Assistance), PA (Partial Autonomous Driving), and CA (Conditional Autonomous Driving) will exceed 50% in 2020, and the assembly rate of Internet-connected Driver Assistance System will reach 10%; and the assembly rate of new cars with DA, PA, and CA will exceed 80% in 2025.

When intelligence becomes the trend of the automotive industry, global car companies can only choose to go forward. And in this process, which parts will exit the automotive stage?

Automobile "core": internal and external hardware will go?

"The basis of automotive intelligence is electrification." BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu once said.

The underlying technologies of automotive intelligence, such as computer technology, communication technology, Internet technology, etc., are all dependent on a continuous and stable supply of electricity. Therefore, smart cars first need to be equipped with batteries.

Compared with electric motors, internal combustion engines are extremely difficult to realize electronic control, and are not in line with intelligent trends such as self-driving. Since the vehicle is already equipped with batteries, it is better to "do neither" and replace the fuel drive with electric drive, which in turn will support the intelligentization of automobiles.

Electrification in the car to bring the dawn of intelligence at the same time, but also for the traditional car four components (engine, chassis, body, electrical equipment) laid out a must-answer question: is eliminated, or be transformed? Although there are many hardware to choose the former, but one of the most attention, undoubtedly, is still the engine and transmission.

The engine is the heart of the car, which determines the car's power, economy, stability, etc.; the gearbox helps the engine exert better power performance by changing the transmission ratio to adapt to different driving speeds and conditions. In the car to realize the transformation of electrification, the engine and transmission "with life *** death", will go to the "museum" together.

(Tesla center-control layout)

What will be eliminated is not only the engine, transmission and other internal hardware, when the era of intelligence comes, some of the external hardware "close contact" with consumers will also be "gone".

The first to bear the brunt is the center control physical buttons. Just as the physical buttons of cell phones were replaced by touch phones, physical buttons are being replaced by "a screen", and the first car company to take the crab was Tesla.

Before 2012, the center control of a car was dominated by physical buttons: in the T-shaped layout of the center console, the physical buttons controlling music, air conditioning and other functions were densely distributed. How to arrange the buttons in a way that was both aesthetically pleasing and practical became a major headache for interior engineers.

When the Tesla Model?S made its stunning debut in 2012 with a large screen, the automotive center control entered a new era. More and more car companies began to take pride in "a screen", in which the new energy car companies are particularly aggressive, physical buttons have come to an end.

The second is the steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal and other components closely related to automatic driving. SAE?Inernational (Society of Automotive Engineers International) will be divided into five levels of automatic driving, of which the L5 level of fully automated driving by the automatic control of the car's computer, do not need to be operated by human beings, the car will be removed from the steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal and other parts of human beings used to drive the car. steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal and other parts that humans use to drive the car.

Back in February 2013, Toyota showed the steering wheel-less FV2 concept car; in March 2018, Volkswagen also introduced the steering wheel-less four-door electric coupe I.D. Vizzion concept car. For some EV owners who are used to using the strong kinetic energy recovery mode, single-pedal operation has become one of the users' daily habits.

In addition to the above "big objects", some "small objects" are also leaving our lives and will become increasingly rare. Taking car keys as an example, "keyless entry" has become a feature of most cars nowadays. Of course, most "keyless entry" actually means replacing the mechanical key with a smart key. However, such as Tesla and other car companies, has realized the use of smartphone APP to open the door, start the car, etc., the value of the car key is being weakened.

Automotive hardware that has not yet reached its end

While a lot of hardware is doomed to disappear in the future, YEEO believes that it is unreasonable to advocate its disappearance, and that the vast majority of hardware will be retained for quite some time.

First of all, the electric drive will not be able to completely replace the fuel drive in a short period of time, mainly because the volume of new energy vehicles is still small, and they are still not economical and environmentally friendly enough.

According to Jato?Dynamic, a British automotive research company, global car sales in 2018 were 86 million, of which 1.26 million were pure electric vehicles, accounting for only 1.5% of total sales. According to Deloitte's analysis, global sales of new energy vehicles will reach 21 million in 2030, still belonging to the "minority", fuel vehicles will occupy the majority of the market. 2019 June subsidy slopes, China's new energy vehicle market suffered a heavy blow, from July to November sales fell five consecutive year-on-year.

On the one hand, the electric vehicle industry is small in volume, highly dependent on subsidies, and has yet to become self-reliant; on the other hand, as of now, electric vehicles are not more environmentally friendly than fuel vehicles, and may even emit more pollutants. According to research data from Paul?Miles, director of the Engine Combustion Laboratory at Sandia National Laboratories in the U.S., as of 2018, the share of thermal power in the source of electricity remains high, which leads to pure electric vehicle carbon emissions in the whole life cycle compared to fuel vehicles are still high.

Secondly, fully automated driving is still difficult to realize in a short period of time.In March 2019, Thomas Selander, head of Volkswagen commercial vehicles, stated that it would still take five years for Volkswagen to master higher-level automated driving technology. His judgment represents the view of the vast majority of the automotive industry on the landing date of fully automated driving: human beings still need to wait for 5 to 10 years, or even longer.

Yiou Auto believes that the engine, transmission and other components that are "tightly bound" to the fuel car will remain "tenacious" together with the fuel car; the steering wheel and other components that are repulsive to autonomous driving will be "absent" because of the fully automated driving. The steering wheel and other parts that are not compatible with autonomous driving will be retained because of the "absence" of fully autonomous driving. The center control buttons, keys and other parts, in the beginning of the intelligent era is on the verge of being eliminated, with the deepening of the degree of automotive intelligence, or will be more and more rare.

Mechanical is down, smart is up

"CES in Las Vegas used to be a home appliance industry exhibition, and most of the products on display today include AI, 5G and other technologies." KATRI Autonomous Vehicle Safety Research Institute Chief Operating Officer Lee Hyun-woo has told YEEO Automotive that the automotive industry is similar to the home appliance industry and is constantly evolving from a single manufacturing category in the direction of intelligence.

Yiou Auto believes that in the wave of intelligence, the auto industry's power of speech is being redistributed: mechanical is down, intelligent is up.

Taking the above automobile as an example, since the signing of the strategic cooperation agreement with Alibaba in July 2014, the two have been promoting automotive intelligent networking around Zebra*** together. With the reorganization of Zebra network and YunOS in August 2019, SAIC chose to "let go" of Zebra, Ali became the largest shareholder, which is behind the helplessness of traditional car companies.

The key technology of intelligent networked vehicles is ADAS and V2X, the core of the former is the sensor, chip and algorithm, the latter not only requires the "evolution" of the vehicle body, but also pay more attention to the vehicle, road, people and other mutual cooperation, which are outside the scope of the traditional automobile enterprises. In order to realize the intelligent transformation, car companies have to look for IT and Internet giants to help, but the latter's goal is often not limited to one or a few car companies, but the trillion-dollar level of automotive intelligent network market. Therefore, car companies in the search for help at the same time, but also in the loss of the right to speak, which is not in line with the traditional automotive ecological chain, "car companies for the big" form.

In any case, there's no doubt that China's automakers are at a new turning point.

China's auto industry started nearly a century later than its Western counterparts. As a latecomer, China has been in a catch-up situation, a situation that has not yet been reversed, from the automobile import and export data can be a glimpse of the current situation of China's auto industry.

According to China Customs data, in 2018, China exported 1.2 million units of automobiles, with an export value of $14.7 billion; and imported 1.14 million units of automobiles, with an import value of $50.7 billion. The number of exports is more than the number of imports, but the value of exports is much lower than the value of imports, which indicates that China's exports of vehicles unit price is low, and is still mostly "low-end car".

Hanging over the head of the Chinese automobile people is the problem: how to get rid of the low-end repeat manufacturing brand? Intelligent or for the Chinese car companies to fight to bend the road to overtake the opportunity.

In the engine, transmission and other traditional mechanical field, Chinese car companies have few possibilities to realize the reverse. The strategy of exchanging market for technology has brought strong momentum to the development of China's auto industry in the past two decades, but as reverse R & D enters the deep water, the shortcomings of China's auto companies' lack of forward R & D capabilities have begun to come to the fore.

To challenge the traditional giants, they must seize the window of change. Now, the intelligent new track is replacing the traditional mechanical old track, China and foreign countries will be in the same starting line, a real "fair game" is about to start.

(City traffic)

But the development of automotive intelligence today began to face a bottleneck, L5 level and even the L4 level of self-driving late in the future, the vehicle interconnection has not been realized, the intelligent only stays at the level of driving assistance and human-computer interaction. People can't help but ask: where is the next wind port of intelligence?

Yiou Auto believes that automotive intelligence is not a unilateral task of car companies, how to break the industry barriers, to achieve the automotive industry and multi-industry innovation and synergistic development, will be the key to automotive intelligence. Accompanied by the continued popularization of intelligent cars, with the continuous emergence of new variables such as 5G, intelligentization will be closer and closer to complete landing.

Edit: Hao Qiuhui

This article comes from the author of Automotive Home Car, and does not represent the viewpoint position of Automotive Home.