HUAWEI'S "Automobile Bureau" Logic: Not Building Cars, Building Platforms

After five years, HUAWEI motor Administration officially came to the surface.

"From April 17th to now, HUAWEI has further clarified what to do and how to do it in the future." In October 23rd, Xu Zhijun, chairman of the rotating chairman of HUAWEI, interviewed reporters at the Crowne Plaza Hotel less than two kilometers away from the world intelligent network Congress.

For the future layout of HUAWEI in the automotive industry, he has a clear attitude: HUAWEI does not build cars, and will become suppliers of incremental components in the future.

On the afternoon of October 22nd, the day before yesterday, Xu Zhijun delivered a speech at the opening ceremony of the World Congress of intelligent network. He proposed that HUAWEI will provide intelligent networking solutions including intelligent networking, cloud services, intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit and intelligent electric vehicle.

This is also following this year's Shanghai auto exhibition period, Xu pointed out that HUAWEI's layout of the automotive industry chain business ideas, more clearly put forward the business line and specific practices.

At the same time, this also means that HUAWEI, which does not build cars, has extended its tentacles to the core area of the future automotive industry. Of course, this is also a new field that most traditional car companies are not good at.

"At present, the commercial value of these businesses has not yet reached scale. In the future, they are expected to occupy 70% of the vehicle value, far beyond the value of traditional technologies such as body and chassis, and form a new incremental market." Xu Zhijun said.

According to the relevant departments estimates, by 2035, the intelligent network will occupy 20% of the world's new car market. By 2030, the demand for autopilot will increase the revenue of Automotive Software by more than 3 times, reaching US $1 trillion and 200 billion.

"With the deep integration of automobile and information communication technology, the intelligent network electric vehicle has become a new revolutionary development engine of human society, and its impact is far beyond two industries. The intelligent network will bring great changes to the human society, to the entire automobile industry and to people's travel." Xu Zhijun pointed out in his speech on the 22 th.

With the further development of the "new four modernizations" in the automotive industry, whether it is Mercedes Benz, BMW and other traditional vehicle companies, or BAT or other Internet giants, or BOSCH, NVIDIA and other parts suppliers, they are all in the layout of the intelligent network alliance. As a company with the core technology of ICT (information and communication), HUAWEI has no hesitation in getting involved in this competition.

Logic of HUAWEI

In fact, since the debut of the smart car incremental component supplier in the Shanghai auto show in April this year and the establishment of the smart car solution BU in May 27th, a series of intensive layout behind HUAWEI has been the focus of the outside world.

With the release of this strategy, the logic of HUAWEI's "no car making" is becoming clearer.

"Promoting HUAWEI's determination to" do not build cars, help car manufacturers build good cars "is a consensus reached with the vast number of car companies. Xu Zhijun said, "after years of development, the quality of China's automobile industry has basically risen. Manufacturing capacity has also risen. In the process of" new four modernizations ", the most scarce part of Chinese auto companies is component suppliers and technology providers.

And the auto industry driving toward autopilot is also the basic judgement of HUAWEI's future development trend. In HUAWEI's view, the value of the car will be built more in the future of ICT technology, which is also a capability that traditional automobile companies do not have.

"First, do not make traditional parts. We focus on ICT technology and capabilities, and experience. In the process of electric, intelligent, shared and networking, we are positioning ourselves as incremental component providers.

Xu Zhijun pointed out that HUAWEI is essentially in the industry to meet the needs of the intelligent network vehicle scene. "HUAWEI's capability is to provide parts, technologies and solutions for car companies, which is most consistent with HUAWEI's genes."

As we all know, the mature intelligent network will inevitably merge into many fields, such as chip, OS, voice, map, cloud computing, AI, big data, 5G, V2X and driverless.

HUAWEI believes that in the future, every vehicle will become a mobile data center. When the car really drives toward autopilot, it needs to configure sensors such as lidar, millimeter wave radar, camera and so on. At the same time, in this case, the ability of information processing and the capacity of data transmission are huge.

And HUAWEI's particularity is here. Over the years, the accumulation of technology in the ICT field has just opened up the two key links in the chip (Computing) and communication (5G) field of the future intelligent network union vehicle, and has the opportunity to lay the underlying structure and industry standard of the intelligent network.

"CCA (Computing + communication) architecture and traditional architecture are different in nature, so it is impossible for traditional architecture to go to AI network, because the future AI network is MDC (mobile data center), each vehicle is a data center, and every vehicle in the future will be very powerful." Xu Zhijun further said.

And the most important thing is that HUAWEI, which announces "no car", is planning a more profound change in the automotive field.

In the view of Xu Jun Jun, the real foresight is not only to build a car, but to build a platform and combine the platform with the industry, so that the hardware can be replaced and the software can be upgraded.

"This is a continuous process of upgrading the corresponding experience during the life cycle of the vehicle. The future car will be sold as a platform, which can continue to provide consumers with experience and continue to create value for the industry chain. Xu Zhijun told reporters that "in the car's life cycle, hardware and software can be iterated and upgraded to fully intelligent driving, and the future automotive industry development opportunities will be here."

How to land?

In fact, HUAWEI's "automobile bureau" can be traced back to the development of vehicle module in 2009. Since the establishment of the vehicle Networking Laboratory in 2014, HUAWEI has launched a number of solutions in the three aspects of the vehicle network, including the terminal, the tube and the cloud. It has jointly developed the vehicle network with Dongfeng Motor and established cooperation with GAC, SAIC, FAW and the Great Wall.

In the latest business layout, HUAWEI will fully empower car companies from five areas, smart car cloud, intelligent network, intelligent cockpit, intelligent driving and intelligent electric.

"Our core concept is to integrate the intelligent cockpit platform with the whole intelligent terminal ecosystem." Xu Zhijun said that the intelligent cockpit is based on the smart phone Unicorn chip plus the Hong Meng operating system, bringing the smart terminal's hardware ecology and application ecology to the entire intelligent cockpit, and establishing a wide range of intelligent terminal ecosystem in the entire industry. This wide range of intelligent ecology really realizes scale and low cost.

The purpose of HUAWEI's intelligent electric platform is to create a differentiated experience for electric vehicles. In the future, it will make full use of the scale and generality of energy industry and the consistency of devices, so as to reduce the cost of the whole electromotion and solve the problems of electric drive, charging and battery management.

At the same time, HUAWEI will also solve the intelligent cockpit ecology through the intelligent cockpit control system, the vehicle control platform and the vehicle operating system, and three domain control systems, including charging, future electric drive, vehicle control and vehicle power control, to help the automobile realize the intelligent network association.

"We hope that in the future, we can put hundreds of CPU and intelligent driving abilities into the three domain controllers, and then connect them through Ethernet to connect all the sensors. Through the distributed network, reduce the connection lines of each millimeter wave radar, laser radar and camera. " Xu Zhijun said.

And the most critical is the MDC intelligent driving platform. "Autopilot operating system will be an open system in the future, just like Android of smart phone or similar to hung Meng as an open system to support all car companies, Tier1 and application developers. They are developing an intelligent driving system based on this operating system. This is an ecosystem." Xu Zhijun explained.

Of course, in the process of landing the whole strategy, Xu also did not shy away from the challenges HUAWEI is facing.

"HUAWEI is the best in embedded software in the world. If we do not have such a strong embedded software capability, 5G will not be able to do this today. But what HUAWEI lacks in software is the ability to go to the cloud and move towards distributed architecture. From the perspective of Internet mode, HUAWEI is in its infancy and may have a gap with Facebook, Google and Amazon.

For future earnings expectations, Xu Zhijun said that although the automotive industry has formed a clear development thinking, but HUAWEI committed to building the most advanced technology, early in the pursuit of yield returns, the key now is to make products competitive.

"Next year, HUAWEI will turn Unicorn into cockpit chips and turn them into MDC chips. There will be several VDC chips in the future, and I hope HUAWEI will build a basic capability in the vehicle regulation chip. " For the next plan, Xu finally said.

It is understood that the exhibition hall of HUAWEI BU in Shanghai will be officially unveiled before the end of the year. At that time, HUAWEI's relevant achievements and products in the automotive industry will also be officially open to the industry.