At the recent Huawei new product launch event, P40 series mobile phones and smart screens took the absolute limelight. Compared with them, the launch of Huawei HiCar is not a big move.
But this is indeed the first time that Huawei has fully displayed Hicar's product form, which means that Huawei's actions on automobiles have begun to make substantial progress.
In fact, Huawei's continuous actions in the intelligent connected car market in the past two years also emphasized its determination to enter the automotive industry. The release of HiCar is just the beginning, and Huawei's ambitions are slowly being released.
HiCar, Huawei's first step
HiCar's demonstration in the car is clearly telling people that it is different from other car-machine mapping schemes.
The car-machine mapping solution is the easiest way to make a car smart. As long as there is a screen and USB interface in the car, the mobile app can be "projected" to the car screen.
The most well-known car-machine mapping is Apple's CarPlay.
But this kind of solution just puts the mobile phone App on the car, and the functions that can be achieved are relatively limited, and only basic applications such as navigation and music are available.
In addition to HiCar, you can connect your mobile phone to the car and share multimedia. NFC can be used as a car key, and you can even use your mobile phone to connect to the camera in the car for video calls.
This, coupled with the AI capabilities of Huawei's mobile phones, can also determine the driver's fatigue to remind driving safety.
Huawei said that HiCar can access Huawei's capabilities in AI, voice, computer vision, etc., and use the 5G network of mobile devices to strengthen the data interaction capabilities of the vehicle-machine system.
Huawei announced the technical architecture of HiCar in the "Huawei HiCar Ecological White Paper" released in August 2019, while emphasizing HiCar's 4S positioning:
Safety) takes travel safety as a baseline, implants safety interaction genes in interaction design standards and technology implementation, and provides active-safety capabilities such as driver abnormal behavior detection
· Smart Connection: non-inductive connection, providing high-speed, minimalist connection; diversion of mobile phone users to the car;
· Seamless Experience: Consistent experience inside and outside the vehicle, distributed core platform capabilities. Consumers do not need to pay attention to who provides the resources, only to enjoy the services provided. For example music outside the car is played on the mobile phone, after connecting to the car, it is automatically connected to the car automatically, and the music is output through the car audio;
· Resource Sharing: hardware mutual assistance, such as mobile phone AI computing power sharing; cars have better communication antennas, combined with mobile phone communication capabilities; comprehensive use of car machine, mobile phone GPS data when navigation, more accurate navigation; when voice interaction Combining the respective advantages of mobile phones and mobile phones, we can learn from each other's strengths in terms of voice wake-up and voice recognition, and achieve better results that cannot be achieved by a single device.
According to a live demonstration, it has been confirmed that the demonstration vehicle is a Volvo model.
Interestingly, Volvo's official WeChat pushed an article "Hello @Huawei, I also have a 40 here". Although the content is not related to HiCar, the title caused readers to guess.
Subsequently, Volvo also confirmed to Tencent Auto that all new Volvo models will be equipped with Huawei Hicar car system, starting from the pure electric version XC40 that will be unveiled in the Chinese market in the second half of 2020.
Previously, Xin Baojun had announced that all its models will be equipped with HUAWEI HiCar solutions.
However, HiCar is not a panacea, it still has certain limitations.
If CarPlay is a universal solution and has very low requirements for cars, basically all car owners can get started, then HiCar's threshold will be relatively high. If you release all the capabilities, you need to cooperate with car companies to complete them.
BYD once said that the company and Huawei are already actively debugging the HiCar cooperation, and it is expected that HiCar services will be experienced in BYD's car in the third quarter.
Carplay is ahead, and the car-to-machine mapping solution has always been a keen area for all incoming car networking.
Google's Android Auto, Baidu CarLife, and Botai's "Internet of Cars" have all gone through a long time from research and development to landing.
Although HiCar enters with a more "high-end" style of play, the timing is ultimately much later.
Taking Baidu CarLife as an example, according to the data disclosed by Baidu in 2016, the total activation of CarLife's car terminal has reached 200,000.
From this perspective, perhaps Baidu is the company that Huawei will compete with now and for some time to come.
However, according to Huawei's past actions, the logic of its layout in the automotive market is not limited to the mapping of the vehicle.
Take on Bosch
"Huawei does not build cars, focuses on ICT technology, and becomes an incremental component supplier for intelligent connected cars, helping car companies to" make good "cars and build" good cars. " Xu Zhijun, Huawei's rotating chairman, publicly stated at the World Intelligent Connected Car Conference in October 2019.
If this sentence is not enough to cause vibration in the circle, then the detailed explanation made by Xu Zhijun next, such as building three platforms of intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit and intelligent electric, is like a big stone hitting the water heavily Attention.
"Doing these three platforms basically declares that Huawei does not make cars itself, everything else in the automotive supply chain is involved." Geek Park quoted an industry source as saying.
According to a report released by Guoxin Securities, Huawei will focus on software, hardware and other fields such as chips, algorithms, cloud services, V2X, and operating systems in the future. "Except for the chassis, four wheels, the shell, and the seats, the rest are all technologies owned by Huawei."
In Xu Zhijun's speech, he expounded Huawei's logic on intelligent connected cars. Together with the three platforms mentioned above, the strategy includes a total of five aspects:
The most traditional intelligent network connection, which involves the transformation of the internal architecture of smart cars. Xu Zhijun said that the traditional E / E architecture is a bus plus decentralized control architecture. The intelligent network should make the vehicle into a distributed Ethernet network + three domain controller architecture to implement software-defined vehicles.
· Intelligent driving platform. Huawei will build an ecological service based on the Shengteng chip, plus an intelligent driving operating system and an autonomous driving cloud service. Here is a crucial point: Huawei will build vehicle sensors in it, including lidar and millimeter wave radar.
The Guoxin Securities report also mentioned that the lidar and chips in the smart driving business are the high added value of the industrial chain. It is monopolized by overseas companies. Huawei focuses on L3 + smart driving and is expected to break the foreign monopoly in the core link.
"Huawei's traditional strength lies in its own chip-based computing power and the construction of the Internet of Things based on the advantages of communication technology. Its smart car layout has also been extended based on chips and network connections, expanding to high-value-added hardware fields such as sensors and motor electrical control. "
· Smart cockpit platform. Huawei will build a smart cockpit platform based on the smartphone Kirin chip plus the Harmony OS. From this point of view, HiCar may only be a short-term solution.
· Intelligent electric platform. Based on Huawei's self-developed MCU (micro control unit), car companies can form a differentiated experience on electric. At the same time, relying on the scale of the energy industry to reduce the cost of electrification.
· Finally, the connection, through 4G, 5G, V2X technology, connect the car to the road, and connect the car to the car. At the same time, through the cloud service, the effective management of all connected vehicles is realized, thus building an ecology that connects all vehicles.
Huawei actually hopes to use software to define the car, and at the same time control the core hardware part in its own hands.
Huawei participates in the Shanghai Auto Show 2019 as a Tier 1 (Tier 1 supplier, whose products are directly supplied to OEMs). In this way, Huawei hopes that the position of "being the new Tier 1 in the automotive industry" will be solid.
A senior industry observer told Geek Park that Huawei's goal is very clear, namely, to be Bosch in the era of smart cars, which is currently the world's largest supplier of OEMs.
Sooner or later
"Huawei's entry into the car is a matter of time." A senior person in the car circle commented. In his view, Huawei's entry into the automotive market is definitely not about playing tickets, but serious about making it bigger.
The reason is also very simple. At present, Huawei's business is supported: both the carrier business and the consumer business have encountered bottlenecks.
In the past ten years, the revenue of operators' business has only doubled, and the proportion of revenue has been reduced from 80% to 34.5% all the way. Although the era of cloud computing and 5G is coming, the communications industry has entered a slack period and will not Breakthrough growth.
Consumer business is Huawei's most dependent growth revenue in recent years. According to the latest financial report for 2019, Huawei's consumer business revenue in 2019 was 467.3 billion yuan, accounting for 54.4% of Huawei's annual revenue.
However, the problem also appears. There is a clear ceiling in the consumer business that focuses on the smartphone market. In 2019, the global smartphone market has been slowing for the third consecutive year. In the Chinese market, smartphone shipments have begun to decline.
No matter how large and profitable the company is, the core goal is still "growth."
The growth market that Huawei is betting on is the smart car with the largest volume and change at present, and it is regarded as the industry most likely to undergo drastic changes after mobile phones.
From an action point of view, as long as Huawei is involved in a new field, it will be regarded as a "ruthless character." Mobile phones are the most typical example. Huawei mobile phones, which are highly dependent on operators, have developed in a few years to only one step away from the world's first.
Facts have proved that as long as it adapts to the market, Huawei can form a complete set of play and make the business extremely powerful. In the process, Huawei doesn't even have the slightest first mover advantage.
The same is true for the automotive business. Someone concluded that a very important strategy for Huawei after entering new fields is to "consider and move."
When Huawei, accustomed to "find and move" but has been victorious in these years, entered this seemingly turbulent market, there is no doubt that he valued the opportunity to reach the trillion-level oasis in the automotive industry.
This looks like Huawei's business expansion. But for this giant that relies heavily on growth, it needs too much-sustained business growth to support the organization's inertia.
When the external environment traps his pace of globalization, horizontal field expansion is actually a critical choice related to life and death.
