In just one year, smart cars are no longer the exclusive domain of new forces!

Jia Haonan and Li Mingmin sent this article from Aofei Temple
Quantum Bit | Public Account QbitAI

After a hundred years of development, the automobile industry has now reached a time of "unprecedented changes."

New and old players have begun to transform towards intelligence.

The most obvious thing is that more mainstream joint ventures or independent brands have also launched new energy flagship models in 2021 to accelerate their intelligent transformation.

"Transformation" means a lot of hard work and difficulty for most automakers. Among many brands, Great Wall Motors is one of the brands with the fastest and most obvious transformation results. Its transformation path is quite inspiring to the traditional auto industry.

How does Great Wall Motors transform into an intelligent company?

Sales volume is the best explanation. Compared with other players, Great Wall Motors is one of the few automakers that has seen significant growth in both fuel and new energy businesses in 2021.

According to statistics from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, China's automobile sales in 2021 were 26.275 million units, a year-on-year increase of 3.8%, far below expectations. The reasons were both the repeated epidemics and the chip shortage.

However, the latest data released by Great Wall Motors shows that in 2021, 1.28 million new cars were sold, a year-on-year increase of 15.2% , of which 137,000 new energy vehicles were sold, more than doubling year-on-year .

△ Image source: Great Wall Motors official microblog

The increase in sales directly led to an increase in profits. This year, Great Wall Motors' net profit was 6.781 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 26.45% .

The reasons behind this huge profit may not be consistent with the outside world's traditional perception of Great Wall Motors.

Currently, Great Wall Motors has a total of 6 passenger car brands, and from the specific data we can see where Great Wall Motors' growth comes from.

The Haval brand has been the top SUV sales brand for many years and it remains the main force in 2021, providing a year-on-year increase of 2.6%. Judging from the data, it has entered a stable stage.

In addition, Great Wall Motor's pickup trucks, like its SUVs, have always been the absolute leading player in China, with sales ranking first in 2021, providing a year-on-year growth of 3.6%.

These two generally recognized strengths of Great Wall Motors did not contribute the most to the total growth of 15.2%.

ORA and the popular Tank have become the brands with the highest growth rate of Great Wall Motors in 2021. ORA focuses on pure electric vehicles and has achieved a growth of more than 100% with its precise positioning and unique design.

The tank has changed the concept of off-road vehicles as being big, black and crude. It is now equipped with intelligent driving and smart cockpit, becoming a very popular trendy toy. More than 80,000 tanks were delivered within a year, with over 220,000 orders.

Judging from these models, the product attributes of Great Wall Motors have undergone fundamental changes, and new energy and intelligence have become the biggest growth points for Great Wall Motors.

At the same time, it can also be seen that Great Wall Motors has achieved initial results in its intelligent transformation.

In fact, since the establishment of the Software Technology Center 10 years ago, Great Wall Motors has taken the first step towards intelligence and started exploring and accumulating technology.

• In 2015, Great Wall Motors demonstrated its L3 intelligent driving technology for the first time.

• In 2016, the Great Wall Motors team won the championship in the China Smart Car Future Challenge;

• At the 2019 Big Data Expo, Great Wall Motors showcased a number of technologies including L4 autonomous driving, 5G remote unmanned driving, and fully automatic valet parking.

Until 2020, the outside world can see Great Wall Motor's intelligent strategy more clearly -
this is the strategy of " letting small boats go on the big ship ".

Among them, Great Wall Motors, as the "big ship", is responsible for the overall system architecture, underlying logic and other general issues that need to be faced in the intelligent transformation; subsidiaries such as Momenta and Xiandou Intelligent, which were established successively, are the "small boats", responsible for point-to-point solutions to core technical problems in the intelligent transformation.

The specific layout is as follows:

The overall framework is called Coffee Intelligence . In June last year, Great Wall Motors released Coffee Intelligence 2.0, which includes intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, and intelligent services.

The underlying technology that supports Coffee Intelligence is a centralized electronic and electrical architecture that is equivalent to the trunk of future smart cars. It integrates a central control unit and integrates functions such as power, chassis, body, assisted driving and vehicle control.

This new electronic and electrical architecture is user-demand oriented and adopts the SOA concept. It can achieve communication standardization, establish dynamic communication relationships, and better realize the interconnection of all things.

In addition to meeting the current mainstream level of automotive intelligence, it also reserves space for expansion of autonomous driving technology above Level 4.

In terms of intelligent driving , Great Wall Motors has established a market-oriented and independently operated company, Momenta , which has made amazing progress, with a total of 2 million kilometers of road testing and has already mass-produced multiple Wei-brand models under Great Wall Motors.

Moreover, in addition to basic assisted driving, models equipped with Momenta products have already realized the high-speed navigation assistance function, and the navigation assisted driving on urban roads will also be updated this year.

For autonomous driving, algorithms are only one part. In addition, the support of the underlying computing power platform is also needed. Many manufacturers choose to purchase it, but Great Wall Motors has completely developed its own intelligent assisted driving computing platform IDC 3.0 through Momenta.

The single-board computing power is 360T, which can be sustainably expanded and upgraded to 1440T, effectively supporting the in-vehicle computing of large AI vision models.

IDC 3.0 can support up to 6 Gigabit Ethernet channels and can simultaneously connect to high-definition cameras, millimeter-wave radars, and solid-state lidars, enabling L3 and higher-level autonomous driving.

Smart Cockpit In terms of smart cockpit , Great Wall Motors established Xiandou Smart, and the MO.life 1.0 smart cockpit system is also installed in many Wei brand models.

In terms of the underlying operating system, there is also the self-developed smart cockpit GC-OS, which can provide an App unified interface + HAL unified interface, and support UI/UE platformization + brand differentiation. It can take into account a variety of high-computing power platforms, and can adapt to major brands of models under Great Wall Motors.

Intelligence is something that Great Wall Motors users can directly experience and is also more perceived by the outside world, but this is just the tip of the iceberg of Great Wall Motors' comprehensive transformation into a technology company.

Great Wall Motors is making efforts to seize the changes taking place in the automotive industry and the opportunities with huge potential in the future.

In terms of new energy Great Wall Motors has established Honeycomb Energy, which specializes in power batteries and has already started mass production of its own models.

As a hybrid technology reserve for the transition stage, Great Wall Motors also has a subsidiary, Honeycomb Power, and its DHT technology has also been mass-produced and launched on the market.

Weishi Energy is a hydrogen energy technology subsidiary of Great Wall Motors, and is planning for the entire chain of the hydrogen energy industry.

Great Wall Motors has also made new moves in the hot unmanned logistics and freight track this year. Ant Logistics, which focuses on intercity freight and park logistics, has cooperated with UISEE Technology to launch a mass-produced autonomous material transfer model.

Earlier, there was news that Great Wall had obtained commercial vehicle production qualifications through acquisition.

It is foreseeable that if Great Wall Motors really launches its own heavy-duty truck models, it will undoubtedly have close synergy with autonomous driving, power batteries, and hydrogen energy businesses.

In addition to automobiles, Great Wall Motors has also entered into industries such as photovoltaic power generation, semiconductors, lithium mining, etc., either by investing or personally getting involved.

To describe Great Wall Motor's transformation in the simplest terms, it must be " not only fast, but also comprehensive ."

The intelligent "battle royale" of auto giants

As of 2020, Great Wall Motors has achieved sales of over one million for five consecutive years. Is it necessary to fully transform towards intelligentization at this time?

Why not look for the answer directly from the data?

Although Great Wall Motors has sold over one million vehicles for five consecutive years, its sales have remained stable in the range of 1 to 1.1 million vehicles during these five years.

In 2021, sales soared to 1.28 million. The core reason is that the results of intelligence and electrification have begun to be implemented, and users can experience an unprecedented sense of technology on Great Wall Motors' new models.

The necessity of intelligence is self-evident.

In fact, all major automakers understand this truth, but at the crossroads of transitioning from fuel vehicles to new energy and intelligent vehicles, each company's journey and results are different.

First is the Volkswagen Group, which represents the German industry .

In addition to facing technological barriers, Volkswagen's transformation faces a greater challenge in the heavy burden of traditional car companies.

Volkswagen's current CEO Diess has been pushing for reforms with Tesla as an example, but he faced a lot of internal resistance and was almost fired several times. After the latest struggle, Diess had to hand over the management rights of multiple departments, which added another variable to Volkswagen's transformation.

Even so, Volkswagen 's transformation is still radical among traditional car companies.

Let’s look at Japanese car companies.

Toyota only announced its complete new energy vehicle plan in Japan a few days ago. Before that, its head Akio Toyoda had severely criticized pure electric vehicles.

As for intelligence, it seems that it has never been a Japanese label.

Finally, let’s look at the American style .

GM recently revealed that it delivered only 26 pure electric vehicles in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2021, which is the worst performance since the launch of the first electric car Chevrolet Volt in 2010. It was previously forced to stop production and recall due to battery problems.

Musk even joked about this, saying "Room to improve " .

Ford Motor claims that it has been "awakened by Tesla" and its Mustang brand has fully transformed into an electric car, but it still emphasizes brand and sports. In terms of the key intelligent experience, Ford does not have the strength to develop its own products and still purchases suppliers' products, and does not use it as a major selling point.

Obviously, when faced with transformation, these traditional car companies generally find it difficult to turn around due to their large size.

On the one hand, auto giants must ensure that sales of fuel vehicles do not decline; on the other hand, they also have to compete with new car-making forces on a new track, and if they relax even a little, they may be left behind by others.

Although auto giants have high sales and a large market share, they often tread on thin ice when faced with the challenges of transformation.

This is also true for major domestic car companies.

In 2020, Wei Jianjun, chairman of Great Wall Motors, publicly stated: "Great Wall Motors is on the brink of extinction... The biggest crisis is the lack of a sense of crisis." Many people believe that this "on the brink of extinction" argument may be too exaggerated for Great Wall Motors. Because at this time, Great Wall Motors had sold over one million units for four consecutive years and was the only one in the domestic SUV and pickup truck markets.

But Wei Jianjun's anxiety comes from his understanding of changes in market and user demands.

The intelligent revolution launched by Tesla has shaken the entire industry. When buying cars, users have higher and higher requirements for intelligence and new energy. If Great Wall Motors' transformation steps deviate slightly, it may fall behind others.

Therefore, the intelligent transformation of Great Wall Motors lies not only in the technical level, but also in the overall transformation of its thinking and architecture design .

On the ideological level, Chairman Wei Jianjun's concern has proven Great Wall Motors' determination to transform.
On the technical level, although Great Wall Motors has also proposed to build an open ecosystem, it has always insisted on self-development of core intelligent technologies.

For autonomous driving technology, we established Momenta, which operates independently in the market with full autonomy and is managed and operated in accordance with the regulations of a technology company to ensure efficiency and motivation.

Xiandou Intelligent, which focuses on smart cockpits, Honeycomb Energy, which develops power batteries, and Weishi Energy, which plans to develop hydrogen energy, all adopt this form.

Under this structure, talent is the "flesh and blood" that maintains innovation.

In response, Great Wall Motors will continue to introduce more than 10,000 talents of various types from around the world on the basis of the existing 15,000 R&D personnel. At the same time, Great Wall Motors will further increase its R&D investment, and the cumulative R&D investment in the next five years will reach 100 billion yuan.

The “Great Wall Model” of Intelligent Transformation

The century-old automobile industry has developed to this day. Whether it is actively leading the new track, quickly following, or being forced to transform, no one doubts the revolutionary direction of intelligence and new energy.

But the transformation process and results are very different.

New forces can focus on one point and quickly form their own moat, such as Xiaopeng's intelligence, ideal user orientation, Weilai's nanny-style service, etc. But for car companies with a long history and huge size, to turn around, they must overcome the huge inertia brought by the huge size.

In fact, the intelligent transformation of automobile companies is not always a difficult journey. Great Wall Motors has developed a new model.

This "Great Wall Model" has three core points.

The first is the wide layout .

From the very beginning, Great Wall Motors has never used its identity as a car company as a limitation.

A series of measures such as establishing an autonomous driving company ensure the intelligent attributes of products, which is still at the level of cars. Establishing agile R&D and rapid iteration workflows is a necessary attribute of a "technology company". The layout of the entire industry chain such as hydrogen energy, photovoltaics, batteries, lithium mines, etc. shows that Great Wall Motors is not only a car company, but also an energy company.

The second characteristic of the transformation is that the core key technologies of intelligence will not be released to other companies, but will be independently developed.

China's smart car industry chain is complete, with countless autonomous driving suppliers and battery suppliers. It is actually very easy to transform, all you have to do is buy, buy, and buy.

In fact, not only some traditional car manufacturers do this, but many domestic new forces also outsource core functions such as autonomous driving and batteries.

However, Great Wall Motors' approach is to develop all of the core smart car components, including wire-controlled chassis, electronic and electrical architecture, autonomous driving, and power batteries, in-house, and then open up a cooperative ecosystem on this basis.

What is the benefit of wasting time and effort? Of course, it is to firmly grasp your own "soul". Great Wall Motors believes that the smart car revolution is like the smartphone revolution of the past, and the "procurement and OEM" route can be a temporary advantage:

But those who made OEM smartphones are all dead, and those who are alive today are those who have mastered core technologies.

The third point is also the most difficult challenge for all car companies in their transformation: efficiency .

Great Wall Motors is certainly an automotive giant with mature systems and clear processes, but the management framework of the manufacturing industry is difficult to transplant to technology companies.

Therefore, Great Wall Motors adopted the strategy of "letting small companies go to big ships" and set up subsidiaries for teams that undertake key transformation tasks, such as autonomous driving, power batteries, etc. Great Wall gave these subsidiaries full trust and autonomy, allowing them to manage and operate in the manner of Internet technology companies, without being restricted by the institutional processes of large enterprises, and fully stimulating their enthusiasm.

That is why subsidiaries such as Momenta and Xiandou Intelligent have been able to mass-produce products within two or three years of their establishment.

Great Wall Motors was not the first to call for a comprehensive transformation, but it was the first to produce results and see effectiveness. Its speed and accuracy are worth pondering.

Moreover, the " Great Wall Model " has even more unique significance in the current context.

On the one hand, a number of traditional car companies in China and abroad are struggling to transform, and the "Great Wall Model" provides a template for all car companies struggling to survive.

In addition, the automobile intelligent revolution is coming in full force, and the Chinese automobile industry is in a leading and pioneering position. The transformation of Great Wall Motors is another representative of "changing lanes and overtaking" besides the new forces.

Finally, since Great Wall Motors has demonstrated scientific research capabilities that are not inferior to those of Internet companies, the industry is no longer certain that the first company to reach the end of autonomous driving will be a "pure" technology company.

This battle royale began against the backdrop of "unprecedented changes" in the automotive industry, and the best is yet to come.