Geely Auto spends 150 billion yuan to seek a breakthrough in intelligent networking

On October 31, Geely Auto launched a new power brand, Thor Power, and the development plan of Smart Geely in 2021-2025 at the Geely Research Institute in Longwan. Leaving aside Thor Power, Geely Auto's plans in the field of intelligence are very exciting and worth looking forward to. By 2025, Geely will commercialize its full-stack self-developed L4 autonomous driving and fully master L5 autonomous driving. At the same time, Geely's self-built low-orbit satellite high-precision navigation system achieves global communication without blind spots, that is, centimeter-level high-precision positioning coverage.

Ambitious sales targets rely on the advancement of intelligent connected technology

From the sales perspective, Geely Auto reiterated its previously set sales target for 2025, that is, by 2025, Geely Auto's annual sales will reach 3.65 million vehicles. Among them, Geely brand sales will reach 1.3 million vehicles, Zeekr brand will reach 650,000 vehicles, Lynk & Co brand will reach 600,000 vehicles, in addition, Geometry and new battery swap brands will contribute 300,000 and 200,000 vehicles respectively. It is particularly worth mentioning that in the overseas market, Geely Auto has also set a target of 600,000 vehicles. To achieve such sales results, Geely has its own core competitiveness in intelligent networking and reaches the industry-leading level is an indispensable prerequisite. Whether it is the Internet of Vehicles or high-level autonomous driving, Geely is indispensable.

It is particularly worth mentioning here that in addition to developing pure electric vehicles, Geely will continue to promote the full popularization of vehicle OTA functions in the field of traditional fuel vehicles, and realize the continuous update of intelligent driving assistance systems and other software applications that require large computing power. From Geely's perspective, it will continue to launch hybrid models on the market for a long time in the future. And ensuring that hybrid models are as intelligent as pure electric vehicles is the key to Geely's Thor power system being able to occupy a place in the domestic market for a long time in the future. After all, at present, there is no way to fundamentally solve the problem of insufficient energy density of lithium batteries, and the demand for electricity when charging electric vehicles in the future will form a huge load on the power grid. Therefore, it is of strategic significance for Geely to maintain a certain number of hybrid vehicles with equally outstanding energy-saving performance.

Self-developed chips have become a microcosm of Geely's layout in the field of intelligent networking

This year's chip shortage crisis has made all domestic car companies realize the importance of chips. For autonomous driving, the AI ​​master chip it needs is far superior to the currently in-demand automotive chips in terms of performance and design difficulty. As a necessary hardware condition for car companies to achieve high-level autonomous driving technology, the importance of dedicated autonomous driving chips is self-evident. Tesla has previously demonstrated its self-developed dedicated autonomous driving chip, which is far ahead of Nvidia's general-purpose chips in performance.

At present, China's first 7-nanometer automotive-grade SOC chip developed by Geely's Core Engine Technology has been lit up. This chip integrates 87 layers of circuits and 8.8 billion transistors on an 83 square millimeter substrate. After completing the relevant automotive-grade certification, this chip will be mass-produced next year. By 2025, Geely's self-developed 5nm vehicle-mounted integrated supercomputing platform chip will be unveiled, and the autonomous driving chip with a computing power of 256TOPS will also help Geely make its own voice in high-level autonomous driving. These are basically the same as the plans for the supercomputing platform and autonomous driving-specific chips announced by Tesla earlier this year. In the near future, Geely will realize the full self-development of core intelligent links such as chip design and packaging and testing, operating system and software, and big data collection and analysis, completely get rid of this bottleneck technology, and help Geely develop rapidly in the global automotive market.

Large investments to build core competitiveness that is difficult to replicate

In Geely's plan, whether it is investing 150 billion in R&D funds in five years or rewarding employees with 350 million shares of Geely Auto, which is already listed in Hong Kong, Geely hopes to keep the best engineering R&D personnel, especially software talents, in Geely to help Geely achieve a thorough transformation in the era of the new four modernizations of automobiles. 2021 is about to pass, and Geely only has four years to realize the 2025 plan. Perhaps in another two or three years, we will be able to get a glimpse of Geely Auto's technical capabilities. If L4 autonomous driving can be commercialized in 2025, Geely Auto will be able to compete with other new forces in the automotive industry on the same starting line.

As the leader of domestic independent brands, Geely naturally has its own understanding and knowledge of the soul-searching of the previous head of SAIC. That's why Geely chose to achieve full-stack self-research in the field of intelligent networking. In the field of autonomous driving, there is not only an algorithm platform with hundreds of millions of codes, but Geely is also trying to explore chips, and Geely has built a low-orbit satellite high-precision navigation system. Such a three-in-one layout has created a technical moat that other car companies will find difficult to cross in the short term. Looking at the global car companies, only Tesla can have such courage. Geely does this not only to make its products more competitive, but also to promote the development of China's independent brand automobile business. If the Chinese automobile industry wants to achieve the centralization of the entire industry in the global wave of intelligence, it can only rely on its own independent brands to continuously break through core technologies.