R&D investment ranks first in the industry! From chips to autonomous driving, Geely has unveiled its strongest "weapon box"

On the evening of October 31, Geely officially released the "Smart Geely 2025" strategy. Comprehensively promoting the process of intelligence has also become the main theme of Geely Auto's 4.0 era.

In the 2021 Chinese corporate R&D investment rankings, Geely ranked ninth with an investment of 21.811 billion yuan. It is the only car company in the top ten, tied with a number of technology companies and large state-owned enterprises. This is also consistent with Geely's status as a leader in independent brands.

The question is, where did all that money go? What leading technologies does Geely have in the era of intelligence? Let Kungfu Auto explain them to you one by one.

(1) Intelligent architecture makes a difference, Geely promotes "new infrastructure"

Since 2020, Geely has officially entered the era of "Technology Geely 4.0" architecture. The most typical one is the CMA architecture, which can perfectly empower Volvo, Lynk & Co and Geely's "China Star" flagship series. It has more than 1.2 million users worldwide and is still expanding at an astonishing speed.

Take the China Star flagship SUV Xingyue L as an example, it has introduced the latest GEEA2.0 electronic and electrical architecture. The new architecture gives Xingyue L a high-speed and developed neural network and a smart brain, which not only supports highly intelligent driving assistance, but also allows fuel vehicles to achieve vehicle OTA for the first time, including the power chassis domain, body control domain, infotainment domain, and intelligent driving safety domain, which can all achieve intelligent evolution.

This is not just for the Xingyue L. In fact, all new smart cars from Geely, Lynk & Co, and Geometry will be equipped with the GEEA2.0 electronic and electrical architecture. Even the Zeekr 001, which is built on the SEA, can also draw technical nutrients from it.

In addition, Geely's GEEA3.0 central computing platform architecture is already under testing. It will lead the evolution of smart cars from "domain control" to "central super brain", which will also be a very disruptive existence.

Geely's logic is actually very simple. Intelligent architecture is a new "infrastructure" project, and intelligent driving and intelligent cockpit are built on it. What Geely needs to do is to lay a solid foundation to provide a more extreme user experience. To achieve this, key chips, software operating systems and technical data are extremely important.

Geely's "Core Engine" technology has launched its self-developed "intelligent cockpit chip SE1000", which is China's first 7nm automotive-grade SOC chip. In a space of only 83 square millimeters, which is the size of a fingernail, it integrates 87 layers of circuits and 8.8 billion transistors. By 2024, Geely will further launch a 5nm in-vehicle integrated supercomputing platform chip and an autonomous driving chip with a computing power of up to 256TOPS.

This is what Geely is doing. Its own core chips, its own car-building architecture, and its own computing platform make every step of its intelligentization particularly stable. Recently, Geely has launched three flagship models, Xingyue L, Lynk & Co 09, and Zeekr 001, and their intelligence levels are all eye-catching.

(2) Smart cockpit is dazzling, experience evolution takes priority

With an excellent hardware foundation, how will Geely build its smart cockpit? The answer is that whoever can do it will do it, and everything is for the experience.

Take the Galaxy OS in the Xingyue L smart cockpit as an example. It can realize the interconnection of three screens. The realization of the interconnection of three screens is the result of the joint efforts of Qualcomm, Visteon, Ecarx and other companies. With the cooperation of many technology giants, Geely has built a new "new relationship between people and cars".

Taking its intelligent voice control as an example, Geely has created a set of "short-path" voice interaction functions. Its local intelligent voice semantic processing effect is very good. Through a set of information preloading strategies, Xingyue L can prioritize the analysis of the driver's voice commands locally and complete information call, reply and execution functions. In this way, the impact of network instability is minimized, and the confidentiality of user privacy is also enhanced. The voice interaction function of the new car also supports full-time wake-up free. It will automatically filter out some invalid commands and can quickly respond to commands with variables such as "I feel a little cold".

Geely's controls for seats, air conditioning and other functions all have real-time 3D rendering interfaces, and can meet the four major vertical application requirements of "speak, listen, watch and play", which greatly reduces the user's learning cost and makes it easier to get started.

In addition to the excellent experience that has already been provided, Geely also regards technical data as the driving force for the evolution of user experience. That is, technical updates are based on user feedback and are continuously iterated.

Geely currently has 3 million vehicles online, accumulating more than 50 million hours of cockpit technical data and 12 billion kilometers of vehicle driving technical data, which is an advantage that other car companies cannot match. Geely will continue to optimize algorithms through these technical data and continuously evolve the cockpit experience.

For this purpose, Geely has set a special goal, that is, by 2025, Geely will achieve at least 1-2 vehicle OTA upgrades every quarter, so that users can continue to be surprised during the use of the car.

(3) With the rapid advancement of intelligent driving, is it feasible to build a satellite system in-house?

Unlike other automakers that "bet" on various types of sensors, Geely firmly believes that the core of intelligent driving is the "heaven-earth integration" technical data and algorithm verification.

To put it bluntly, whether it is laser radar or millimeter wave radar, they can all be purchased, but the most core data is difficult to buy. What Geely needs to do is to chew on these most difficult bones.

Since 2018, Geely has invested in the aerospace technology company SpaceTime Aerospace and independently developed a low-orbit satellite communication system to provide high-precision positioning services for high-level intelligent driving.

So far, Geely has completed the deployment of 305 high-precision space-time reference stations. The high-precision maps collected by Geely's own surveying have covered major cities in China, and plans to cover the entire country by 2023. Geely also has an ambitious goal, which is to achieve "global blind spot-free" communication and centimeter-level high-precision positioning coverage by 2026. This is still some distance away, but it is not impossible.

Of course, Geely's integrated space-ground travel ecosystem will not only be used in the field of intelligent driving. Geely has already cooperated with leading companies in the fields of drone transportation and heavy machinery to jointly conduct commercial scenario application tests.

Geely has great ambitions. It is committed to achieving full-stack self-development of autonomous driving, realizing the travel vision of "zero accidents and zero casualties", and achieving "delivery is safety". And everything it is doing now is still to contribute to this ambitious goal.

Compared with other car companies, Geely’s most obvious feature is that all its technologies tend to be self-developed, which allows it to firmly grasp the competitive initiative and advancement.

(4) Kung Fu Clap

After reading Geely's 2025 intelligent strategy, the biggest feeling is that this is a thorough "open conspiracy". Geely's technologies are not castles in the air, but start from the most basic "foundation", based on its own massive data and user base, to build a complete set of intelligent new ecology. This is something that new forces cannot learn, and the longer the time and the more complete the data, the greater its advantage will be.

It seems that Geely Smart is planning to make friends with time. Do you think it will be a success?