Car-to-car interconnection leads the cockpit of the future. Can FlymeAuto be more powerful than others?

At Huawei's summer full-scenario new product launch conference that just concluded, Huawei released the MateBook X Pro 2023 notebook, which is further linked with Hongmeng car and machine. There are new tricks in the circulation function. However, in this regard, Flyme Auto, which was also released just before, gave a different answer.

On March 24, Egatone held its first Technology Ecological Day, and at the same time officially announced three computing platforms: Antola 1000, Antola 1000 Pro and Makalu, as well as the ECARX Super Brain automotive brain series central computing platform. On March 30, Xingji Meizu’s first car-machine system Fylme Auto and Lynk & Co 08 were officially unveiled. In the eyes of the outside world, this is an innovation in the smart cockpit system by Lynk & Co, Meizu and Egatone. Users are expected to witness the birth of a second car-machine system that is comparable to or even surpasses Huawei's Hongmeng smart cockpit in terms of experience.

Since Meizu was acquired by Geely in 2022, there has been an endless stream of news about Meizu’s upcoming new energy vehicles, but everyone has seen the final result. Meizu changed its name to Xingji Meizu and launched the Flyme Auto smart cockpit system, aiming to change the The technical architecture of smart cars allows mobile phones to become part of the car and shapes the sixth domain of cars - the mobile phone domain.

Flyme Auto realizes the integration of data, team and computing power between cars and mobile phones. Data connectivity is easy to understand, which is to open up the data barriers between mobile phones and car machines at the software level, so that the two terminals can achieve data interaction, information connectivity, etc., thereby bringing about functions such as mobile phone applications in the car. The team integration is to integrate the Meizu mobile phone industry, Yikatong smart hub and the automobile industry of the OEM, and have reserved space for corresponding needs in the early stages of automobile research and development. At the same time, Flyme Auto reconstructs the entire underlying communication protocol, integrates distributed application ecology, heterogeneous networking capabilities, etc., allowing mobile phones to truly integrate with cars, bringing about the ideal sixth domain of cars.

In today's era of new energy vehicles that pay more and more attention to smart cockpits, the emergence of Flyme Auto is to a certain extent a dimensionality reduction blow to other new energy vehicle systems. For Meizu, which once pioneered the smartphone era in China, human-computer interaction has been a constant issue for more than ten years. Reshaping the user's car-computer interaction experience has naturally become the primary problem that Meizu's Fylme Auto car-computer system solves.

Even before the release of Flyme Auto, Meizu had leaked that it would continue the design concept of drastically changing the three diamond buttons on Android phones to solve the Dock bar problem that is criticized by users in most current car systems. In fact, Meizu did not completely redo the Dock bar. Instead, it made a small area on the left side of the Dock bar a layer of adaptive effects. Flyme Auto can directly display key information in this area according to the adapted App and usage scenarios. Basically, Continue the design logic of human-computer interaction on mobile phones.

Based on this, the overall interaction of Flyme Auto also inherits the excellent experience on the mobile phone. In order to meet the large number of temporary interaction needs of users, the small window mode on the mobile phone is completely copied to the car. Car owners can lightly open applications and temporarily intervene without interfering with current operations, which can reduce the sense of fragmentation between application switching.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg among Flyme Auto’s many excellent interactive designs. The core data layer that connects two different terminals, the mobile phone and the car-machine, is the biggest highlight of this car-machine system. Implemented in daily life, the songs that car owners listen to on their mobile phones can be automatically connected to the car when they get in the car, and continue to be played through the car audio. All of this is fully automatic without manual intervention. Including the user's WeChat voice, conference video, etc., all can be fully automatically transferred.

Speaking of which, in fact, many users have discovered that Apple and Huawei mentioned at the beginning of the article seem to have already implemented similar functions. Therefore, in terms of functional innovation, Flyme Auto is not considered a pioneer. To be more precise, Flyme Auto He is a latecomer. Apple's multi-device transfer has the most limitations. Users can only pause music on the iPhone and wait for cloud synchronization before it will be displayed on other devices, and they need to use Apple's designated player.

Huawei, with its years of technological accumulation in the communications industry, is significantly better than Apple in multi-device data transfer, but it is different from Flyme Auto at this stage. Huawei users can transfer the content to the car system through their mobile phones, but manual intervention is required, there are obvious designated operations, and the playback progress cannot be remembered. Regardless of whether Huawei's logic is stronger or weaker than Flyme Auto's, Flyme Auto obviously wants to think more and do more if it's purely automatic.

Judging from the function implementation of Flyme Auto, this car-machine system has realized the real-time transmission of a large number of data streams across devices. This is also the core technology of Flyme Auto. Currently, neither Huawei nor Apple has achieved this level. , which means that Flyme Auto is already ahead of the industry in terms of real-time data flow.

But this is not enough, because in the official promotion, Flyme Auto can also use the mobile phone processor to undertake the tasks of the car. What are the benefits of this approach? Presumably users still have fresh memories of the era when China's smartphone market was just taking off. Various flagships were in full bloom and hardware differences were obvious. However, this also led to the rapid iteration of smartphones. The phone you bought at the beginning of the year might be outdated by the end of the year. Nowadays, new energy vehicles are also facing this problem. With the rapid iteration of car engines and chips, it is really difficult for a car with a lifespan of seven to eight years or even more than ten years to expect the factory engine hardware to last the entire life of the car. It is too difficult to replace the car hardware. After all, no user will upgrade the car by buying a new car.

Therefore, using mobile phone processors to replace car processors seems to be the best way to fundamentally solve the problem of car hardware iteration. From a technical perspective, it is still difficult to implement this function at this stage. In the introduction of Flyme Auto, when users use Meizu mobile phones, they can use the mobile phone processor to process car-machine tasks in real time, while the car-machine is only responsible for executing functions, but this poses a huge challenge to the data communication capabilities between the mobile phone and the car-machine.

Many people may not know what this technology means. For users, the vehicle computer is responsible for processing vehicle data, and high delays are never allowed when it comes to vehicle core data processing. Ordinary car machines achieve high-speed data interaction through built-in solid-state drives, and mobile phone processors replace the car machine processors. This requires the establishment of a connection between the car machine and the mobile phone without a physical data line connection, which can process a huge amount of data at the same time without delay. The most important thing is that the extremely low data path can ensure stable transmission for a long time, which seems almost a fantasy at the moment.

Therefore, Lynk & Co 08 has equipped Flyme Auto with a set of luxurious hardware configurations, which uses the latest Antola 1000 Pro computing platform released by Egatone. The platform has two Antora 1000 chips, which can achieve double CPU and GPU computing power support, and the NPU computing power can reach 16TOPS. It also provides L0 to L2 driving assistance functions, including safety alarm, comfort assistance and monocular camera LCC lane Maintenance, and development of remote parking RPA and full-scenario parking lot parking functions.

Judging from the paper parameters, the Antola 1000 Pro computing platform already has the ability to compete with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8295 platform that is about to usher in a market blowout. With the support of such powerful computing power, Flyme Auto has the potential to bring a complete revolution to the vehicle-machine system to the entire industry.

Flyme Auto has a certain forward-looking attitude in terms of hardware foundation and design interaction, especially when mobile phone processors replace car processors. However, it seems that I am still skeptical about the user experience of this technology. After all, it is limited by It is too difficult to realize this function with current wireless transmission technology. However, with the subsequent iterations of 6G and 7G, the implementation of this technology is almost certain. In other words, Flyme Auto is a vehicle-machine system built with future thinking. When the technology matures, the complete Flyme Auto will be expected to Completely leading the entire industry into the next era.