Baidu's car manufacturing will eventually "reincarnate" Geely, will BYD also withdraw from Baidu's autonomous driving?

Last night, the car circle brought out two plates of hard food at once.

Geely launched its new brand Jiyue, and Baidu obtained its birth certificate for car manufacturing.

Evergrande Automobile received strategic investment from Middle Eastern tycoons and received some life-saving money.

At the same time, Lei Jun was giving his annual speech in Beijing. During the three-hour speech, he did not mention Xiaomi's progress in building cars.

Adding these three unrelated things, you can understand where the threshold for car manufacturing is today - skilled bosses lack qualifications, and qualified bosses lack money.

Today, we only pick one of them to focus on.

As we all know, Geely has many passenger car brands. If you have a dinner party, these sub-brands will not fit at the table. For Geely, multiple Jiyue is as simple as adding a pair of chopsticks, but Baidu currently needs this pair of chopsticks. Take a seat at the table.

Therefore, the Jiyue brand did not emerge out of nowhere.

At the 2022 Guangzhou Auto Show, the debut of Jidu ROBO-01 attracted everyone to watch. At that time, its identity and background was initiated and established by Baidu and strategically invested by Geely. Baidu is ahead, Geely is behind.

On the eve of the opening of the Shanghai Auto Show in April this year, some media reported that Jidu was unable to participate in the Shanghai Auto Show because it did not have the qualifications to build a car. Although the concentration aspect quickly denied this statement, the qualification issue is still a key sticking point.

A big fat boy is about to be born, why don’t you approve the birth certificate? ! This is not surprising. Youjia has been tormented by this problem ever since. Jidu is relatively lucky and has good fortune behind it. After a series of industrial and commercial changes, Baidu finally gave up on establishing a separate company and embraced Geely as its mother. Today's new company is called Hangzhou Jiyuyue, with Geely holding 65% and Baidu holding 35%. Geely is ahead, Baidu is behind.

Compared with some traditional car companies that want to hold their souls in their own hands and insist on self-research of the whole stack, Geely never falters. SEA already has a vast pure electric platform. Wouldn't it be great if multiple brothers come online together? It is reported that Jiyue 01 will be produced on the same line as Jiyue 001 at Geely's Hangzhou Bay factory, and may be delivered as soon as October. Who will this car be delivered to? This tests your imagination too much. Let’s talk after you touch the car and see the price!

Baidu has been struggling for more than two years since it announced its car production in January 2021, and Robin Li has also tried his best. Compared with assisted driving that has been promoted and popularized, the unmanned autonomous driving that Baidu pursues is too high-profile. Without hardware support, it is difficult to take full initiative in cooperation with car companies. Therefore, Baidu and Geely are not replicas of Huawei and Cyrus.

Speaking of "soul", another piece of news is worthy of careful consideration. On August 15, the day after the Ji brand was released, some media reported that "BYD gave up its agreement to equip its electric vehicles with Baidu's autonomous driving technology and turned to internal development of smart car software."

In March 2022, BYD agreed to apply Baidu technology in its electric vehicles, including navigation and automatic parking. This is undoubtedly a big deal for Baidu Apollo. Baidu began researching autonomous driving in 2013 and launched the Apollo project in 2017. Since then, it has frequently interacted with the automotive industry.

News of the cooperation between BYD and Baidu can be traced back to 2018. The two companies jointly demonstrated a driverless fleet on the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge. From the outside world, BYD seems to have been a loyal supporter of Baidu's deployment of autonomous driving business, but the actual situation is obviously not that simple.

At present, there is no official response from BYD to the news that BYD has withdrawn from Baidu’s autonomous driving cooperation. In fact, BYD, a big company with a big business, has already started its own research. This can be seen from its cooperation with Nvidia, investment in Horizon and the establishment of Dipai Zhixing Company in the past two years. Now, Baidu has settled in Geely to manufacture cars. If BYD is determined to develop its own cars, it can be said to be in its place.

Perhaps Lei Jun had already seen clearly when he decided that Xiaomi would build a car. There were not so many strong alliances, so he simply did it himself. Business competition is just about getting what you need at a certain stage and teaming up to keep warm. When it develops to a certain stage, the big fish eats the small fish - there are also hardships in doing it yourself. Lei Jun didn't mention this pain last night, but many people feel it. arrive.