Integrated cabin and driving: explicit costs decrease and implicit costs increase

The EE architecture has developed from domain centralization to domain integration. Different OEMs have begun to try cross-domain integration among the five classic domains (cabin domain, intelligent driving domain, power domain, chassis domain, and body domain) based on their own understanding. Cabin Driving one body came into being.

From a hardware perspective, "cabin and driver integration" can improve the reuse rate of sensors , chips and other hardware and reduce costs; from a software perspective, the "cabin and driver integration" integrated system drives the iteration of the overall software architecture to obtain more functions Or a better functional experience.

Although "cabin-driving integration" has many benefits, its implementation also faces various difficulties.

On the afternoon of September 24, Jiuzhang Zhijia and the China Automobile Industry Training Base jointly held a small offline salon event with the theme of "Integrated cabin and driving, is it a real demand or a fake demand?", inviting guests from OEMs, autonomous driving solution providers, Nearly 20 smart driving related personnel including chip suppliers (positions include smart driving strategic planning manager, electronic and electrical architecture manager, sales manager, product manager, project manager, software and hardware engineer , etc.) participated.

Is the integrated cabin and driver a real demand or a false demand?

The theme of this event centered on "Demands and Changing Trends of the Integrated Cabin-Driving Market and Technology", with exchanges and discussions as the main form, discussing "What are the core advantages of the integrated cabin-driving solution" and "In the long run, whether the integrated cabin-driving solution Can it really achieve the effect of cost reduction?", "What is the evolution path of the cabin-berthing integrated solution, the cabin-parking integrated solution and the cabin-driving integrated solution", "What are the landing time points, challenges and difficulties of cabin-driving integration", "Cabin-driving integrated solution" What impact will the integrated solution have on the cooperation model between OEMs and suppliers?" and other related issues.

Summary of some opinions of the salon

In this discussion, the guests raised:

The electronic and electrical architecture design of most OEMs involves the planning of cabin-driving integration, but it has not been implemented into specific projects. The core reason is that the cost reduction and functional experience improvement of cabin-driving integration are uncertain.

The benefits and difficulties of "cabin-driving integration", as well as issues such as landing form and time points, can all be attributed to cost considerations. If the cost drops enough, it may even be possible to abandon the integration of cabin and driver and directly switch to a more integrated central computing architecture.

"Cabin-driving integration" can significantly reduce hardware costs and supply chain management costs, but it still needs to consider the increase in software development costs, vehicle-level verification costs, and organizational structure integration costs.

in:

Explicit cost reduction:

(1) Regardless of the one box/one board/one chip solution, compared with the current two box and two chips solution in the smart driving domain and cockpit domain, it reduces the investment in domain control and chips in terms of hardware, and reduces the number of wire harnesses between domains. Hardware costs have declined;

(2) From managing multiple domain controllers and chip suppliers to centrally managing a small number of suppliers, the management cost of the supply chain is reduced;

Hidden costs rise:

(1) The migration of the upper-layer ecology and the complexity and difficulty of software adaptation will increase significantly with the increase in the integration of the intelligent driving domain and the cockpit domain, and the development cost will increase;

(2) The smart driving domain and the cockpit domain have different functional safety requirements, leading to an increase in the cost of meeting vehicle regulatory requirements;

(3) Cabin-driving integration needs to gradually open up the department walls between the smart driving domain and the cockpit domain, and promote the integration of organizational structures to improve efficiency, but the time cost is high;

(4) It is difficult to achieve platformization, standardization, and scale in the short term. It cannot cover all high-end, high-end, and low-end models, and it is difficult to amortize costs.

Therefore, combining the demands of reducing costs and improving functional experience, the guests believed that the integration of travel and parking is the best solution in the short term, and it is expected to be implemented on a large scale in 2024~2025. The integration of cabin and driving will reduce the cost in the comprehensive dimension and bring more to users. , On the premise of better user experience, it can be first implemented on high-end models, and then gradually expand to mid- and low-end models, which is expected to be as early as 2026.

At the same time, a few guests also proposed that based on the considerations of product definition, system consideration, cost reduction, mass production delivery, and organizational structure integration, we should abandon one box and one board and focus on the one chip solution to integrate cabin and driving.

If its R&D costs and other hidden costs are equal to those of a more integrated central computing architecture, it will consider directly abandoning the integration of cabin and driving and directly switching to a more integrated central computing architecture.

Jiuzhang Zhijia has organized many high-quality small-scale offline closed-door meetings (salon activities), such as "Who will be the winner in the battle for large computing power chips ?", "Analysis of basic software trends for autonomous driving", " The implementation of the BEV perception model, how different players can deeply participate in and promote it, etc. We carefully selected and invited senior executives and technical backbones from OEMs and intelligent driving technology companies to participate, which was highly recognized by the participating guests.