From batteries to skateboard chassis

One year after acquiring a stake in Gecko Technology, CATL also announced the progress of the skateboard chassis. According to the information disclosed at the Electric Vehicle Hundred People Forum, the second round of winter testing of the skateboard chassis based on customer models has been completed this year, and mass production will be achieved in the second half of the year.

The company in charge of this project is Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Ltd. (Shanghai), which was officially established in 2021. The CTC technology project was initiated within the CATL Group in 2018. After three years of technology research and development, the company was officially established. It has been more than two years of industrialization practice, and is now at the stage of "mass production as soon as it is unveiled".

Regarding the skateboard chassis, Yang Hanbing, managing director of Times Intelligence, said, "The soul and creativity of the car should be left to the OEMs. They understand users, scenarios, and consumer needs better. We understand batteries better, energy efficiency, and electric chassis safety."

For the outside world, CATL's development of the skateboard chassis has released an important signal that the changes in the relationship between parts and the whole in the industry are closer to "Moore's Law". However, will the chassis of automobiles become a universal part like a computer motherboard?

The "big chess" of skateboard chassis

Let me first give you a brief introduction to the current situation of Times Intelligence. The relevant person in charge told me that the company currently has more than 600 people, 90% of whom are R&D personnel. The general manager Yang Hanbing, who is at the helm, was originally the president of Schaeffler 's Greater China Automotive Technology Division. The company mainly makes skateboard chassis, which means that it has invested a lot of manpower.

What surprised me was that in terms of the chassis of the skateboard, Times Intelligence and Gecko Technology are relatively independent. That is to say, the person in charge told me that the chassis of the skateboard this time were all developed by Times Intelligence:

"The battery is definitely developed by us, from CATL, and the electric drive system, thermal management system, and the integration of the entire chassis are all developed by our Shanghai company. But there are some small components, etc., and the industry already has mature technology that can adapt to the needs of the skateboard chassis. We are open to external cooperation for these components."

In addition, let's talk about Gecko Technology. The core of Gecko Technology is also skateboard chassis technology. It is a company under Alte. The chairman of the company, Liu Jiangfeng, is the former president of Huawei Honor. Shareholder director Xuan Qiwu (Chairman of Alte) has been engaged in car design since 2002. At the Shanghai Auto Show last year, Gecko also released its first logistics vehicle, Jiangling Jinhu EV48.

From the background point of view, Xuan Qiwu and Alte are the kind of "hidden champions", not showing their strength, but extraordinary. CATL's leap from the battery era to the chassis era is considered to be a "opening up of the pattern", which also shows that it is not just thinking about battery CTC.

Looking back, out of consideration for the development of the next generation of vehicles, CATL defines the skateboard chassis as: "a highly integrated energy and motion module that supports upper and lower decoupling and openness to the outside world."

When talking about skateboard chassis, we must also mention "X-by-wire chassis". The core difference between skateboard chassis and X-by-wire chassis is that the former can define chassis performance through software instead of connecting only through electrical signals. According to Liu Yang, vice president of PIX MOVING, skateboard chassis is the ultimate form of X-by-wire chassis.

From the perspective of architecture, it is generally believed that the most important point of the skateboard chassis is to achieve decoupling between the upper and lower bodies, so that the two can evolve independently and even be customized according to the scene. This architectural design brings great convenience to the manufacturing, maintenance and upgrade of the car.

Yang Hanbing said that the CIIC integrated intelligent chassis will not only improve the efficiency of vehicle development, but also provide unprecedented freedom for vehicle styling design and intelligent function definition. Its advantages include three dimensions:

Figure | CATL skateboard chassis patent diagram

The first is "fast, and faster." - The parallel development of the upper and lower bodies greatly shortens the vehicle development cycle;

Second, "saving more." - After the integrated intelligent chassis becomes a standardized and platform-based component, the industry's sharing of a chassis architecture will bring huge cost advantages, that is, reducing the initial cost of developing a model, and multiple models and car companies share the model;

The third is "freedom, and even more freedom." - After the upper and lower bodies are decoupled, the correlation between safety and styling is reduced, and the EE interface and mechanical interface are opened, allowing automotive designers and product managers to play more freely and unleash their creativity in styling design and intelligent experience function development.

Yang Hanbing believes that the core of the skateboard chassis has three centers, namely the power center, energy center and control center. In the long run, it will also develop into an intelligent center, for example, used to control the mechanical arm on the chassis.

The purpose of decoupling design is also to decouple the vehicle life cycle. After all, the update frequency of the upper intelligent components is high, while the life of the chassis components is much longer than that of the intelligent components. They can be reused and even used for innovative applications such as V2G (vehicle to grid) and energy storage. The decoupling of the skateboard chassis makes the vehicle hardware upgradeable and replaceable, extending the life of the vehicle.

In terms of the more important E/E electronic and electrical architecture, CATL has proposed an EE (Electrical/Electronic) architecture solution for an integrated intelligent chassis, including modules such as the powertrain domain, chassis control domain, and thermal management domain. Under this architecture, it is managed through "integrated intelligent chassis domain control" and a minimum redundant system is built in the chassis to meet the needs of L3/L4 autonomous driving.

In addition, Yang Hanbing revealed that CATL's skateboard chassis has great advantages in power consumption and fast charging, with a power consumption of only 11 kWh per 100 kilometers, much lower than other cars. The fast charging technology also allows the battery SoC to be charged from 30% to 80% in 10 minutes, and with the use of an 800V electric drive system, the overall efficiency is as high as 91.7%.

According to Li Peng, the founder and CEO of Yopao Technology, the manufacturing logic of the skateboard chassis is that after the electrification of automobiles, the chassis of the car becomes similar to the motherboard of a computer, and product differentiation is achieved through configuration and software. So, can it be achieved?

Automobiles enter the "Moore's Law" era

First of all, Yang Hanbing believes that under the wave of intelligence, the automotive industry is entering the era of "Moore's Law".

In Yang Hanbing's view, in the era of internal competition, it is more necessary to unleash scene-based and personalized creativity. Due to the diverse demands of mobile smart spaces and the rapid iteration cycle of 1-2 years, the industry has become more and more competitive in the past two years.

In the mechanical era, cars were replaced every 8 to 10 years. In the electrification era, the cycle was shortened to 6 to 8 years. In the electrification era, it was gradually shortened to 3 to 5 years. In today's intelligent era, with scenario-based and personalized development, it has gradually become a trend to update a car model every 1 to 2 years.

"So the 'Moore's Law' for automobiles, if it was exaggerated and prophetic in the early years, now we are already in the situation."

However, car companies are taking a wait-and-see attitude towards Tier 1 or Tier 0.5 developing skateboard chassis. I have previously written "Skateboard Chassis: A Hard-to-Earn Cake" to explain the difficulty of implementation in this regard. After all, car manufacturing has a threshold, and car company customers (especially passenger cars) should be a "hard bone to chew" for CATL.

For car companies, giving up control of the chassis is equivalent to giving up the "soul". If the skateboard chassis can be handled, then for car companies, the "soul" will be a little uneasy.

Therefore, according to the skateboard chassis that is soaring in accordance with "Moore's Law", as well as this consumer electronics and modular R&D idea, most car companies will do it themselves, including the most important wire control part. As far as I know, Changan and Chery are both conducting R&D in this area. Changan's SDA platform architecture proposes the idea of ​​"soft-hard decoupling, soft-soft decoupling", and Chery Xingtu's E0X platform also adopts the idea of ​​wire control and skateboard chassis.

There are also some skateboard chassis development companies whose products have reached the landing stage, such as Yopao Technology, but most of its five customers are energy companies, and its three domestic customers are also commercial vehicle manufacturers, which is also a very obvious example.