Smart chassis, completely new!-EEWORLD

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The automobile chassis is brewing a new intelligent technology revolution and market change.

Following the comprehensive launch of new car chassis such as Huawei Tuling chassis, Geely AI digital chassis, and Zhiji Lingxi digital chassis, more domestic brand car companies have increased their investment in the intelligent chassis track.

For example, the latest intelligent digital chassis technology released by Haobo this month has created a new form of functional control: integrating electronic differential locks, eliminating the need for four motors, and realizing functions such as tiger-style turns and jumping 15cm on the spot. The car can also perform actions such as dancing to music and four-wheel aerial rope skipping.

The constantly updated intelligent chassis also reveal the latest technologies and market trends in this field.

First, intelligent chassis technology has entered the 2.0 stage, relying on more sensors and actuators to achieve more advanced chassis control. Typical technologies include active suspension, electronic differential lock, etc., which improve the vehicle's handling and comfort through real-time data analysis and control algorithm optimization.

In addition, at the hardware level, the stability, safety, and flexibility of the entire vehicle are deeply dependent on the comprehensive wire control of the vehicle chassis to support real-time data interaction, precise control, and autonomous decision-making.

For example, Haobo's automotive chassis components are deeply integrated with the EEA3.0 electronic and electrical architecture to achieve full wire control - full wire-controlled suspension, steering, braking, and drive systems have stronger output capabilities and faster responses, bringing stronger sports limit control capabilities to new energy vehicles.

In fact, this is not the first car company to announce a fully wire-controlled chassis. As early as the end of last year, NIO released its new car ET9, and also announced that it would be equipped with a fully wire-controlled intelligent chassis that integrated three core hardware systems.

It can be seen that the intelligent chassis replaces mechanical or hydraulic devices with electronic devices, driving key subsystems of the intelligent chassis such as wire-controlled braking, active suspension and wire-controlled steering, and ushering in a comprehensive wire-controlled market node.

Fully controlled by wire, a new focus of chassis competition

Taking wire control braking as an example, data from Gaogong Intelligent Automobile Research Institute shows that in 2023, 7.9577 million new passenger cars (excluding imports and exports) in the Chinese market (excluding imports and exports) were delivered with standard wire control braking (One/Two Box), a year-on-year increase of 60.31%, and the installation rate rose to 37.68%.

Domestic brands that are at the forefront of electrification and intelligence have become the main contributors to the market, with more than 55% of new cars delivered with standard brake-by-wire configuration. It is expected that the front-end installation rate of brake-by-wire systems will exceed 50% in 2024.

It is not difficult to find that in the few years before 2020, domestic suppliers' exploration of EHB was still in the battle between One box and Two box technologies. With the gradual maturity of One box technology, obvious cost reduction advantages, and the radical attitude of domestic brands towards wire-controlled chassis, the industry has basically clarified the mainstream technology trend of One box.

Today, after fully verifying the product reliability and stability, as well as energy recovery and a series of auxiliary functions, wire control braking, especially the One box solution, has ushered in a new scale-up cycle, especially domestic solutions, which have a fierce momentum of latecomers.

For example, as the first science and technology company in China to achieve large-scale mass production of One box braking system, Liker Technology's One Box product integrated intelligent braking system IHB-LK®️ has achieved a high degree of functional integration, integrating key components such as transmission vacuum booster, brake master cylinder, and body stability system ESC.

It is worth mentioning that the high dynamic response capability is another highlight of its products, which can seamlessly support all driving assistance functions and autonomous driving functions; and the product adopts a new system architecture design, and the continuous pressure regulation control time is not restricted.

In addition, the product also has excellent energy recovery function, and the system decoupling can use the large motor to achieve 100% braking energy recovery. So far, Li Ke Technology's wire control brake system has been designated by more than ten leading OEMs in China for nearly 30 projects, and many car companies' projects are in mass production.

In addition, the One box + 4-wheel RBU braking redundancy solution launched by Liker Technology can meet the braking redundancy requirements of high-level autonomous driving. Different from the previous two-wheel control or only provide braking function after failure, the 4-wheel RBU control solution not only ensures safe braking when the system fails, but also has certain ESC and ABS functions, significantly improving the vehicle's control ability and safety under complex road conditions.

Another key technology of the drive-by-wire chassis - steer-by-wire (SBW), eliminates the mechanical connection, gets rid of the various limitations of the traditional steering system, and achieves the decoupling of the upper and lower hardware of the system. It is an important link in realizing the intelligent steering of the vehicle.

Thanks to the “green light” from domestic policies, this segment has also opened the first door to large-scale mass production.

Since January 2022, the national standard GB 17675-2021 "Basic Requirements for Automobile Steering Systems" has deleted the requirement that full-motion

In order to meet the requirements of the power steering mechanism, the regulations have allowed the physical decoupling between the steering wheel and the steering gear of the steering system.

In the "New Energy Vehicle Industry Development Plan (2021-2035)" issued by the State Council, the chassis integration of pure electric vehicles and the wire-controlled execution system have been listed as key technical research projects. As an important part of the execution end of smart driving cars, the wire-controlled steering system has also ushered in a new opportunity for market reform.

In fact, steer-by-wire has been put into small-scale production in many foreign brands, including Infiniti's DAS steer-by-wire system on its Q50, Tesla's Cybertruck pure electric pickup, and Toyota's bz4X.

At the Tier 1 level, as early as 2017, Nexteer released a steer-by-wire system consisting of a silent steering wheel system and an on-demand steering system, and in its 2022 interim report announcement, it won a 2 billion yuan order for a steer-by-wire system from a certain OEM.

In October 2022, ZF and NIO signed a strategic cooperation agreement. The two parties plan to cooperate in areas such as wire-controlled steering products. This also marks the first time that ZF has cooperated in wire-controlled steering business in the Asia-Pacific region.

In terms of the domestic supply chain, both the steer-by-wire chassis suppliers with steer-by-wire genes and the newly established steer-by-wire up-and-coming companies are beginning to emerge.

For example, at this year's Beijing Auto Show, Tongyu Automotive Technology's steering control system (SBW) debuted, and its product focuses on three major features: feel simulation, variable transmission ratio, and can be embedded in the steering wheel. Currently, Tongyu Automotive Technology's SBW product is under testing and is expected to be mass-produced in 2026.

Yupan Technology, founded in 2023, entered the steering track from rear-wheel steering, has launched a rear-wheel steering system, and completed nearly 100 million yuan in seed and angel round financing in April this year. At the same time, the company has also laid out wire control steering and

Active suspension achieves dynamic stability in all four wheels through integrated control of the chassis in three directions: XYZ.

At present, Yupan Technology has completed the verification test of the rear-wheel steering system RWS and the whole vehicle road test, and the wire-controlled steering and active suspension samples have also been verified on the vehicle.

Chassis domain integration gives birth to a new software and hardware ecosystem

However, from the perspective of the entire vehicle, chassis domain control will play an important role in eliminating the execution conflicts of the XYZ wire-controlled subsystems, improving the spatial margin for vehicle chassis handling stability, as well as redundancy and driving function safety.

"The coordination and cooperation of the chassis is more complicated, and the intelligent driving domain controller sends instructions to each chassis actuator one by one, which is decentralized control and cannot meet the technical requirements of the centralized development of automotive electronic and electrical architecture. In the future, the chassis domain controller will definitely act as the cerebellum to send unified instructions, coordinate braking, steering, suspension, etc., and control the vehicle's yaw angular velocity, longitudinal acceleration, etc." said Shu Qiang, founder, chairman and general manager of Tongyu Automobile Technology.

By fusing the signals of the sensors of the current wire-controlled brakes, wire-controlled steering, suspension and other components, the chassis domain can accurately quantify the boundary conditions for safe and stable operation of the vehicle during driving, accurately identify the driver's intentions and comprehensively optimize the chassis's multi-objective and multi-systems, thereby achieving integrated control of vehicle dynamics and solving the problem of coupling conflicts among various actuators.

Previously, NIO has tried to install the intelligent chassis domain controller ICC on its first sedan model ET7, and began deliveries in March 2023.

It is reported that ICC, which integrates control functions such as redundant parking, air suspension, and shock absorbers, can comprehensively design and adjust chassis comfort, handling, etc. It also supports high-level autonomous driving scenarios with cross-domain integration, and supports flexible and rapid iterations through FOTA upgrades.

From a product perspective, the chassis domain controller must have communication redundancy, power redundancy, perception redundancy, and main controller redundancy designs in terms of system, software and hardware. It must follow the highest level ASIL-D functional safety and information security design process, and have the ability to downgrade or safely take over in a fault mode to ensure that the chassis' load-bearing and driving functions are safe and reliable.

At the same time, the chassis domain needs to have powerful hardware computing capabilities and rich software interfaces to achieve decoupling of software and hardware and decoupling of functions and hardware, which is conducive to supporting OTA upgrades and thus realizing rapid iteration and optimization of core algorithms.

Based on more than ten years of technical accumulation and mass production experience in components such as wire-controlled brakes and wire-controlled steering, Tongyu Automotive Technology has developed integrated control of wire-controlled chassis, namely the chassis domain controller.