Wuling's domestically produced chips and battery swaps at the Hainan conference

Wuling showed a lot of things at the Hainan New Energy Conference, mainly in three parts: domestic chips, battery swapping, and large iron-lithium cylinders made by Ningde for Wuling. I think in the field of A00-class BEV, Wuling has thought of many solutions for the market after 2022, and its combat potential is off the charts.

1. The story of domestic chips

Wuling's "strong core" strategy, to put it simply, is to import domestically designed (manufactured and packaged) chips as soon as possible under the current chip shortage conditions, which is very important for Wuling's future survival. Under the test of chip shortage, the most uncomfortable ones are Tier 1 who cannot get chips (deprived of the qualification to survive), and the other is the car companies that cannot afford to pay for chips. So this time Wuling launched a "self-developed" computing chip, and also tried to make breakthroughs in 5G communication chips, storage chips, energy chips, artificial intelligence chips and other fields to accelerate the pace of chip localization.

I took a closer look at Wuling's KF32A150MQV, which is a product of Chip ON Shanghai Xinwangwei. I first talked about this in March of the first half of the year, and then a domestic Tier 1 automotive electronics company helped Wuling to make domestically produced chips.

Note: Wuling has other chip suppliers. We will talk about them again when we get the domestically produced VCU and BMS.

Figure 1 Wuling’s domestically produced chips are cooperating with Xinwangwei

Wuling currently chooses ChipON 32-bit MCU, which is mainly used in car bodies, including touch panels, sunroofs, car fans, etc. Overall, there are more 8-bit MCUs in China, and this time Wuling imported 32-bit MCUs. This type of MCU is widely used in the field of automotive electronics, and is more used in node control and ECUs with slightly complex functions or strong requirements for functional safety. According to whether functional safety is required, it can be divided into three application categories: non-functional safety, ASIL-B, and ASIL-D.

Non-functional safety components are more derived from body control and vehicle-mounted ECUs, such as seats, air-conditioning panels, lighting controls, Tbox, OBC, vehicle-mounted wireless charging, and vehicle-mounted display co-controllers.

ASIL-B level functional safety applications are more about vehicle body control, such as BCM, air conditioning power supply, power management, BMS, instrument panel control, headlights, etc.; sometimes non-functional safety and ASIL-B application scenarios will overlap slightly, mainly depending on how the OEM makes regulations.

ASIL-D functional safety applications are strong functional safety applications, ranging from automotive airbags, brake ABS, ESP, to electric drives, battery pack BMS, gearboxes, and three-electric systems (VCU, MCU, BMS). The MCU manufacturers that can provide D-level products mainly include Infineon's TC series MCUs, Renesas' RH850 series MCUs, and NXP's latest S32K3 series MCUs.

Figure 2 Typical application of K32A 15x

2. Progress of battery replacement and cylindrical battery introduction

The most surprising thing about Wuling to me was the release of smart micro-battery swapping technology and related battery swapping stations for new energy vehicles.

Wuling Intelligent Micro Battery Swap Station, due to its small battery, occupies a small area overall, and can be expanded in a modular manner to flexibly configure multiple battery storage compartments. When swapping batteries, it can be accurately identified through visual recognition and laser positioning technology, and the battery swap time is very short.

Figure 3 Wuling’s battery swap station approach

This approach is a bit like the optimization that Hangzhou State Grid did on the Kandi battery swap version. If a vehicle-battery separation is done on a micro electric vehicle, it is similar to the approach of electric bicycles, and it can really increase the penetration rate of electric vehicles by 5% (1 million) -10% (2 million).

Figure 4 Fully automatic micro-swap station

Another thing worth noting is that the large iron-lithium cylinder is landing very quickly at the A00 level, as shown below.

Figure 5 A strange heating film is used here

Summary: I think Wuling’s approach is still very fast and aggressive. I think this approach is very inspiring at all levels.