In the era of intelligence, car manufacturers must learn to build mobile phones

Source | Bohufn

Author | Chen Ping'an

In March last year, when Rebus choked and shouted, "fighting all the reputation and fighting for Xiaomi Automobile", he may not expect that this cross -border style is floating from the smartphone industry to the new energy vehicle industry.

In the past six months, the rumors of making mobile phones in the circles have been frequently. From Musk's recruitment of mobile phone talents to Weilai to build mobile phones, to the Geely that just acquired Meizu, "making mobile phones" is being valued by more and more car companies Essence

However, today's mobile phone market is already a red sea. Not only is the market peak, according to the data of Xintong Institute, the total number of domestic mobile phone shipments in the domestic market from January to March 2022, a total of 69.346 million units, a year -on -year decrease of 29.2%. ; And the market is basically divided. According to data in the first quarter of this year, the top seven manufacturers including OV Huami have eaten 96.2%of the market share. Geely acquired Meizu's market share last year was only 0.01%.

At this moment, when entering the mobile phone market, even if you eat the auspiciousness of the entire mobile phone team of Meizu, there is a tragic feeling of moth fluttering.

Unlike the mobile phone market, the new energy vehicle market is a vibrant scene. According to official data, the sales of new energy vehicles in China in the first half of the year, an increase of 120%year -on -year, accounting for 21.7%of the sales ratio of new cars.

So in the critical period of the industry's entry into a new stage of development and the increasingly fierce market competition, why should car companies be distracted by mobile phones?

New Energy Vehicle Dilemma

This matter will start with the vehicle system.

In recent years, with the gradual deepening of intelligence, although the three -electric technology is still the foundation, the core competition elements have shifted to autonomous driving and smart cockpits.

At present, autonomous driving is still far from the L5 level. Many autonomous driving companies such as Wen Zhiyuan and Baidu have reduced dimensions and put the target at the L2-L3 level. In other words, the difference between autonomous driving alone is not so obvious.

Because of this, smart cockpits have become the focus of publicity.

The smart cockpit is based on hardware such as the cockpit SOC and the cockpit domain controller. The soul is the operating system of the vehicle. Most of the domestic manufacturers' vehicle systems are based on Android for customized development. The vehicle Android has a benefit that it can effectively open up hardware resources and applications, thereby avoiding the redundancy of the distributed structure of new energy vehicles.

But the disadvantages are also obvious. The native Android system is very simple. Auto manufacturers need to pay attention to UI's training. Unfortunately, not all car companies can do it.

Geely may have a deep understanding. The GKUI models equipped with Yitong self -developed car system are often complained by "slow response" and "system card".

On a cat complaint platform, a considerable number of users vomit:

"The navigation was opened and the stuck was stuck. After exiting, the dashboard and central control were stuck."

"The car is not available, and the touch screen cannot be used."

(Picture source: Network)

The optimization of UI is the exception of mobile phone manufacturers. According to Tiger Sniff, mobile phone manufacturers are trying their best to optimize the Android system. For example, for the upgrade of camera applications, some companies' UI teams even rewrite all the HAL layers.

Secondly, the car software ecology is also a headache for car companies.

In order to make differences in smart cockpies, new energy vehicle manufacturers can be described as racking their brains. The steam is equipped with the maximum size three -screen screen, and the ideal over there is equipped with 5 screens on the newly released ideal L9.

(Picture source: Network)

The car companies are not allowed to open friends, but the hard work is software suppliers.

The audio APP lychee podcast once stated that the biggest difficulty in the development of car applications is that the central control system of different car manufacturers is different (that is, the screen specifications are different), and the customized and adaptive workload accounts for two -thirds of the total workload.

And the size of the car is not as good as the mobile phone. The suppliers spend strongly to make adaptation, but they may not have equal benefits. Because of this, it is difficult for most car companies to rely on third parties to improve the ecosystem of vehicle machine application.

As the "Xue Xue" in the consumer electronics market in the past ten years, smartphone manufacturers have obviously have more say in the development and software adaptation of the Android system. Industry insiders believe that the research and development capabilities of a mobile phone team are sufficient to cope with the development difficulties of car applications.

In other words, a mobile phone team can break the current vehicle dilemma to a considerable extent, thereby enhancing the experience of smart cockpits. But even so, car companies can cooperate with mobile phone manufacturers to develop, why bother to form a team to build mobile phones?

Strategic defense for apples

This has a lot to do with the current trend.

In the era of intelligence, the boundary between the terminal and the terminal is getting blurred, and the connection between mobile phones and cars is getting closer. The smooth connection between mobile phones and vehicle machines will directly affect the user's driving experience.

Weilai encountered this situation. Weilai has the UWB digital key on the second -generation car logo on the second -generation platform. This new technology can not only bring higher accuracy of ranging demand, but also complement the wireless connection methods such as Bluetooth to meet the needs of users in more scenarios.

However, because Apple refuses to open the port and Apple users accounted for more than half of Weilai owners, this update could not be used for many people. This incident touched Weilai Li Bin very much. When he talked about this in an interview, he said:

"Mobile phones are now the most important equipment for Weilai users to connect to the car. It is not equivalent to the key to the family in the hands of the home. Taking Weilai users as an example, more than 50%of them use Apple mobile phones, but Apple is very closed in the automotive industry. Until now, there is no open interface, so it is very passive. "

If the interconnection problem is just a warning, then more and more mobile phone manufacturers begin to expand the car business and become a supplier of the vehicle factory, which will make the car manufacturers jealous.

There are many cases in the past few years, such as Apple's CarPlay, OPPO's digital car keys, and Huawei, in addition to batteries, chassis and body, do everything else, and make themselves into Tier 0.5 suppliers.

(Picture source: Network)

However, the supplier's iron will never be dyed downstream, and there are many mobile phone manufacturers who have officially announced cars or may be cars.

Although Apple has not yet officially made a car, rivers and lakes have been rumored to make cars everywhere.

Huawei really claims not to build a car, but the current supplier model has poor results. In July of this year, Yu Chengdong once admitted in a public occasion that Huawei Automobile's business is currently the only loss business. In this context, Huawei's technical reserves and brand appeal are not impossible to turn to the C end.

In cooperation with them, what car companies need to consider should not be the smoothness of the vehicle, but to share user data.

Not only do mobile phone manufacturers have huge C -terminal customers, they will have an advantage in software and terminal interconnection than car companies. The "soul theory" of SAIC Chairman Chen Hong is still in the ear. If the car company has been working with mobile phone manufacturers, it is tantamount to making wedding dresses for others.

As Li Bin said, "Think about 2025, the Apple car came out, and 60 % or even more users used Apple mobile phones, we did not have a little defense. Good. "

More and more cruel competition

From the perspective of industry development, companies that can sit in the market in market competition have "comprehensive" characteristics: Apple from hardware to software design, all of which are used by Apple, Samsung Industrial Chain almost covers all the hardware produced on mobile phones.

In the new energy vehicle industry, there are already "comprehensive" pioneers. In the first half of the year, BYD's anti -overtime global new energy vehicle sales list was topped. A large part of the credit needs to be attributed to his supply chain that he is not looking for.

In the second half of intelligent, whether the mobile phone is an important part of the intelligent terminal, whether it can be included in the ecology is of great significance to "comprehensive".

Technically, whether it is a smart cockpit or autonomous driving, the evolution of its technology requires a lot of data collection. However, according to the survey, the current problems of general perception and data processing capabilities of smart cars are less than 5%of the data upload generated by general smart cars. Car companies can make mobile phones themselves not only precipitates user data, but also serve as data transit stations.

(Picture source: Network)

From a market perspective, mobile phones made by car companies can also bring better smart cockpit experience to users, thereby deepening the brand moat.

This is not difficult to understand Li Shufu's view of mobile phone business.

Li Shufu once said, "For the entire Geely automotive industry, the significance of the mobile phone business is very far -reaching. To better develop mobile phones, it can bring better development of the car; the development of vehicles can better develop The continuous improvement of the level can help smart electric vehicles to continuously improve the competitiveness. "

But for car companies, this will be a lot of investment. Regardless of development costs, the cost of early consumer education alone is not small. Earlier, there were media reports that the first mobile phone product of Li Shufu's company's Star -Ji era may not be sold publicly.

This also means that in the future, the future investment will become higher and higher, and the competition will be more cruel.

Reference source:

Letter list: Ren Zhengfei should touch Wang Chuanfu's stone

Yuanchuan Research Institute: Huawei does not build a car, may

Tiger Sniff: Geely Marriage Meizu, who is the savior?

China Automobile News: Which is strong? Can Weilai Geely create a mobile phone to help

Wise Finance: In the era of intelligence, those who get the car will get the world?

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