Rebirth 08: Rise from copycat phones

Chapter 232 Coupe mass production plan and rocket launch (6.8K two-in-one)

Bao Yongyan opened the driver's door and said, "Boss Xu, look at our interior design. The overall design is simple yet sci-fi!"

As he spoke, Xu Shenxue got into the driver's seat, and Bao Yongyan also walked to the other side and got into the co-pilot seat. He continued, "In order to show the high-tech attributes at the first glance, we have equipped large-size touch screens in the most conspicuous driving instrument panel position and the central control position."

"Especially the touch screen on the center console is large enough, a full 16 inches, and there is also an 11-inch screen in the back seat!"

"The small touch screen on the instrument panel can display all driving data, including speed, lights, battery level, etc."

"The touch screen in the center console is used for navigation, reversing image and multimedia display!"

"We have installed the group's AutoNavi map as navigation software. At the same time, the car computer has a built-in 4G communication baseband and a data card, which can update navigation data in real time and provide navigation!"

"At the same time, this networking function can also upload a large amount of driving data for subsequent assisted driving training!"

"We have also imitated tablets and mobile phones and built-in music and video playback software in the car system, and also used content providers in the group!"

"The car computer can also be connected to our Zhiyun mobile phone based on the Bluetooth network to realize functions such as making and receiving calls, playing music and videos!"

"The car computer function is our focus, mainly to widen the first perception gap with other traditional gasoline vehicles!"

Xu Shenxue smiled and said, "You guys are just moving the TV into the car. But it's good this way. We have to have something different!"

Bao Yongyan also laughed: "It's not just the TV. We also plan to get a small refrigerator. However, the current battery cost is too high. If we put electrical appliances in the car, it will affect the battery life. It can be said that there are gains and losses. However, after we put the refrigerator in, users also choose to turn it off and not use it to save electricity!"

"Of course, in the software part, our focus is not on these big screens, but on the assisted driving system."

"We have developed an assisted driving system together with Zhiyun's unmanned vehicle team. We use lidar sensors, millimeter-wave radars, and high-definition cameras to sense surrounding environmental data, establish real-time terrain structures through specially developed algorithms, and use AI systems to identify moving or stationary objects, ultimately achieving a series of assisted driving!"

As he spoke, Bao Yongyan revealed a smug expression and said, "Because we use the AI ​​technology from the Intelligent Research Institute, our assisted driving AI has undergone big data deep learning training, and the driverless capabilities it has demonstrated have reached a quite astonishing level!"

"Especially in the recognition of stationary objects, our AI system is far superior to other manufacturers. The recognition of stationary objects is also very important. For example, it can accurately identify various fixed objects on the road, people or vehicle images on billboards, and many other situations, so as to avoid the vehicle making wrong decisions due to recognition errors when performing assisted driving."

"When we tested it before, the vehicle was able to drive autonomously, starting, driving, parking and other operations without human intervention, even on some complex roads."

However, Bao Yongyan's tone dropped after he finished speaking: "But the cost of this will be very high. The current LiDAR and millimeter-wave radar are too expensive!"

Xu Shenxue is not very clear about the technical details, but he knows the great role of the AI ​​system in his own intelligent research institute.

As long as there is enough data for training and guidance of the AI ​​model, the AI ​​model will become smarter and smarter.

"The application of AI technology in the field of driverless cars is also the core focus of the institute's driverless car project. Now that it is first applied to assisted driving, it can be regarded as a preliminary test, and it can also collect more driving data for subsequent model training."

"As for the cost issue, it doesn't matter if the hardware cost is a little bit higher now. Anyway, we only make high-end models now, so we can afford the high cost!"

"Furthermore, you have to believe in the strength of the domestic supply chain. As long as there is such demand, it won't be long before the prices of laser radar and millimeter-wave radar will be brought down. My Liuhe Investment has already made arrangements and invested in and acquired many companies that specialize in this. However, at this stage, the visual solution is still a relatively cost-effective solution. Zhiyun Technology previously made a strategic investment in an overseas company, Mobileye. Their visual assisted driving solution is very good and I think it has great market prospects."

Xu Shenxue said: "However, AI is still in its early stages, and there are still some technical problems in the extended development of driving AI. Therefore, you should limit your application and not directly launch pure unmanned driving at this time. The unpredictable risks are too great. We need to be more stable and not move too fast."

Bao Yongyan said: "We have also taken this into consideration, so our driving AI is castrated on the basis of unmanned driving. Our AI assisted driving system can independently handle some basic driving tasks, such as lane keeping and automatic following, as well as simpler automatic parking functions, but the driver is still required to observe and take over the car at any time."

"But even so, this system has high requirements for hardware performance, especially the demand for computing power. We commissioned Zhiyun Semiconductor to develop chips specifically for the car system."

"This type of chip is still relatively expensive, not only because it uses a 32-nanometer process, but also because in order to meet automotive-grade technical standards, the packaging technology requirements are also quite high."

"In addition, the current costs of lidar and millimeter-wave radar are also very high!"

"The hardware cost of the entire system is very high, not to mention the R&D and training costs of the driving AI."

"This may have a certain impact on subsequent marketing promotion!"

Xu Shenxue said: "In the early stage, the cost of things is naturally higher. When the subsequent technology matures, the output is large, and the supply chain matures, the cost will naturally decrease. There is no need to worry too much about these things!"

"You don't need to think too much about price and market for now. All you need to do is to improve the technology. Anyway, the car we're going to focus on in the early stages is high-end models, so some costs can be covered."

Bao Yongyan said: "That's right. The costs of our car are quite high in all aspects. If we put it on the market, even the low-end version will cost more than 600,000 or 700,000 yuan. If you want a longer range and advanced driver assistance version, it will probably cost more than a million yuan!"

Xu Shenxue smiled and said, "You have to believe that there are more rich people than you think. As long as the product is good enough, I can sell you a million-dollar car!"

"The prerequisite is that the car must be good enough. Anyway, we will put all the advanced technologies we can get, no matter whether they are useful or not, whether they are expensive or cheap, as long as they are useful, into the car. Our first wave is to promote the brand and give people a little shock. Then we will simplify the configuration according to the situation, and then make a high-volume model to make money!"

"But the hardware still needs to be adequate, and the power and battery life cannot be bad!"

Bao Yongyan said: "Don't worry, Mr. Xu. Our main hardware systems are actually very good. Electric vehicles are difficult and simple at the same time. Apart from the assisted driving, the three core components are the motor, battery, and electronic control."

"The technical content of the motor system is relatively low. We acquired a domestic motor manufacturer and obtained some foreign corresponding motor technology patents, and then developed a customized motor."

"As for the electronic control system, this is more critical. It is the integrated management system of the entire vehicle. It needs to manage the energy distribution of the entire vehicle and control the operation of each subcomponent. It also includes the energy management system, energy recovery system, motor control system, steering control system and powertrain control system, etc. This is a relatively complex integrated system, and our intelligent driving assistance system is based on this electronic control system!"

"We recruited a large number of engineers to independently develop this part of the electronic control system. The first version of the test version is currently installed on this prototype car."

"As for the battery system, it mainly integrates a large number of lithium battery packs, manages charging and discharging, and performs safety design on the battery packs to ensure the safety of lithium batteries."

"This is actually quite difficult, mainly because lithium batteries are relatively dangerous, and our electric vehicles need to discharge or charge at high power, so this is a very challenging task. In order to solve the problem of fast charging of batteries, we also borrowed some of Zhiyun Technology's fast charging technology and made targeted improvements to adapt it to our battery pack."

"We have also done a lot of work on safety prevention. In fact, a considerable amount of the weight and volume of the battery pack and even the vehicle are used for safety prevention to ensure that the battery is as safe as possible and does not catch fire when it is hit. Even if a fire occurs, it must be controlled to prevent it from burning too quickly, giving people in the car enough time to escape!"

Xu Shenxue is naturally aware of the dangers of lithium batteries!
The reason why Zhiyun mobile phones and other smart terminal products have been slow to adopt fast charging technology is that Zhiyun Technology has not yet found an absolutely safe fast charging technology. The fast charging technology developed previously seems to be very good and the charging speed is fast enough, but there are still certain technical defects. In some specific circumstances, it may cause the battery to catch fire, and frequent use may cause the battery to swell and reduce its service life.

These defects are unacceptable for Zhiyun Technology, which pursues the limit.

Therefore, Zhiyun Technology developed the fast charging technology a long time ago, but it has never been used. Instead, it continues to conduct research and development and technological iteration.

Compared with mobile phones, lithium batteries in electric vehicles face greater sources of danger and more serious consequences, so Xu Shenxue actually pays more attention to this aspect.

"I don't need to say much about the importance of battery safety. We must do our best and would rather sacrifice some battery life to ensure safety!"

Bao Yongyan said: "This is also the reason why we use lithium iron phosphate, which has a more mature technology and higher safety. Although ternary lithium batteries have a higher energy density and can bring longer battery life, our battery technology in this area is still lacking and cannot ensure ultimate safety."

"When we conducted spontaneous combustion simulation tests, the proportion of ternary lithium batteries significantly exceeded that of lithium iron phosphate."

"In addition, the cost of lithium iron phosphate batteries is also lower, which helps us control the cost of the entire vehicle."

“Even though the energy density of lithium iron phosphate batteries is slightly lower, we still achieved a range of 350 kilometers in the prototype vehicle!”

Accompanied by Bao Yongyan, Xu Shenxue got in the car to check it out and even took a quick drive around the company's test site. He felt it was pretty good, with good electronic control technology. In comfort mode, the start was relatively smooth, unlike those cheap electric cars that start with a catapult, which can make people vomit just by sitting in one.

It was then tested by a professional test driver, and the actual starting speed in the test was 4.5 seconds per 100 kilometers. This is very good for a conventional coupe whose main focus is on appearance and does not consider the maximum speed too much.

These routine tests are actually nothing interesting. What you really see is that the driver lets go of the steering wheel. Although the vehicle is under the control of the "Intelligent Driving Assistance System", the vehicle begins to drive unmanned and tests a series of functions such as automatic following, cruising, lane keeping, and parking.

This thing is not uncommon after more than ten years, but it is still serious high-tech at the moment, not to mention the assisted driving developed by Zhiyun Technology. In fact, it is different from a large number of assisted driving that appeared in the early days. It is much smarter!

This thing is essentially a driving AI!

Even without performance restrictions and strict controls, even the current "intelligent driving" AI can control the vehicle autonomously without any human operation... Of course, safety cannot be guaranteed.

Because unmanned vehicles are more complex and difficult to develop than robot dogs. In order to prevent its own unmanned vehicles from becoming road killers after being put on the road, Zhiyun Technology does not provide a pure unmanned driving solution, but only an assisted driving solution.

According to the top level of autonomous driving within Zhiyun Technology, this belongs to the L2 level. As for the goal of Zhiyun Technology's driverless car team, the initial level is L4, and the ultimate goal is L5 level.

That is, fully automated driving, with no human intervention required throughout the entire process... This is also the unmanned transportation solution that Zhiyun Technology has prepared for future smart cities.

But even at L2 level, it is amazing enough!

And the reason why it is defined at the L2 level is to avoid legal risks...

If the car is driverless, it involves a very important legal issue. That is, if an accident occurs during autonomous driving, does the responsibility belong to the driver or the manufacturer?

Once you promote your driving technology as truly autonomous, such as L4, then the responsibility will most likely belong to the manufacturer.

Therefore, in order to avoid legal risks, when HaiLan Technology launches this thing to the market in the future, it will definitely not use words such as driverless or automatic driving. Instead, it will use words such as "automatic assisted driving", with the focus on assistance.

Then if an accident happens, it has nothing to do with the manufacturer. It's just an assisted driving system. It's your fault as a driver for not taking over the vehicle in time!

This is actually very important. Otherwise, the car companies will be sued to death, facing a large amount of sky-high compensation at any minute and finally going bankrupt, and it will seriously affect the company's reputation and vehicle brand value.

Therefore, you will see that many car companies have very good technology, but they only dare to label themselves as L2++++ and will never say what kind of autonomous driving they are.

This is to avoid legal risks.

----

After looking around at the prototype car, Xu Shenxue was still full of confidence in this thing: "Now that the car is almost done, we can also properly promote it and release it. Tesla in the United States is about to mass-produce Model S, and we can't fall too far behind!"

Bao Yongyan said: "We have also been following Tesla's developments. Their first model was a sports car. Although the car was very good, the cost was too high. They lost money on every car they mass-produced. The Model S is their mass-produced model. According to some information they have released, its performance is quite excellent!"

"But we have an absolute advantage in the field of intelligent driving. As far as I know, their models do not have intelligent driving, they are just pure electric vehicles."

Xu Shenxue said: "This is our advantage. We will set the tone for our brand with smart driving first!"

Xu Shenxue then discussed with Bao Yongyan the vehicle's first launch announcement and subsequent mass production and sales.

According to the plan, the models represented by the prototype car will only serve as a benchmark for ultra-high-end models and follow the concept car route... This thing is too expensive, whether it is batteries, lidar, or millimeter-wave radar, they are all very expensive at this stage.

If the car is fully equipped like the prototype, plus the R&D costs, production costs, etc., and the selling price is less than one million, it will be a loss.

Therefore, real mass-produced models actually need to be simplified models, especially in assisted driving. Although laser radar is also used, it can only be selected as a smaller option, and visual assisted driving is the main focus.

Zhiyun Technology has previously made a strategic investment in an overseas visual algorithm company whose visual algorithms are very good. By integrating it with its own driving AI, the resulting pure visual driving solution is actually very good, not to mention that it is also supplemented by laser radar.

Take a two-pronged approach to ensure safety.

For batteries, there are three levels of combinations: low, medium and high.

After final calculation, the standard version, plus the Xing Energy subsidy, can probably reduce the price to 500,000 yuan.

Although this price is still very expensive, Hailan Automobile has added a lot of high value-added things to this price.

In Bao Yongyan's words, the title of the world's first commercial automatic assisted driving is worth at least 200,000!

HaiLan Technology's pure electric coupe can support this price!
Of course, even so, we don’t expect too much sales. It still takes some time for new things to gain public recognition.

HaiLan Technology's initial strategy is to focus on promoting automatic assisted driving, strive to directly increase the gap between traditional gasoline vehicles and focus on high-tech attributes.

The press conference is expected to be held in April, and then pre-orders will begin to be accepted. As for mass production, that will have to be after September, and it can only be small-scale production. Real large-scale production is estimated to have to wait until next year.

During this time, Hailan Automobile actually needs to continue polishing the details before mass production starts.

However, after the press conference, it would not be a problem to first produce dozens of sample cars for promotion and use them as display cars for advertising at Xu Shenxue's wedding.

After getting a satisfactory answer from HaiLan Automobile and finalizing the time of the press conference, Xu Shenxue left HaiLan Automobile contentedly.

Xu Shenxue is quite satisfied with the recent work of HaiLian Automobile, which was able to quickly reverse the negative impact brought by the previous management, and then quickly advance the technology. It also did not hesitate to spend money on corporate acquisitions, mergers and acquisitions, and infrastructure investments.

Then they came up with a prototype car so quickly, which shows that the team led by Bao Yongyan is still reassuring.

After leaving Hailan Automobile, Xu Shenxue was busy with wedding preparations for the next few days, taking wedding photos and making some coordination arrangements for the wedding.

Even if they try to keep a low profile, there are too many things to consider at a wedding, so many things need to be decided by Xu Shenxue himself.

After the spring press conference, in order to leave enough time for the many guests, Xu Shenxue also began to send out wedding invitations in advance.

There are about a thousand important guests planned to be invited, a considerable number of whom are overseas guests, mainly wealthy people and management of large companies.

Arranging accommodation, transportation and even security for these guests is a hassle.

However, there are many things that Xu Shenxue does not need to handle personally. Except for taking wedding photos himself, other times he basically just listens to a report and then makes a decision.

After a brief period of busy work, Xu Shenxue received a report from Nanmen Aerospace Company on Qiongzhou Island, saying that they were preparing to conduct a full-scale rocket launch test next week.

It is not the previous test flight of a small-size model, but a test of a rocket engine developed independently. If the takeoff and ascent phases go smoothly, a recovery test will be carried out.

Previously, Nanmen Aerospace had conducted more than ten tests of small-size rockets to verify the engine and recovery technology, some of which failed and some were successful.

The most significant achievement is that half a month ago they used a small-sized test rocket for testing, successfully launched it into space and then recovered it.

What will be carried out this time is the test of a real large rocket: the first test flight and recovery test of the Nantianmen 5 rocket.

The real test for Nanmen Aerospace is here.

Regardless of whether this test would succeed or fail, Xu Shenxue chose to go to Qiongzhou Island to cheer up the R&D personnel on site and give them reassurances: Don’t be afraid of the rocket exploding, I have plenty of money, just go for it!
After Xu Shenxue arrived, Deng Feiyue, the chief engineer in charge of the entire reusable rocket project, was very nervous!

Even though they had conducted more than a dozen tests on the small rocket model before, and except for frequent failures in the beginning, the subsequent five or six times had actually achieved varying degrees of success, and the last three times were successful from takeoff to recovery.

The reliability of the engine and the retrieval technology were verified.

But how can the reuse test of small-sized rocket models be compared with this big guy in front of us!
The overall technical difficulty is not on the same level!

The diameter of this thing alone reaches 3.6 meters, and it has as many as seven engines.

Although it is just a test, in order to obtain more experimental data, this time the Nantianmen 5 rocket still uses a two-stage rocket design. If everything goes well, in addition to verifying the takeoff and recovery of the first-stage rocket, it will also simultaneously test and verify the first and second-stage rocket separation technology, the second-stage rocket air start, remote control and other technologies, as well as release special satellites for the test.

This is a comprehensive test!

The validation of recycling technology is only part of the test.
This type of large-scale comprehensive test is actually not much different from a conventional commercial rocket launch, but it is very expensive, costing hundreds of millions for one launch.

Even though Xu Shenxue has repeatedly stated: I'm not afraid of you exploding!
But if it really explodes, hundreds of millions will be wasted. Who knows if Boss Xu will regret it or even get angry!

Xu Shenxue could more or less see the nervousness of the people on site, and was quite speechless about it... I had expected that this experiment would fail, and I was mentally prepared, so why did you still have this expression!
Even if it explodes, as long as we can collect relevant data and find problems, it will be worth it!
But the people from Nanmen Aerospace insisted on doing so, so Xu Shenxue was too lazy to say anything and just watched!
Under the watchful eyes of Xu Shenxue, on March 5, a sunny day, Nanmen Aerospace's recoverable commercial rocket Nantianmen was officially ignited and launched at the Nanmen Space Launch Center on Qiongzhou Island!
As the seven engines of the Nantianmen rocket ignited successfully and pushed the large rocket straight into the sky, many people present stood up involuntarily!

Two chapters in one
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