Image source @Visual China
Text｜Liu Kuang
In the past two years, smart cockpits have become a trend in the development of the automotive industry. Some car companies even regard them as an important core selling point, and the smart cockpit market has gradually ushered in a window of explosion. IHS Markit predicts that by 2030, the market size of China’s smart cockpit will exceed 160 billion yuan, and its global market share will increase from the current 23% to about 37%.
There is no doubt that the smart cockpit is becoming the outlet of rapid development, and domestic giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, and Baidu have entered the game and concentrated their efforts. It is not difficult to guess that as the market and many players’ enthusiasm for smart cockpits continues to grow, more and more participants will pay more and more attention to promoting the development of this field, and the industry situation may become involute.
The same smart cockpit
Smart cockpits are taking off rapidly, and traditional car companies, new car manufacturers, hardware suppliers, and software developers are flocking to them. However, because the configuration of various manufacturers is similar, the homogeneity problem of smart cockpits has gradually become prominent.
Due to the complexity of technology, smart cockpits need to rely closely on the upstream and downstream supply systems, and the solutions provided by most suppliers to smart cockpit brands are relatively similar, resulting in no obvious difference in the functions they carry. That is why today’s smart cockpits are in the form of large screens and multi-screens, and functional configurations such as voice interaction, touch control, and OTA (remote online upgrade technology) are becoming more and more common.
The research results of Yiou think tank show that as of October 2021, the penetration rate of smart passenger car cockpits in China is 50.6%. OTA functions are 86% and 50.9% respectively.
Convergence of product configuration makes it more difficult to widen the competitiveness gap between brands. In order to get rid of this dilemma, many car companies have begun to move towards the main battlefield of differentiation. For example, Tesla has built an entertainment cockpit and introduced a variety of popular games such as “Happy Landlord” and “Cyberpunk 2077”. The smart cockpit of Xiaopeng Motors in China can meet users’ entertainment needs such as watching movies, playing games, and singing. .
It can be seen that the current smart cockpit participants are not lacking in differentiated gimmicks, but now that the industry has gathered many forces, who can stand out from this 100 billion-scale market, it is still necessary to consider whether the differentiated gameplay of each company can really be obtained. favored by consumers.
In terms of differentiation, in addition to car companies with mature car manufacturing experience, Internet companies that entered the market later also continued to exert their efforts on the intelligent cockpit experience and intelligence level. In the past two years, they have made frequent actions in the industry, and the momentum has been full. , its strength should not be underestimated. The general purpose of Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and Huawei’s involvement in smart cockpit products is unified and clear, that is, to establish a bridge between the mobile terminal and the car side on the cockpit product, but each has its own tricks in the specific play.
Application pie: close to the user, enhance the experience
The development of Alibaba and Tencent in the field of smart cockpits advocates “software definition”, focusing on the content application side of in-vehicle scenes, and correlates users’ leisure, entertainment and work needs in the car.
Today, the connectivity of TAI 4.0, the solution released by Tencent, has been fully upgraded. On the car side, on the one hand, basic functions of C-side applications such as car-machine navigation and location sharing have been added; On the mobile phone side, small program products such as “Tencent Travel Service” were launched to realize the connection between mobile phones and car scenes.
As a TOB supplier, it provides digital services to car companies, focusing on porting its own social, music, office and other mobile applications and content to the car. There are obvious signs that Tencent wants to continue its social entertainment advantage in the smart cockpit. of great ambition.
According to data, Tencent has formed cooperation with 35 car companies. Facts have proved that such an ambition may not be an impossible goal for Tencent. After all, its content ecology is extremely rich and influential, and it is easy to form an advantage at the level of smart cockpit application software.
Although Ali also has Taobao, Alipay and other applications, in contrast, most of the software does not fit well with the in-car scene, and it is difficult to form a strong competitiveness. It is precisely because of this deep understanding that Alibaba began to change its thinking and use its cloud computing capabilities to build an ecological foundation for the application side.
As we all know, the key foundation for the interconnection between smart cockpit and mobile applications lies in the powerful service capabilities provided by cloud computing. As a leader in the domestic cloud computing field, Alibaba has the greatest dominance in data scheduling between the cloud and the terminal. It has a leading edge in the operation efficiency and functional experience of the intercommunication between the terminal and the mobile terminal.
It can be seen that both Tencent and Ali are focusing on the application side to make a fuss, but the difference is that the former pays more attention to the development of multiple scenes in the car, while the latter is to improve the operating efficiency of in-car applications, but the end of the two is the same. All are to enhance the user’s real experience in the car scene.
It seems that although Tencent and Ali have attracted many B-side car companies based on their own influence, and transplanted their own applications, content ecology, and cloud services into the car, in an attempt to deeply intervene in the lives of users, in fact, games , social networking and many other in-car applications are still questioned as “pseudo-demand”, and their practicability is not strong, which also causes the two to have a lower sense of presence in the smart cockpit field than Baidu and Huawei.
Technology School: Deep Integration, Strengthening Intelligence
Different from the logic of Tencent and Alibaba’s participation in the smart cockpit, Baidu and Huawei’s application ecological background is relatively weak, so the two prefer to shine at the technical level they are good at. As far as the current situation is concerned, Baidu and Huawei pay more attention to the deep integration of software and hardware in the smart cockpit, and make smart cars more intelligent at the current level of technology.
Based on the Kirin chip and the Hongmeng operating system, Huawei’s smart cockpit connects people, cars, and homes, enabling deeper interconnection between mobile phones, cars, and other smart terminal devices. Specifically, Huawei’s smart cockpit can deeply integrate the computing, communication, and positioning and navigation capabilities of mobile phones and vehicles, and can also control smart home devices such as TVs and air conditioners.
Because it is equipped with self-developed chips and systems, there is strong compatibility between the software and hardware of Huawei’s smart cockpit. Third-party developers can quickly migrate the application ecology on the mobile phone to the car, saving application development costs. To a large extent, the resistance of car companies and developers to accept Huawei’s smart cockpit has been reduced.
Although Baidu shares a similar view with Huawei, they both value the development of technology-enabled smart cockpits. However, among many Internet companies, Baidu, as one of the few vehicle manufacturers, has regarded smart cockpits as opening the gap in the smart car market. A key step, its importance to the smart cockpit can be imagined.
Based on mature intelligent technical support, Baidu has two main development routes in the field of smart cockpits: one is to provide solutions for B-end car companies, and the other is to develop and use it by itself. Baidu’s self-developed smart cockpit can be directly applied to its own “Set degree” on the car.
Previously, at the Apollo Ecological Conference in December 2020, Baidu officially launched Xiaodu Car to provide partners with a digital solution for smart cockpits. In terms of intelligence, it added TOP1 Q&A, a recommendation engine and an emotion engine to provide users with better solutions. Many smart choices. In June of this year, the Jidu concept car ROBO-01 was officially unveiled, throwing out new technical points in the intelligent cockpit – cabin-driving fusion technology, full offline millisecond-level voice, 3D dynamic man-machine co-driving map, canceling a large number of Physical buttons…
More optimistic is that so far, Baidu’s smart cockpit products have cooperated with more than 70 car companies for 600 models. In addition, according to Baidu, Jidu Automobile will also achieve mass production in 2023. Looking at it this way, Baidu’s smart cockpit is more likely to be a step ahead than other Internet companies.
To sum up, what is certain is that, whether it is Alibaba and Tencent that are biased towards the application side, or Huawei and Baidu that focus on technology empowerment, their entry has successfully driven the development of the smart cockpit field, and their differentiated gameplay is more To a certain extent, it has accelerated the progress of this field and extended the imagination of the industry.
Ecology or the final lap
At present, the cockpit technology that can touch the user’s senses is more abundant. For most cockpit manufacturers, it is not practical to supply all by themselves. If they want to create a highly integrated smart cockpit with multiple functions, they need to cooperate with other technology manufacturers. .
In other words, car companies have a complete system of car R&D, production, and supply chain, but their capabilities in software development are short. In addition, most car companies do not have the same extensive application ecology as Internet companies. In contrast, although the Internet giants have rich application resources and strong underlying system operation capabilities, they still lack experience in hardware integration development.
However, the development of cockpit products has gradually entered a high degree of intelligence, and the trend of high compatibility and integration of software and hardware is becoming more and more obvious. In the future, the form of ecological cooperation between software and hardware manufacturers may become inevitable. It can be expected that with the maturity of smart cockpit technology, Internet giants such as Tencent, Ali, Huawei, and Baidu will continue to fight on ecological integration to determine the outcome.
However, it is worth noting that in the current market environment, new car manufacturers such as Wei Xiaoli, as well as traditional car companies such as Volkswagen and GM, are also trying to create their own operating systems, strengthen the in-car scene experience, and establish their own The in-car ecology is fully prepared to go deep into the smart cockpit industry.
To a certain extent, the successful construction of in-car ecology by car companies may weaken some ecological links with Internet companies, which is undoubtedly a resistance to the development of Internet companies in the field of smart cockpits. Therefore, the big Internet companies need to think deeply about how to play their own advantages and maintain a stable ecological cooperative relationship with car companies, which may be the key to winning.
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