- Wearing a black T-shirt with the English “” printed on it, JiDU CEO Xia Yiping walked quickly into the conference room located in the Baidu Building. At the beginning, he laughed and said that he was not satisfied with the English letters of the T-shirt on his body, because the preparations were in a hurry recently. It should have been printed with the Chinese “JiDU car”.
Two months ago, the news of Xia Yiping’s appointment as the CEO of Baidu’s car company, JiDU Automobile, was first exposed. The former Mobike co-founder and chief technology officer was considered a good candidate from the beginning. Before joining Mobike, he worked in Ford in the United States and China, and was deeply involved in Ford Motors-it can be said that The earliest research and development work related to automotive intelligence (Internet of Vehicles) in the automotive industry. After returning to China in 2013, he joined Fiat Chrysler and was responsible for the entire Asia-Pacific car networking business unit. Then the entrepreneurial wave in the Chinese market rose. In 2015, he joined the Chinese startup company Mobike, leading the work related to products, technology and company growth. .
The same technical background, but compared to Baidu Group CEO Robin Li’s slow and standard image of a technical engineer, Xia Yiping left us a bit more Geek, answering media questions almost without pause, direct output of opinions, clear logic , Speaking fast.
This is the first time Xia Yiping has faced the media since he officially announced to join JiDU as CEO. As the true trader of JiDU Auto, this is also the first time that he explained to the public the car-making concept behind JiDU Auto.
What kind of car will JiDU make? He first replied, “We are not just making a market-oriented car. The electrical and electronic architecture is developed by JiDU itself.”
JiDU’s first vehicle is developed based on Geely’s SEA Haohan Open Platform, but Xia Yiping believes that there is still a “gap” between Haohan’s platform and JiDU’s product requirements, so JiDU-based product needs are required. Geely and JiDU will target Haohan’s platform. Make changes. Among them, JiDU leads the improvement of technology.
Geely’s SEA Haohan architecture has disclosed very detailed parameters, which mainly have advantages such as large broadband, reduced software development costs, new three powers, and SEA OS development system. And JiDU’s own research and development of electrical and electronic architecture means to expand the software attributes of this car beyond the engineering technology of chassis technology, and once the product functions and technical bottom layers envisaged by JiDU cannot be supported by the vast electrical architecture, this is also the so-called The parts that need to be “modified”.
This means that JiDU is more like a system integration company. “For example, L4 has requirements for the power supply of the entire platform. Maybe the current architecture can only support 3 kilowatts, and we need 5 kilowatts, so the architecture needs to be changed.”
And if you want to integrate the small car OS, it also means some changes to the SEA OS development system.
The SEA architecture has the world’s largest broadband means that it can achieve full coverage of body styles from 1800-3300mm wheelbase, A-class cars to E-class cars, including cars, SUVs, MPVs, station wagons, sports cars and pickup trucks. In other words, JiDU’s first models can be of different types, as well as different wheelbases and levels.
With the electronic and electrical architecture going up, JiDU has formed a software development team and is working on a “more open SOA open software platform”, emphasizing the intelligent attributes of the product.
Xia Yiping said that people who feel stronger in technological attributes are actually young people, so the first product has developed specific functions for younger people. And “based on some electric vehicle data, you will find that female consumers are still quite dominant in electric vehicles, so we will take into account the needs of some female users.”
But this is still a very general and very imaginary concept. Especially for traditional automobile OEMs, different needs have been differentiated in product categories-for example, only targeting young people can focus on technology and intelligence. In the product category, some people like Hot Hack, and some like hardcore. Off-road SUV, some people like to travel “crock pot.”
In fact, Geely’s company Jikrypton also recently launched Jikrypton 001 based on the vast structure of SEA, which became a hot product in the market for a while. In the past few years, the Lynk & Co brand, which can be regarded as the predecessor of ultra-krypton, has invested huge amounts of funds and accumulated in younger brands and user operators.
To a certain extent, JiDU has to respond to the question: How big is the difference between its main focus of youth and intelligent tonality and the so-called new sub-brands incubated by traditional OEMs that have mastered core technologies? How different is it even from Xiaomi, which has many young “rice fans”?
Xia Yiping’s point of view is that luxury cannot be measured by price. Several important concepts of JiDU technology are that in the future-oriented era of unmanned people, it should not be regarded as a car, but a robot. We will incorporate a lot of robot design in a lot of interaction design, even appearance design. “He is not afraid of Xiaomi making cars.
He said that there is no way to cite specific examples, but he believes that the current design is mainly human-oriented-users still use touch screens and buttons to output the car in one direction, and the future of JiDU car design is more of a two-way Communication-not only in the car, but also outside the car. “In the entire design, the first major element is Robot design, which emphasizes emotion more conceptually.”
JiDU’s entire company has been a “fully digital” company since its birth. Full digitalization means that everything from user operations, market operations to products to after-sales systems is built on a digital platform. “This includes user operations, including our own self-operated stores, sales end, operation and maintenance end, how to use digitalization to open it up, improve the overall efficiency, efficiency is also a large part of the future.”
“You can go to see (cars) at the auto show next year. With my own feeling now, I think it is really the most eye-catching car in today’s exhibition hall.”