I didn't know what Yo-Yo Technology was before, but because I recently caught fire in the circle of friends, I studied a little bit of a new company that was ready to subvert "car-making". Yo-Y Technology recently released two major product lines of UP Super Chassis and UP SPACE Super Cabin, the former is the skateboard chassis, and the latter is a different form of the car body - at least I understand it.
First, let's talk about what a skateboard chassis is. This concept has risen in the North American market in the early years, the most typical is the RIVIAN car company that went on the market last year, which is to create the R1T electric pickup truck with the concept of skateboard chassis. Basically, the skateboard chassis can be understood as "non-loader body + CTC battery integrated chassis + partial chassis control domain system".
Of course, the yo-yo technology side gives a clearer definition to the skateboard chassis: "There is a clear judgment line in the technology, that is, whether the chassis supports the development of upper and lower splits." ”
Why is it set up? In Yo-Running's view, only the decoupling and split development of the upper and lower body can form a scale effect of development and production - a skateboard chassis without a scale effect is meaningless. This is because on the one hand, it is possible to develop the products that previously needed to spend 40 billion yuan to develop, and only 4 billion to develop, completely focusing on the value pursued by users; on the other hand, it can save about 6-12 months of development time, as long as the development and verification of the skateboard chassis has been done, there is no need to repeat the verification between different models, which is also an advantage.
Of course, these are all said by Yoyo Technology itself. But if you really think carefully about the business logic of Yo-Yo, there is actually a relatively big problem - you can't say loopholes, but it is obviously not enough to convince OEMs why they should use skateboard chassis.
The first question is, is the development of the decoupling of the car really reliable? Over the past hundred years, car companies have first used non-load-bearing bodies, and later converted to load-bearing bodies, that is, from split development to integrated development, the reason is that integrated development is better for the collision safety, overall layout, comfort, handling, etc. of the vehicle, and can better reflect the advantages of a car.
And now the skateboard chassis has been done back, although it may be that the three-electric system and CTC technology have indeed allowed the skateboard chassis to solve some defects in the non-load-bearing body, but the core problem is that the limitations of the same chassis in the overall layout are obvious, not as simple as Yo-Run Technology claims to the outside world.
For example, for designers, the starting point of the design is the input of the size parameters of the product, once the length, width, wheelbase are input, in fact, the proportion of the entire product is almost the same, at most, the layout of the H point on the skateboard chassis is more variable. However, there is another problem at the bottom of the skateboard compared to the general architecture of the car, because the chassis has added a battery pack, and considering the standardized design, the entire chassis will obviously encroach on the longitudinal space, which greatly limits the design of the upper body. At least from the display chassis given by Yo-Yo, it can be seen that the entire chassis is very thick, if the development of SUVs or buses is fine, the development of sedans or MPV models, its proportion and longitudinal space can not be well optimized.
In other words, while the skateboard chassis may be very versatile, the upper limit of the entire chassis is greatly limited. This is essentially a departure from the scale effect. If it is to develop a pickup truck or bus project, perhaps this chassis is feasible, but for commercial vehicle companies, is this not the strategy they have always adopted?
The second is whether the concept of a full-line chassis can really be popularized.
The reason why the skateboard chassis is "skateboard" is to have a high degree of integration, from the battery pack to the drive motor, to the suspension, and even the steering mechanism needs to be integrated. In this way, the so-called car body is developed and verified independently, and the purpose of free setting of the car body can be achieved.
Now everyone may be able to understand the integration of the battery chassis, and then the electric drive system is also integrated with the chassis, but to say that the suspension and steering are integrated, it is really a test of engineering and technical capabilities.
No matter which car company, steering adjustment and chassis suspension adjustment are its core competitiveness, which is also the core asset of participating in market competition. However, if Youpao believes that providing a standardized chassis can allow outsiders to compete, or let existing car companies buy, it is impossible. The existing skateboard chassis pursues standardized specifications, which means that these suspension and steering are standardized choices, such as the type of suspension that is bound to be optional on one or two specifications, which to a large extent limits the adjustment space of car companies. And this set of chassis to the car company, does it mean that the car company to their own chassis, steering and other set parameters to yo-yo? That is too risky for established car companies.
Yo-Yo said that its chassis performance is comparable to bmw 5 series, Mercedes-Benz E-class, this is really possible for a new supplier?
More critically, steer-by-wire is necessarily a major innovation on the skateboard chassis. Because only by integrating the steering into the chassis can the entire chassis be highly integrated. However, the switch-by-wire shift from the Infiniti Q50 to try, in fact, there has been no breakthrough in the actual sense, one is because the cost is too high, in addition to the wire control itself will inevitably require mechanical redundancy, the purpose of cost reduction can not be achieved. Second, because the feel of the steer-by-wire steering can not yet reach the state of mass production, you can think, the iteration of iBoost in that year has many years, the brake foot feeling and feedback at the beginning are completely electronic, can not meet the demand at all, until many years later gradually matured. The difficulty of steering-by-wire is obviously higher than that of brake-by-wire, which is actually a big obstacle for the entire skateboard chassis technology manufacturer.
The third question of the skateboard chassis is the ability to build an all-digital chassis.
Yo-run Technology said that the entire chassis supports pluggable ring network electronic and electrical architecture to achieve software and hardware decoupling, and the HPVC chip in the super chassis can support heterogeneous large-scale computing platforms, and the maximum computing power can be expanded to 1000TOPS to meet the automatic driving needs of L4 and above. In addition, the entire electrical and electronic architecture can support redundancy including braking, power supply, etc., coupled with wire control chassis technology and integrated electric drive system, then basically the hardware is completed by Yo-Run, and enterprises only need to develop software APP to complete different styles of settings.
But this kind of idea, which sounds good and beautiful, is not realistic when you think about it. On the one hand, this requires that Yo-Yo-Pao can have a strong enough hardware design capability, on the other hand, it has a strong enough hardware calibration capability, and also requires the purchaser to make corresponding software adjustments on this basis to match the chassis.
It's like there are public graphics cards in the graphics card field, NVIDIA and AMD gave all the design drawings in advance, manufacturers do according to this drawing to have a most standardized product, if the graphics card brand manufacturers have stronger ability to improve some things, design the software to improve performance.
This strength is not only to assemble the hardware, but also to integrate these hardware operations, the software engineering capabilities required on the chassis are also quite high-level, and even it needs to create an open platform that can allow buyers to access secondary development. However, can Yo-Run achieve such strengths as NVIDIA and AMD?
summary:
When evaluating his own model, the CEO of Yo-Yo-Run likened the Yo-Run skateboard chassis to an Android phone built by Google. The implication is that the mobile phone ODM manufacturer provides a standardized product, and then Google only needs to design a look and develop unique software on this hardware platform.
But still that sentence, Google's self-made mobile phone, based on its own strong software capabilities, the design of ODM is just a model for them to present their own software capabilities, this mobile phone is neither powerful nor unique, the market has not paid for it. And the ODM era has long passed, whether it is a laptop or a mobile phone, only the use of ODM products can not establish a strong enough brand differences, which is the most inconsistency of the business logic of Yo-Yo-
If you say that Youpao intends to do commercial vehicles and driverless logistics vehicles, its logic may be able to try, but it is really necessary to say that in the passenger car market with a scale of 20 million units, it is really difficult to attract buyers in The skateboard chassis of Yo-Yo.
Text| JackieLXX
Figure | network