Text/Shore Qing
The concept of the software-defined car has been proposed for more than three years, and the car has been defined by machines, appliances, and electrons, and has developed to today's software-defined. It seems that since entering the era of electrification, intelligence has begun to stand out in cars, consumers have higher and higher requirements for car intelligence, and software has accounted for an increasing proportion of them.
This point, from the strategy of the industry's leading enterprises, we are not difficult to find, in the recent Mercedes-Benz release of vision EQXX concept car, we will find that hardware is a major guarantee to achieve car performance, but in it, software also plays a vital role, especially for intelligence.
Jasmin Eichler, head of Mercedes-Benz's future technology research department, said: "Software drive has always been one of the key areas of Mercedes-Benz and continuous improvement, and it is also one of the important transformation directions of Mercedes-Benz, and the transformation of leading software-defined cars has begun.
In fact, software-defined cars seem to be a concept that has emerged in recent years, but if we really "trace the source", we will find that the occurrence of software-driven cars began to show its traces as early as the 90s of the last century, but the development at that time did not belong to the mainstream trend, until now software began to play an increasingly important role in cars.
In the past, people did not often mention software because the electrical architecture was too simple, and the software extended from it naturally did not get attention. In the early years, the key point in judging whether the car was good or bad was kinetic energy, which was also commonly known as the three major pieces, and a single mechanical component made the entire car have several controllers, and there was no architecture to coordinate and manage him.
When the car enters the era of electrification, people put forward more requirements for intelligence, a single performance no longer has an absolute advantage, a car will have more ESP/ABS, power windows, airbags, adaptive cruise system, air conditioning compressor and the current popular intelligent driver assistance system.
In this way, the diversified configuration needs more controllers, the original electrical structure is no longer suitable for the current development of the car, the electrical architecture is transformed into an electrical and electronic architecture, the automotive hardware system will gradually become consistent, and the composition of the car will evolve from the mechanical work of tens of thousands of parts to the ability to combine hundreds of millions of lines of code.
As an extension of the electrical architecture, the importance of software is revealed at this moment.
Especially after entering the 5G era, the Internet of Vehicles, intelligent driving assistance systems and "large mobile smart terminals" and other concepts began to be valued by consumers, these rely on the ability to run code naturally to the software to achieve, the car and super unlimited cloud computing capabilities docking, anytime and anywhere can open the office; car instructions will help consumers avoid obstacles; panoramic images to provide users with more vision.
After the advent of 5G, the entire automotive industry architecture must be redesigned, and software-defined cars can bring us far more than the above.
For enterprises, the intelligent requirements put forward in the new era are undoubtedly an adventure where opportunities and challenges coexist. The biggest feature of software is that once the function is implemented, the cost of copying the software is basically zero. That is to say, when the software technology is mastered, the same cost investment of the enterprise, the profit margin of the software depends on the number of users.
Therefore, the claim that software is called the "profit cow" of new energy vehicle companies is not exaggerated at all. Of course, the investment cost of software research and development is much higher than everyone thinks. At present, there are many new car-making forces that will buy software from technical vendors, and then use the battery manufacturer's power battery, so as to "piece together" a new car.
But an enterprise wants to survive and develop for a long time, relying solely on the purchase of "banknote ability" is not enough to support, just as in the era of fuel vehicles in the last century, domestic independent brands purchased the engines of foreign-funded enterprises, in the development of the era of change, the final survivors are ultimately those with self-developed technology.
All in all, the method of software to achieve profit is certainly correct, which is undoubtedly a major feature of the new energy vehicle era, but the times have also sounded the alarm bell many times, and those who can laugh to the end are often the real winners with their own core technologies.