Since the clarion call for industrial transformation sounded, the focus of the domestic auto market has begun to change. Under the long-term marketing bombardment, the market has not only calmed down, but ushered in an unprecedented public opinion war, configuration war and price war.
In fact, from the user's point of view, everyone is also happy to see the industry volume price configuration, but the problem is that the radical product strategy should not be at the expense of safety and quality, many new power companies will be R & D, verification cycle shrinking again and again, the vast majority of time and cost are placed in the consumer perception level. But if the highlight of a model is not quality and safety in the first place, then there is a problem in the ranking of the important levels of product development.
In the current market environment, is it the volume of traffic, or the volume of research and development? The RoboTest unmanned vehicle intelligent test platform independently developed and matured by SAIC-GM, as well as the development concept of "high safety and long life of the whole life cycle" of the Autoneng intelligent electric platform, are worthy of our in-depth thinking.
RoboTest建立品质护城河
Everyone who keeps an eye on the new energy market knows that the new cars on the beginning of the year may become old at the end of the year, and the new power car companies have shrunk the R&D cycle again and again, and the marketing rhythm determines the development rhythm, and the whole company is led by the sales department.
It's not that it's bad to shorten the development cycle, but in the traditional rhythm of seven or eight years of generation change and three-year change, the quality of R&D and testing may be discounted in the cycle of sudden change to one change every year and one change every two years. At the same time, due to the synchronous changes in the direction of marketing public opinion and the market environment, some large manufacturers have also begun to take the road of shortening the development cycle and accelerating the speed of product iteration.
To put it simply, the RoboTest platform consists of two cores: the vehicle (execution) and the cloud (management). Among them, the vehicle-end controller integrates the driving robot system and the high-precision positioning perception system, which can realize the robot self-detection and test according to the set program without destroying the original structure of the vehicle; The cloud is mainly responsible for the remote configuration of test specifications and test paths, real-time monitoring and analysis and management of test data, and timely adjustment of the program of the vehicle-end robot.
Through such a set of completely unmanned intelligent test platform, SAIC-GM can get more diverse, more complete, and larger data flow and test results in the same R&D cycle as its competitors, when the development team of the competitors is still promoting 996, RoboTest has been working tirelessly 7x24, and up to now, the mileage of the durable bench test alone has reached 1.5 million kilometers.
For users, RoboTest models can significantly improve the quality of vehicles for long periods of time and high mileage, and at the same time effectively extend the life of the product. In addition, products based on the RoboTest test platform can maintain product consistency better than other brands, enhancing the quality reputation of the model.
For car companies, RoboTest can not only significantly shorten the development time without reducing the development quality, but also reduce the impact of human factors and equipment errors, and enhance test safety and improve test efficiency under certain risky working conditions such as airbag calibration, and finally realize the two-way optimization of cost and quality.
At this time, some people may want to say, why can SAIC-GM change, but other companies can't change? Perhaps most of the new power enterprises have completed the upgrade and iteration of the development and test platform? It should be noted here that RoboTest is the only system independently developed and systematically applied to the vehicle test verification process among domestic and foreign OEMs. And the application of RoboTest also requires a well-functioning test site, and most domestic car companies, especially the new forces, do not have their own test sites, SAIC-GM because of the mature and perfect Guangde test site, just to achieve the efficient application of the whole system.
The development concept determines the upper limit of the product
In fact, the development and application of RoboTest's unmanned vehicle intelligent test platform is essentially to adapt to market demand as much as possible without reducing the quality of development and testing. This involves a question of product development philosophy, why does SAIC-GM have to stick to GM's global development process? Why is it important for the development team to ensure sufficient trial data?
The reason is simple, because from the beginning of the development stage, it has been decided exactly where the upper limit of a car is.
To be precise, whether the engineering team has established higher quality standards, whether there is safety redundancy, whether it is based on meeting the requirements of the national standard, or whether it is to establish a higher quality system, these have been sealed from the development stage, and the mass production in the later stage is just the result of the development stage. In fact, the engineer already knew what the experience of the owner in the whole life cycle was in the laboratory. Therefore, SAIC-GM's development concept of "high safety and long life of the whole life cycle" is the key to ensuring user experience.
The simplest way to understand the so-called high security is to have a higher safety standard than others. Let's take the Autonen platform as an example, which meets the highest level of ASIL-D system safety, which is the highest standard for the safety level of electronic and electrical systems in the automotive industry. At the same time, the battery development and testing standards of the Autoneng platform far exceed the national standard, and the safety redundancy is done to the greatest extent.
For example, when selecting the cells of the battery pack, the main engine manufacturer usually will do a DC internal resistance test on the battery cell, because the internal resistance is one of the important indicators to evaluate the performance of the battery cell. At the same time, the DC internal resistance test can also be used to evaluate the health of the battery cell and predict the lifespan, so the DC internal resistance test is a key process for OEMs to control the performance of the battery pack.
Because of cost control reasons, most car companies do not fully test the battery cells, basically the industry default control is ±15% deviation, while the battery cells of the Autoneng platform can achieve 100% DC internal resistance detection, which can be far lower than the industry level of ±7.5%, ensuring the consistency of the quality of the battery pack off the assembly line.
In addition, SAIC-GM far exceeds the national standard level in many key technical indicators, such as the initial temperature of the battery thermal diffusion test, the national standard requires that it is normal temperature, and the SAIC-GM standard is above 45 °C; For example, the national standard for battery pack extrusion test is 100kN extrusion force, and the standard of SAIC-GM is 300kN; For example, the national standard for the drop test of the battery pack is 1 meter height, and the height of SAIC-GM is 2 meters; For example, the national standard for the acupuncture test of the battery pack requires no fire or deflagration within 5 minutes, while the standard of SAIC-GM is 50 minutes......
Higher safety quality standards result in a more reliable and stable user experience, and there is not much performance degradation over time. Because of the long life, it is an important part of SAIC-GM's product development concept.
Taking Autoneng cells as an example, before the large-scale commercial use of solid-state electrolytes, the current efforts of the industry in optimizing the performance of battery cells and improving the life of battery cells are basically making a fuss about the positive and negative electrodes. In order to ensure that the battery cycle life attenuation rate of the vehicle is less than 10% after 500,000 kilometers, SAIC-GM has created a new cell formula, which reduces the attenuation of the battery cell and prolongs the working life by building a core-shell structure for the positive electrode and using a high-capacity graphite anode.
High safety and longevity throughout the entire development cycle are integrated throughout the entire development process. Whether it is the Autonen platform or RoboTest, they have become the key factors in creating SAIC-GM's "big factory quality".
High safety and long life throughout the life cycle
If the upper limit of a car has been determined in the development stage, then the echelon management in the service stage and retirement stage has become the key to how to share the fruits of development with users and the market. The two strings of "high safety" and "long life" are still tightened in every SAIC-GM product all the time.
When the vehicle leaves the factory, although the safety of the vehicle can be optimized by OTA software capabilities one by one, basically the structural safety has settled. Therefore, for a vehicle, especially a new energy vehicle, safety management in the service stage and retirement stage is the top priority.
Generally speaking, safety management can be divided into two dimensions: prevention and early warning, and loss of control management. Prevention and early warning is mainly a safety system before the vehicle has not yet occurred safety risks, and the traditional sense of "passive safety" is different, the current new energy vehicles not only need to do passive safety in the physical structure, but also in the software to do passive safety.
Models born on the SAIC-GM Autonen platform have their own three-level alarm mechanism:
The first-level alarm does not affect the driving of the vehicle, but the monitoring system will record;
The second-level alarm means that the performance of the vehicle is limited, and OnStar notifies the user to enter the service station in a safe way and deliver it to the owner after the overhaul is completed;
During the Level 3 alarm, the driver needs to stop immediately, and notify the dealer to the scene through OnStar, and OnStar will contact the new energy vehicle safety accident emergency team to deal with it.
In order to realize the operation logic of the three-level alarm mechanism, the reliability and accuracy of the monitoring system have become the key. The battery health intelligent detection system combining the two ends of the "vehicle-cloud" of the Autoneng platform realizes all-weather early warning. On the vehicle side, the integrated barometric pressure/temperature/voltage triple sensor multi-dimensional monitoring can monitor the status of the battery pack and battery cells 24 hours a day and at a high frequency.
In the cloud, the data platform builds a battery health assessment model based on the data of the whole life cycle of the battery, and uses AI to integrate multiple mechanism features, which can identify potential thermal runaway hazards such as lithium separation, internal shortage, bulging, and leakage of the battery in advance, and provide early warning of abnormal battery health.
Of course, the focus of early warning is on monitoring, and when a thermal runaway occurs in the battery cell, the handling of the vehicle becomes extremely important. An important design of the battery pack is the exhaust channel on the upper cover of the battery cell module, which can quickly discharge the high-temperature gases and substances generated by the thermal runaway of the battery cell and reduce the damage to the surrounding battery cells. At the same time, the fast exhaust channel in the battery pack combined with the large-area high-flux explosion-proof valve at the rear can quickly discharge the high-temperature gas generated by the thermal runaway of the battery cell and reduce its damage to adjacent cells and modules.
The exhaust channels on the upper cover of the battery cells and modules mentioned here and the fast exhaust channels in the battery pack are all patented designs of SAIC-GM and are unique to the Autoneng platform.
It is worth mentioning that the insulating material inside the battery pack is made of special rubber and special plastic, which will not soften and deform at high temperature, which can effectively keep the high-voltage parts insulated, and the fire blanket is built into the upper cover of the battery pack, which is composed of high silica cloth, aerogel and glass fiber cloth stacked to reduce the harm to the cockpit when the battery pack is thermally uncontrolled.
In fact, the safety management of new energy vehicles is an extremely complex and huge system engineering, and what can be explained here is only scratching the surface. However, from prevention, early warning to runaway management, they are the key factors to ensure reliable and assured use by users. The emphasis on safety is the fundamental reason why the Autoneng platform is enough to make all car owners trust.
Even, SAIC-GM not only considers the safety of batteries in the service stage, but also takes into account the recycling in the retirement stage.
If all battery packs born on the Auton platform are transformed into energy storage batteries after retirement, the battery management system will also upload the battery data to the cloud big data platform in real time, combined with the battery health monitoring and risk early warning algorithm developed by Pan Asia, to assist the energy storage batteries in cascade recycling to analyze the battery health in real time and predict the risk in advance.
In addition, because of the ultra-high safety of Autoneng batteries, they also have the safety standards that far exceed the safety standards of energy storage batteries after long-term and long-cycle use. Therefore, the battery also has a very high utilization value in the retirement stage, such as the establishment of an energy storage station with integrated charging and storage, and at present, SAIC-GM has built the first generation of intelligent microgrid demonstration station with integrated optical storage and charging, with 240kW liquid-cooled supercharging capacity. On the other hand, the ultra-high safety redundancy and low attenuation also make the models of the Autoneng platform have a higher second-hand residual value, because the market recognizes, the user recognizes, and the value retention rate is naturally high.
The master observes
In today's savage growth of the new energy vehicle market, the quality of R&D and testing is more important than ever, and this importance is not to speak two new terms and show two new patents at the new product launch conference, but to cover the safety thinking and R&D thinking of the entire product life cycle.
For new energy vehicles, the safety threshold is higher, and it is more difficult for ordinary consumers to judge, which is a test of the OEM's own adherence to safety and the design of safety redundancy. Whether to meet the national standard, or to exceed the national standard, or to establish a higher level of quality system, different car companies have different choices.
However, in the end, consumers must trust brands with stronger development quality and higher safety guarantees, because the products of these brands will be gradually verified in the long river of time. Only safety and quality are the real direction of the volume.