21st century business herald reporter Zuo Maoxuan reports from Shanghai.
After several twists and turns, the smart electric vehicle brand jointly built by Baidu and Geely has gone beyond the limit, and finally started the market-oriented stage.
On October 27th, its first model, Extreme Yue 01, was officially launched. This time, two models, Extreme Yue 01 Max and Extreme Yue 01 Max Performance, were launched, and the price was 249,900 ~ 339,900 yuan.
Among them, the most concerned high-order intelligent assisted driving function "ROBO Drive Max", which is regarded as the core competitiveness of Chaoyue, supports 980 yuan’s subscription on schedule/month, or a one-time buyout of 49,900 yuan.
Extreme leap is an important carrier of Baidu’s dream of building a car.
In January 2021, Baidu announced the establishment of a smart electric vehicle company with Geely. In March, Jidu Automobile was formally established with a registered capital of 1 billion yuan. Baidu and Geely held 55% and 45% of the shares respectively, and received over 300 million US dollars in start-up funds.
At the Guangzhou Auto Show at the end of 2022, the first automobile robot ROBO 01 of Jidu was officially unveiled. It was built based on Geely’s vast SEA architecture, and the intelligent scheme mainly came from Baidu.
Limited by the qualification problem, Jidu Automobile almost fell silent in the first half of this year.
Until August 14th this year, Geely Holding Group released official information and announced the strategic upgrade of cooperation with Baidu. Its brand-new automobile robot brand "Extreme Yue" was officially released, and its first model was officially named "Extreme Yue 01".
"Extreme Yue" is born out of Jidu Automobile, and follows the brand logo of Jidu Automobile. Extreme Yue 01 is the first production car ROBO 01 of Jidu.
The company behind Jiyue brand is Hangzhou Jiyue Automobile Technology Co., Ltd., which was formally established on August 9 this year. Zhejiang Geely Investment Holding Co., Ltd. and Shanghai Mihang Automobile Co., Ltd., which is wholly owned by Baidu, jointly hold shares, with the dual shareholding ratio of 65% and 35% respectively.
Although the equity has changed, the division of labor has not changed: Geely is responsible for vehicle manufacturing and Baidu is responsible for AI empowerment.
Extreme Yue seems to be the product of a "strong alliance" and regards Tesla as the goal of his own challenge.
"From beginning to end, we wanted to have a fight with Tesla." On October 28th, Xia Yiping, CEO of Extreme Vietnam, stressed in an interview with 21st century business herald.
In his view, although players in the industry want to benchmark Tesla, no one can shake its position yet. And the more intelligent the price is, the better the price/performance ratio is in the current industry.
Intelligence is regarded as the core competitiveness, which is similar to Tesla and Tucki.
However, as far as the moment is concerned, it is only now that it has entered the market, and the market challenges it faces are extremely severe. Whether facing "Wei Xiaoli" or Huawei, intelligence has become the main battlefield for various smart electric vehicle companies to compete. As a latecomer, Jiyue is facing the pressure of market competition, technology, supply chain and so on.
"Pure Vision" Intelligent Driving Scheme
The ultra-yue car said that the ultra-yue 01 is the world’s first AI car robot. This concept seems to be a gimmick, but it is also a way to emphasize one’s greatest characteristics as a latecomer to the market.
When Baidu and Geely jointly conceived to build a new brand, they had already made clear the special attributes of this new brand.
The main purpose of Baidu is to inherit the core competence of Baidu Apollo, and re-integrate and verify it, so that Baidu has a landing scene in the research and development of autonomous driving for many years.
Geely itself has a complicated brand sequence including Geely, Link, Volvo, Polar Star, etc. It does not need a new brand that is too close to the previous brand positioning, but hopes to make more attempts in intelligence, so as to explore more possibilities in the future automobile era.
In other words, Geely provides technical support for the "body" of the company, while Baidu is responsible for the "soul" of the smart car of the company.
Extreme Yue 01 is based on the vast architecture of Geely SEA, which has been applied in many brands such as Extreme Krypton, smart and Polar Star, and its performance and quality have been preliminarily recognized in the market.
Therefore, intelligent ability is the core competitiveness that Extreme Vietnam tries to focus on.
According to Extreme Yue, the intelligent driving of Extreme Yue 01 relies on the "pure vision" perception algorithm. Its pure vision perception architecture has 11 high-definition cameras, 12 ultrasonic radars and 5 millimeter-wave radars, totaling 28 intelligent driving sensors, and the laser radar is cancelled.
This scheme named "ROBO Drive Max" is the first "pure vision" scheme in China to get through the network occupied by BEV+Transformer+OCC. On a global scale, it is also the second car company to adopt a pure vision solution after Tesla FSD.
According to Xia Yiping, at the beginning of this year, Extreme Vietnam made a lot of evaluations when it planned to take off the lidar and adopt a pure vision algorithm, especially in the early days, and it also expected the local experience to decline. However, from the perspective of cost and optimization of computing power, the pure vision scheme was finally adopted.
Xia Yiping believes that going to lidar is not an inevitable result, and there are always repeated in the process of technological development.
"Under the current laws and regulations, it is of no value to be too aggressive in autonomous driving. The first step is to model the whole vision algorithm. The future vision model must be more general, not a simple concept of automatic driving, but more a concept of general artificial intelligence. This is a long-term development trend and irreversible. " Xia Yiping said.
In his view, the advanced intelligent driving function at this stage should start from the scenes used by users every day, not just "showing off skills".
According to reports, ROBO Drive Max includes point-to-point navigation assistance PPA+ parking service AVP+ROBO Drive full function.
Point-to-point pilot-assisted PPA, with high-order intelligent driving assistance capability covering high-speed and urban scenes. When PPA is started, it can complete a series of functional scenes such as autonomous lane change overtaking, getting on and off ramps, obstacle avoidance in and between lanes at high speed and overhead. In urban roads, zebra crossings and traffic lights can be accurately identified, and driving tasks such as courtesy to pedestrians, unprotected left turn and avoiding non-motor vehicles can be completed.
In parking service, it can not only identify various types and complex parking spaces, but also support a distance of up to 2 kilometers. Both indoor and outdoor parking lots can be used, and it can support the parking of any parking space on the same floor to the entrance and exit of the parking lot.
It is understood that this year, ROBO Drive Max will open the high-level intelligent driving function in the urban area to all users in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hangzhou, and PPA can be used in 90% of the high-speed viaducts in the country. In 2024, PPA will gradually open 200+ cities nationwide.
However, as far as the more complicated traffic environment in China is concerned, whether this pure vision scheme can work depends on the subsequent effect on the actual road before we can make a judgment.
In terms of intelligent cockpit, Extreme Yue 01 was first equipped with 8295 chip of Qualcomm’s 4th generation Snapdragon digital cockpit platform, and dual NPU(60TOPS) was fully enabled for the first time. In addition, Extreme Yue has also integrated the large-scale model capability of ERNIE Bot, making it the first smart car in the world with a large model.
Just from 0 to 0.1.
"I firmly believe that from yesterday, the entire new energy automobile industry will be divided into pure new energy vehicles and smart cars." On October 28th, Xia Yiping said in an interview with 21st century business herald.
He believes that the difference between the two lies in the different requirements for mastering the core technical capabilities. One is dominated by technology companies, which have the ability to calculate and master the core of the algorithm; One is dominated by the traditional mechanical performance companies of Sanpower in the past. This has undergone a watershed change.
"I don’t think we have entered a’ Red Sea’ battlefield. I think we still have to open up a new battlefield." Xia Yiping said.
Although the current competition in the smart electric vehicle market is extremely fierce, he believes that Extreme Vietnam still has market opportunities.
At the same time, Xia Yiping also said that it is only from 0 to 0.1 to build the car, and it is necessary to improve the systematic ability of production capacity, supply chain and channels.
Of course, the most direct problem now facing Xiayi Plane is how to sell more cars.
In the laying of sales channels, Jiyue has also been questioned by many outsiders. Since the end of last year, Jiyue has started to build offline stores, some of which are in the core business districts with high rents such as Lujiazui in Shanghai and Sanlitun in Beijing. At that time, it was still a long time before the first production car.
Xia Yiping said frankly that opening a store in advance without a car and being vacant there put a lot of pressure on the brand. For a startup, it is actually a very difficult decision.
"Opened a store, no mass production, can only put engineering vehicles over there, also can have an impact. But how can you promote your brand if you don’t open a shop? How does user cognition come about? If you promote it too early, there will be another problem. Without products, everyone says that you build a car with PPT. " Xia Yiping said.
From the perspective of market volume, although the company has gained a certain social awareness by building a store in the bustling business district, compared with other car companies that already have a certain sales volume in the market, despite relying on Geely and Baidu, the brand awareness of the company is still insufficient.
Next, Extreme Vietnam will still speed up the channel construction.
According to reports, at present, there are nearly 50 sales stores in Vietnam, and it is planned to reach more than 100 by the end of this year, and more than 250 sales stores will be laid next year; On the after-sales side, direct stores and authorized stores are spread out in two ways.
Regarding the sales forecast, Xia Yiping said that at present, Extreme Vietnam is still in the stage of capacity climbing, and another model will be released soon. The climbing process may last for more than one year, and it is expected to reach the goal of monthly sales of 10,000 vehicles in 2025. Extreme Vietnam plans to produce a new car every year, and accelerate it in the third and fourth years, and more models will come out.
Where is the road to cooperation between Baidu and Geely?
Judging from the current public situation, the more successful it is to enter the market, it means that the cooperation between Baidu and Geely has entered a new stage.
In fact, with the development of intelligent new energy automobile industry, the cooperation between technology and automobile industry is getting closer and closer. However, it is the first new car-making enterprise in the true sense to be jointly funded and incubated by Internet giants and traditional car companies.
Unlike Huawei, which has attacked the city in the automobile industry in the past two years and held hands extensively, Baidu entered the smart driving track earlier, but due to the lack of representative products, its cognition in the hearts of ordinary consumers is not strong.
The emergence of the extreme leap may make up for some shortcomings in this respect, but a series of new puzzles have not been completely uncovered.
In addition to providing intelligent technology, what kind of attitude will Baidu participate in the road of building cars in the future? Among the many sub-brands of Geely Holding, what kind of identity will Extreme Yue play? Is there more room for imagination in the cooperation between Baidu and Geely after passing the extreme leap?
For many questions, it seems that we have to wait until what kind of market achievements we can achieve before we can have a chance to imagine a longer future.
Interestingly, on the same day that Extreme Yue 01 held a listing conference, Extreme Krypton also held a listing conference for the new car Extreme Krypton 001 FR.
Regarding the difference between Extreme Yue and Extreme Krypton, An Conghui, CEO of Extreme Krypton Intelligent Technology, said in an interview with 21st century business herald that although they share a vast infrastructure, the needs of each brand are different, from performance, configuration and material application to design, adjustment and user expectations. Products may overlap, but they must belong to different market segments.
Of course, from now on, Extreme Vietnam has just entered the knockout stage. Although it is backed by Geely and Baidu, it is destined that a few new car-making enterprises in China will survive in the end, and Extreme Vietnam has not taken the lead.
However, compared with other new car-making enterprises, Jiyue can rely on Geely in platform development and factory construction, and the level of intelligence is empowered by Baidu, so the demand for funds may have an advantage.
However, new car-making enterprises will be in a strategic loss stage for a long time, and they need more support in the capital market.
At present, there are only two shareholders, Baidu and Geely. However, 21st century business herald reporter learned from people familiar with the matter that Vietnam also hopes to raise funds from abroad.
According to Xia Yiping, there will be new financing actions early next year, which will be announced at that time.
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