Surpassing Tesla is not the goal. Why is developing a unified operating system the foundation of my country's automotive industry?

For a long time, my country has been in a follower state in the technology industry, but with the advent of the era of smart cars, my country has the possibility of overtaking traditional automobile powers.

The biggest difference between the smart car track and the traditional car track is the way the product is defined. The latter is defined by hardware, while the former is defined by software, which is exactly what my country, with its extremely developed Internet industry, is good at.

Therefore, when smart cars emerged, new domestic car-making forces represented by NIO, Xpeng and Ideal entered the market one after another, creating a surging trend.

However, although the domestic intelligent automobile industry is currently in a period of rapid development, if we want to surpass European and American powers in this field, just like the united front formed by the steel and petrochemical industries, our major automobile companies also need to form a joint force and end the state of fighting each other. This directly gave rise to the huge issue of unified operating system for domestic automobiles.

Unified operating system will be a turning point in the competition of smart car industry

As a software-defined smart car industry, the most important one is undoubtedly the car operating system. In this field, my country's new car-making forces have done very well, not inferior to Tesla, the pioneer of smart cars. But at the same time, traditional car companies, which account for the majority of car sales, are somewhat unsatisfactory in the field of software.

This is the reality. If we want to overtake traditional powers as soon as possible in the era of smart cars, we still need traditional car companies and new forces to work together as one.

Not long ago, Miao Wei, former Minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, proposed a new direction for the development of China's smart car industry at the 11th China Automobile Forum, saying that our automobile industry urgently needs to develop an independent and unified operating system.

First of all, the most important goal is to no longer be strangled. Previously, the United States banned TSMC from manufacturing chips for Huawei, which resulted in the inability to produce all high-performance semiconductor chips designed by Huawei. The core of the national plan to promote a unified automotive operating system is to establish complete independence from the underlying hardware to the application software level.

In the field of mobile chips, due to the late start of domestic chip manufacturing technology, we are far behind our competitors in advanced processes such as 5nm and 7nm. However, for smart cars with low performance requirements, chips with 28nm process are sufficient.

And because many domestic chip factories, including SMIC, have achieved the localization of 28nm production line hardware and raw materials, it is completely possible to achieve the independence of automotive chips. Driven by the huge potential of the smart car market, the large-scale mass production performance of domestic automotive chips will also be accelerated, reducing the risk of being strangled by the United States.

Secondly, for the vehicle-road collaboration route chosen by my country's smart car industry, a unified operating system can also help to quickly advance this strategy.

From the perspective of car companies, the biggest reason that currently restricts them from fully investing in the vehicle-road collaboration industry is undoubtedly the high cost. Vehicle-road collaboration requires a high degree of connectivity between cars and surrounding roadside facilities. For car companies, it is necessary to test the hardware of each new car with the roadside equipment.

The manpower and resource costs spent by car companies in this process will eventually be passed on to the selling price of the products, resulting in a decline in the competitiveness of the products. In the long run, this will also affect the sales volume of the smart car industry. The unified operating system for cars can provide more powerful hardware universality, greatly reducing the testing and maintenance costs of car companies, thereby reducing product prices and promoting the implementation of the national policy of vehicle-road collaboration.

At present, due to the fact that domestic smart car companies are fighting each other in the field of operating systems, a large amount of resources are used for internal consumption, which consumes our limited time resources in this field. Once a national-level unified automobile operating system is implemented and the policy of "concentrating resources to accomplish major tasks" is implemented, it will not only help domestic car companies focus more on their respective areas of expertise, but also extend the software advantages of the Internet field into the era of smart cars and promote industrial development.

my country already has the strength to develop a unified operating system

Being born in this era is undoubtedly the most fortunate thing for this generation of Autobots.

We not only have the opportunity to recognize the importance of a unified automotive operating system, but also have the ability to complete it. Unlike other software applications that are mostly built on infrastructure, my country already has the ability to fully independently develop the underlying operating system in the field of intelligent automotive operating systems.

The core operating system of a smart car is the vehicle control system that directly interacts with the underlying hardware and drivers. my country has always had no achievements in the field of smart vehicle control systems, but Huawei's smart vehicle control system VOS released last year filled this gap.

At the same time, the VOS operating system also natively supports heterogeneous multi-core from multiple chip manufacturers. It has excellent performance and compatibility. For car companies, this can significantly reduce component procurement costs, thereby enabling them to create more cost-effective smart cars.

In terms of autonomous driving systems, Huawei has also launched the AOS intelligent driving operating system specifically for autonomous driving. As a real-time system, this system has been specially optimized in terms of communication, mobilization and operating environment. Compared with the modified Linux time-sharing system used by Tesla, it performs better in terms of security.

In addition to Huawei, the XPILOT 3.0 autonomous driving assistance system launched by Xiaopeng Motors is also excellent. It can now realize high-speed NGP automatic navigation and provide multiple functions including automatic overtaking and automatic speed limit adjustment. It can be said that from the current field of autonomous driving systems, my country's industrial level has reached or even surpassed Tesla's level.

Another major advantage of smart cars over traditional cars is that their entertainment systems are more powerful, providing owners and passengers with a comfortable and pleasant riding experience. However, due to the large demand for user customization of cars, how to ensure that the accessories that users want to install can play their roles perfectly has become a problem that plagues many car companies.

The Hongmeng system previously launched by Huawei based on the distributed microkernel architecture has come to play its role. The Hongmeng cockpit operating system HOS built on the Hongmeng system has outstanding performance in the scalability of automotive platform hardware due to its architectural advantages. It allows car companies to define hardware interfaces according to their needs and adapt to more user-defined hardware; secondly, the weakly coupled combination greatly reduces the difficulty of later maintenance, thereby further reducing maintenance costs.

We have certain advantages not only in software, but also in the field of car chip design. Huawei and Horizon Robotics have made achievements in the field of autonomous driving chips. The computing power of Huawei's previously launched MDC 600 chip platform has reached 352TOPS/300W. Although it is still behind Nvidia's 2000TOPS/800W, due to my country's vehicle-road collaboration route, the performance requirements for single vehicles are not high, so in actual scenarios, the autonomous driving experience between the two will not be much different. In short, it can be regarded as mainstream performance level.

In general, the smart car industry, which is in the early stages of its development, has brought us technologies that allow us to overtake traditional European and American car companies in the field of science and technology. However, the industry situation of each fighting on its own has hindered my country's progress.

With the emergence of the unified operating system plan for the smart car industry, the ideal of overtaking Europe and the United States is becoming more and more realistic, because it can not only help my country build large-scale industrial advantages in the international smart car market, but also promote the implementation of domestic vehicle-road collaboration policies. More importantly, we already have the strong ability to do this well.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.