The trillion-dollar new business model of smart cars is driven by billions of sensors that you don’t know about

If electrification is the first half of the automotive industry's transformation, then intelligence will be the second half.

Electrification only changes the car's power system, while intelligence will greatly enrich the car's functions, improve the travel experience, and bring about huge changes in lifestyle.

BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu believes that smart cars are super phones with legs. He believes that by 2035, we will enter the era of smart cars. "Mobile phones only have a dozen sensors, two or three cameras, and a microphone, which gave birth to the current smartphone ecosystem and business landscape. Cars have hundreds of sensors and seven or eight cameras, so the future business ecosystem of smart cars will be richer."

The Trillion Era of Smart Cars

There is no doubt that the only thing that can create a new trillion-dollar business in the post-smartphone era is smart cars.

When cars can be driven autonomously, people will be freed from the steering wheel. People can work, live and entertain in their cars. When all vehicles are planned to take the best route according to intelligent transportation, travel will no longer be congested, and road rage will become a thing of the past.

Face recognition, voice interaction, Bluetooth unlocking of cars, automatic avoidance of congested roads, convenient car payment, real-time monitoring of the interior environment, watching movies, drinking coffee, and massage in the car on the way home from get off work are gradually becoming a reality.

Smart cars will play an increasingly important role in people's lives, and more scenarios will be continuously explored with the development of smart cars.

BYD's vision for smart cars is open

In terms of automobile electrification, BYD has taken the lead by virtue of its previous layout. Facing the upcoming era of smart cars, BYD has chosen to leverage this huge market through an open approach.

BYD is good at vehicle manufacturing but has shortcomings in vehicle intelligence. BYD did not evade or cover up its shortcomings. Wang Chuanfu once directly admitted in an interview that BYD is lacking in smart cars and that traditional car companies lack Internet thinking.

Therefore, BYD chose to open up and learn from others’ strengths to make up for its weaknesses. BYD is positioned as the executive part of automobile intelligence. By opening up, BYD can save energy to make good hardware of the car, while giving full play to its own technological advantages, it can make up for the gap in hardware with international automakers.

The Internet's shortcoming is the execution of smart cars and autonomous driving, that is, hardware manufacturing, which is exactly what BYD is good at. The two sides complement each other's strengths, and letting professionals do professional things can achieve twice the result with half the effort.

For example, the cooperation between BYD and Baidu has achieved many results. Baidu Map Navigation and other services have covered all BYD models; the L3 autonomous driving car jointly developed by the two parties will be mass-produced in the near future; BYD Qin Pro is the first autonomous driving development platform certified by Baidu Apollo.

BYD is not simply outsourcing the software part of smart cars to Internet companies, but is deeply integrated with Internet companies through openness. BYD will open up 341 sensors and 66 control rights on the car to provide developers with a broad creative platform.

BYD not only cooperates with Internet giants such as Baidu, but also opens its own hardware platform to developers around the world. BYD not only wants to make smart cars, but also wants to create an industrial ecosystem for smart cars.

Without the innovators, entrepreneurs and developers of the mobile phone ecosystem, and without the development of innovative content and application scenarios, there would not be such a huge mobile phone ecosystem today, and giants such as Tencent and Alibaba would not have grown so big. The same is true for the construction of the smart car ecosystem.

Car manufacturing is one or two orders of magnitude more difficult than mobile phone manufacturing, and smart cars are far more complex than smartphones. Smart cars built on more sensors and more complex hardware will have richer application scenarios than smartphones. Such a complex ecosystem cannot be managed by just one or a few large companies.

One or two companies are not enough to form an ecosystem, and group innovation can enrich the business model. Only with the participation of many developers can the various application scenarios of smart cars be fully developed.

Building a smart car ecosystem can form a virtuous circle. With the efforts of developers, BYD's smart cars will become better and better, and sales will increase accordingly. The higher the car sales, the deeper the foundation of this industry ecosystem will be, which will drive more developers to join the ecosystem.

The key to attracting more developers is scale. Only when the scale is large enough can developers get sufficiently generous returns. When the scale is insufficient in the early stage, BYD will focus on supporting relevant developers and provide a good growth soil for the extension of the ecosystem. BYD will share the cake of the smart car industry to enter the era of smart cars faster.

BYD's openness means not forming alliances or taking sides. On BYD's hardware development platform, Baidu, Horizon Robotics and others can develop autonomous driving, 360 can explore a new car-machine safety system, and online car-hailing companies can innovate operating models and achieve fleet management. An open ecosystem means more opportunities and innovation.

BYD's ecological construction is not limited to cars, but uses cars as a carrier to layout smart cities with longer-term development potential.

Wang Chuanfu is very optimistic about the role of automotive intelligence in promoting smart cities.

He took Shenzhen as an example: Shenzhen has about 3 million cars, each with more than 300 sensors. If users open 10% of the sensors, it is equivalent to having hundreds of millions of sensing terminals. As a benchmark for smart cities, Shenzhen is the city with the highest density of sensing terminals in the country, but currently there are only more than 1 million.

After the massive amounts of data such as PM2.5, temperature, images, road conditions, etc. generated by hundreds of millions of sensing terminals in smart cars are connected to the city’s public system, it will bring about disruptive changes in the management of industries such as public security, meteorology, environmental protection, insurance, banking, transportation, and education.

Not all car companies can open

Automotive intelligence has become a hot area in which traditional car companies are competing to develop.

SAIC and Alibaba have jointly developed the Banma Smart Driving Operating System. Changan and GAC have both cooperated with Tencent in the field of intelligent networking. Geely has even developed its own GKUI smart operating system, attracting a series of Internet companies including the BAT Group to participate in the cooperation.

It can be seen that in China's smart car field, cooperation between traditional car companies and Internet companies has become a major trend.

BYD is undoubtedly open in its cooperation with Internet companies.

Geely cooperates with Internet giants on the basis of self-developed operating systems, but rarely opens up to ordinary developers, preferring to master more links independently. When SAIC cooperated with Alibaba, they implemented strict data isolation between each other, and data was shared but not shared. Changan, GAC, Great Wall and other car companies have not opened up their own hardware platforms to the same depth as BYD.

In fact, not all car companies can be as open as BYD.

BYD has always pursued a vertical integration strategy, producing and using as many auto parts as possible. In this process, BYD has accumulated a lot of core technologies.

Smart cars are the trend of automobile development. Since smart cars and electric cars are naturally compatible, smart cars must be based on electrification. After previous accumulation in the field of new energy vehicles, BYD has independently mastered all the core technologies of new energy vehicles.

The development of automobile intelligence requires opening up all the extremities of the automobile's "nervous system". This involves all the core technologies and numerous parts of the vehicle. These large and small parts belong to hundreds of upstream suppliers. If the interface and control rights are to be opened, many intellectual property issues are involved, and the negotiations will consume a lot of time.

BYD's early vertical integration and deep accumulation of new energy vehicle technology have enabled BYD to open up all sensors and control rights of its vehicles. BYD's openness to this extent is unique not only in China, but also the first in the world.

The vertical integration strategy previously adopted by BYD was intended to reduce costs, but more importantly, it was to reduce dependence on parts suppliers and achieve transformation as quickly as possible when changes in the automotive industry come.

Vertical integration allows BYD to circumvent the intellectual property issues it faces when opening up. Since BYD owns all the core products, it can open up all of them and respond quickly to the transformation of automobile intelligence. In this way, efficiency will be greatly improved.

The deep openness reflects BYD's sincerity to small and medium-sized developers and its determination to build a smart car industry ecosystem. The open ecosystem will make BYD's smart car experience richer and more personalized.

While BYD is open, it has not ignored the corresponding safety issues.

Safety is an issue that cannot be avoided no matter how the automobile develops. With the development of the automobile industry, the proportion of software in automobiles is increasing, and the number of sensors will also increase greatly. Automobile networking and software updates make automobiles increasingly part of the Internet. All of these have increased the safety risks of automobiles.

Automobile safety includes hardware safety and software safety. BYD is very good at hardware safety. As for software, BYD invites professional companies like 360 ​​to do it, and together they create a more comprehensive car safety system.

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.