Car companies build cell phones, or cell phone factories build cars, is becoming a trend.
It is difficult to say who is the first to move, but the purpose is clear.
The smartphone market is shrinking year by year, the cell phone factory naturally will not sit on the hot car windfall.
Car companies want to bend the car by intelligent, half a day of effort, found that consumers still prefer to put a cell phone holder in the car, but also rarely use their own car machine so-called “intelligent features”.
But it is clear that both car companies and cell phone manufacturers, have underestimated the difficulty of cross-border.
Cell phone manufacturers have a large number of user groups, in the intelligent experience in the best understanding of user needs, but also has a strong enough software and system development experience.
However, whether it is research and development, testing or production, building a car is far more complex than building a cell phone, the automotive industry has been developing for a hundred years, and none of the car companies that exist in the world today can survive comfortably on huge investments alone.
Car companies will think that handle tens of thousands of parts to build a car, control only a few hundred parts of the cell phone supply chain is simpler, but cell phone iteration is faster, mature cell phone manufacturers can not guarantee that each product is a significant sales, the lack of experience in the car companies, it is easy in the cell phone industry, was beaten nose to nose.
At the same time, both car companies, or cell phone factory, are facing the same problem, after repeatedly building wheels, the average consumer, with what to buy the two respectively cross-border to build cell phones or cars, to meet the manufacturers of commercial self-consciousness?
Give up aggressiveness, is the first step for cell phone manufacturers and car companies to trust each other
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to talk exclusively with OPPO Vice President Wu Henggang, the head of OPPO’s travel business Zhang Xin, to talk about the story of OPPO’s travel business. Today, at OPPO’s ODC conference, OPPO presented its own car solution, OPPO Carlink, to the public.
Between building cars and building full-stack car systems, OPPO Carlink, an idea that has been born since September 2019, wants to explore a third way that no one has taken yet.
Today the confidentiality is lifted, the content of the communication at that time, can be released as the number.
Internet companies or cell phone manufacturers to do car machine, there are two mainstream directions, one relying on the car machine hardware itself, to create a set of full-stack car machine, similar to the Hong Meng car machine, one is relying on cell phone computing power, through the wired or wireless way to cast screen to the car machine screen, similar to CarPlay.
But for car companies, such access, too aggressive.
You can understand the car screen as a piece of commercial land managed by car companies, in order to ensure the user’s basic experience and data security, car companies will rarely contract the entire industry plot all to any single developer free to handle.
But if the car companies themselves, and will encounter, because the number of single models compared to cell phones and tablets such mobile terminal volume is too small, the profit prospects are not clear, software developers are not willing to come to this land to build a building to operate the embarrassing situation.
Therefore, intuitively speaking, the third way that OPPO Carlink wants to go is to cooperate with car enterprises, contract a part of the land, through its own software capabilities, to solve the situation that developers are not willing to come to the car machine to build a building on the ground, while ensuring that the complete architecture of the car machine remains in the hands of car enterprises, so that car enterprises in the era of intelligence, will not “lose their souls “.
This thing is now described quite easy, but behind is a 3-year story.
In 2019, BYD found OPPO, hoping to cooperate with an NFC digital key, then Tesla China, because the Android machine killed the background situation seriously, in order to ensure the experience of the digital key, also found OPPO to do a special adaptation, followed by Changan and other 23 car companies.
In February 2021, SAIC’s chief engineer led a team to visit OPPO, thinking that there are still too few applications available in cars, and cell phones have accumulated a lot of applications and derived many services in the past 10 years, hoping to join hands with OPPO to create interconnection between smart cars and cell phones.
So in June 2022, OPPO set up a travel business segment, and on August 24, 2022, SAIC Zero Beam and OPPO officially set up the “Ecodomain” joint lab to jointly conduct R&D in the field of connectivity.
When I asked Zhang Xin if SAIC had not found OPPO, is it likely that OPPO would not want to do OPPO Carlink such a function? Zhang Xin’s answer was this.
In my opinion, this is a coincidence, but also a necessity. After SAIC came to talk to me, I remember, because last year many people talked about OPPO wanting to build a car, and also talked about Mr. Chen (OPPO founder Chen Mingyong) side visited Changan Automobile, etc., I was accompanied.
After the middle of last year, more and more car companies came to talk to us about whether it is possible to migrate some of the more mature soft and hard service capabilities of cell phones to cars.
In this process, we found that Geely and Weilai have gone to make cell phones. But more car manufacturers still hope to do a good job with cell phone manufacturers to integrate the depth of capabilities, rather than build their own cell phones.
According to OPPO Vice President Wu Henggang, SAIC and OPPO’s cooperation “is a two-way reciprocal, two-way run, rather than who is the master and who is the deputy. Everyone will be less guarded in the process of doing this, and will remain the dominant player in their respective fields.”
These words are translated more directly: OPPO is accepted and trusted by the automotive industry, the core reason is that OPPO does not make cars.
How is it so hard to make a car center screen?
Most ordinary consumers find it hard to understand why, even in today’s era of smart cars, the car screen, still far from smart, there is a big gap, even worse than the flat experience we can buy at will.
Most of the network comments, the problem will be attributed to the car car screen and chip need to achieve automotive standards, testing conditions and certification process, are more demanding than the faster iteration of consumer-grade digital products, so naturally behind a full generation of flat experience.
But in fact, today’s mainstream smart cars, both screen display quality, screen refresh rate, touch sampling rate, can compete with consumer-grade tablet, Snapdragon 8155 as the representative of the car-grade chip, even after the car to do arithmetic redundancy, the remaining arithmetic power is much higher than the ordinary tablet.
The biggest problem with the car experience is the fragmentation of the software experience.
The author’s team has a colleague who used to work in the intelligent department of the car machine of the first-tier traditional OEM in China, and he gave an example.
They negotiated with a well-known video platform in China, hoping that the video platform could be stationed in the car, so that the car could also play the platform’s videos.
But the video platform proposed the condition is that each video membership on the car needs 16 yuan per month membership fee, because the car company has a lot of models, the car screen size is also a lot, the video platform is not willing to undertake the adaptation work.
Because for the video platform, and can not earn much money in this cooperation, but also to ride a lot of labor and technical costs to adapt, more than worth the loss. A car company’s smart car sold more, for cell phone users, the volume is still very small.
OPPO even if the domestic sales of the top 3 cell phone manufacturers, will face the same problem.
So in 2021, OPPO led vivo and Xiaomi to launch an ICCOA alliance with 119 partners, including vehicle manufacturers, Tire1 suppliers, cell phone manufacturers, software developers and application service developers. The aim is to create a set of common standards to solve the problem of fragmentation of in-car software.
But the interesting thing is that in the alliance, there are both cell phone manufacturers who make cars and car manufacturers who make cell phones.
When I asked Zhang Xin, the innovation business director of OPPO’s travel business, wasn’t he worried about OPPO being used as a spare tire?
After all, even if OPPO’s current market share is good, but matching the market share of new cars launched by partner car companies every year, there are not many users who can really experience the new features. Suppose one day OPPO cell phones do not work, the market share fell very obvious after the car companies and OPPO cooperation desire will be reduced to very low.
Zhang Xin is thinking: this thing is not controllable, whether car companies or cell phone factory, sales are dynamic changes, such fluctuations are short-lived, but we went to form some industry standards, this thing is common.
Including white papers, standards, basic capabilities to promote the landing, these are the industry standard things. Why we will consider leading this alliance is also taken into account this problem, no matter who, we are in the process of promoting the development of this industry, there is always someone to take the first step.
According to OPPO’s planning, after the integration of cell phones and car machines, they can be roughly divided into three types of scenarios according to the proximity of the car, the opening of the car door, and the access to the car.
The car system can reorganize all kinds of resources and services on multiple devices according to the scenario and user needs, such as output through the car screen and speakers, and input through the cell phone touch screen and microphone, so that users can realize the operation of senseless switching.
This is indeed a difficult but attractive prospect of the ideal path, as to how the final landing effect, 2023 will see the light.
The future of interoperability is more promising than becoming a car company
In these recent years, we have all witnessed the rapid development of Chinese Internet services and smart hardware, but it seems that today’s Chinese Internet majors, as well as domestic smartphone giants, are gradually starting to fall into a kind of Musk fetish.
Building cars, satellites, humanoid robots – it seems that all these top tech businesses that we couldn’t even think of in the past are not so “expensive” given the long-term wealth accumulation of Chinese internet and hardware companies.
At the same time, these physical products involving top-notch technology have considerable allure to the capital markets, and can support a growth story with rising stock prices.
But do we really need so many new brands of smart electric cars? Or is there an immediate need for a humanoid robot that can’t walk well at home?
Actually, not really.
During the half month of frequent communication with OPPO, they kept emphasizing one thing to me: the car solution is only part of the Pantanal system, which is an open architecture that seamlessly connects across terminals, be it car, phone, watch, or smart home.
To give you a simple example, when you are ready to take a nap in the car, just click on the nap mode on your phone.
The phone will automatically adjust to Do Not Disturb mode, the seats in the car, automatically put down into a comfortable semi-reclining position, the car stereo play some soothing sleep-aiding music, until the phone set the alarm clock, the car seat slightly vibrate, wake you up, and the seat back to its normal position.
This is indeed truly intelligent, but it is only a scene too small to be simple, simple to be simple function. The OPPO concept of the Internet of Everything, after the creation of a cross-device, cross-system, cross-service ecology.
This is not an easy thing, to solve the connection problem of different terminals, to allocate arithmetic power, to refine the scene as accurate as possible, even if we have known what real intelligence can be like in science fiction movies more than a decade ago or even decades ago, but this is really our “intelligent life” today, from the realization of The road to real intelligence.
For cell phone manufacturers with mature smart hardware and software development experience, perhaps, to create a truly intelligent and interoperable system, far more than cross-border integration of supply chain, personally down to build a car, more worth looking forward to.
