Deep integration and integration in automobile development are enduring trends.

Wang Chuanfu once said: “The first half of new energy vehicles is electrification, and the second half is intelligence.”

The electrification in the first half can be divided into two logical branches. The first branch is the replacement of the three major components of fuel by the three-electric system, and the second branch is the dramatic change in the vehicle architecture.

People are often familiar with the former, but unfamiliar with the latter.

What is a huge change in vehicle architecture?

We all know that a fuel vehicle must be equipped with a huge engine, and the engine is connected to core components such as the gearbox with a mechanical transmission shaft. The three major components of a fuel vehicle determine the basic layout of the chassis. Other components can only be built on this basic structure. Layout, in other words, there is not much room for innovation in the overall vehicle architecture of fuel vehicles.

But pure electric vehicles are completely different. They cancel the three major components of fuel vehicles and replace them with motors, batteries and electronic controls. Since most batteries have a flat-plate-like structure, this brings great room for innovation in the overall vehicle design of electric vehicles.

For example, since electric vehicles do not have an engine, an additional anti-collision beam can be added to the front cover of the electric vehicle.

The most typical example is SUVs in the era of fuel vehicles. Many car buyers believe that SUVs have poor handling, are not as good as off-road vehicles in muddy conditions, are overpriced, have poor trunk sound insulation, etc., and even throw out that SUVs are not as good as station wagons and station wagons. Comments like hatchback sedan.

But today, the motor has solved the problem of the engine and gearbox occupying the space in the front cabin. Due to the presence of the battery, the chassis has become thicker and the head space has become larger. In addition, there is no need to worry about the acceleration of the three-electric system. As a result, pure electric SUVs have become a category favored by consumers with high price and volume.

A major change in electric vehicles compared to fuel vehicles is that various exhaust pipes and drive shafts are replaced with wires, and these wires can be integrated through reasonable layout design, just like integrated circuit boards.

The most typical example is the 48V platform architecture brought by Tesla Cybertruck. Tesla uses the dataCAN bus to run Gigabit Ethernet cabling, which connects all wires to the same cable, cascades more powerful computing chips, and fewer MCU units, resulting in a 77% reduction in total cabling. Cut copper usage in half.

Deep integration and integration in automobile development are enduring trends.

Compared with the 12V electrical architecture that has been used for more than 70 years, 48V wiring and components are smaller, lighter, and more integrated. They are also more suitable for increasingly complex vehicle electrical components and software systems to meet higher power consumption. need. This promotes the development of autonomous driving.

It can be seen that there are two inevitable trends in the great changes in vehicle architecture, namely integration and integration.

The so-called integration is to integrate various parts of the vehicle into whole parts. Its biggest advantage is to reduce the complexity of the supply chain and reduce costs. The most typical example is integrated die-casting.

The essence of the so-called integration is to analyze the unavoidable law in the development process of consumer electronics – Moore's Law.

Electric vehicles and consumer electronics are similar. In the cost of the entire vehicle, the three-electric system and automotive electronics account for more than 60%, and both of them have strong pan-Moore's Law characteristics. The cost-effectiveness of the battery will be improved through the new The application of materials and new technologies is rapidly iterating, and automotive electronics, which accounts for the second largest share, these electronic components themselves follow Moore's Law.

Therefore, the cost of electric vehicles forms an interesting “twin cost curve”: the vehicle cost curve and the battery cost reduction curve are almost the same, and like smartphones, non-linear reduction can be achieved.

Deep integration and integration in automobile development are enduring trends.

Specifically, the trend of various electronic components is to become more and more concentrated and more and more like a chip.

From the perspective of industrial development, the development space for integration is much larger than that for integration. The most typical example is that the computers in the 1950s were so large that they required an entire building to house them, but today's computers, which are the mobile phones you and I use every day, can be carried in our pockets.

Therefore, from the perspective of the end of the industry, in the future, the electronic and electrical architecture of electric vehicles will inevitably evolve towards integration, concentration and integration. An example that reflects this trend is the CTC chassis proposed by Leapmotor in 2022 ——The concept of skateboard chassis structure.

After understanding the trends of integration and integration, let’s look at batteries. The author believes that the development of batteries will definitely follow the general trend of integration and integration. In the future, with the mass production of solid-state batteries and the improvement of energy storage technology, the capacity and volume of batteries will definitely be further concentrated and integrated with the chassis. The biggest advantage of this approach is high integration, compact structure, and increased body rigidity and safety.

What car companies must pursue is higher integration and stronger scale effect. For example, Tesla, which has the ultimate pursuit of integration and integration, also had the idea of ​​replacing batteries in the early days, but later chose a simpler CTC architecture. ——Integrate the battery pack into the car body.

Deep integration and integration in automobile development are enduring trends.

For example, at the 2023 Ji Krypton Brick Battery launch conference, some media asked about the power exchange cooperation between Geely and NIO. It was officially confirmed that the company participating in the NIO power exchange cooperation was Ruilan brand, which focuses on the online car-hailing market. Not extremely kryptonian. Jikrypton’s answer is that since power replacement requires standardization to achieve scale effects, and the future trend is the integration of batteries and car bodies, CTC architecture and CTB architecture are the general trends.

At present, the world's two major new energy giants – Tesla is betting on the CTC architecture (battery chassis integration), and BYD is betting on the CTB architecture (battery body integration), both betting on integration and integration.