AutoBeta(AutoBeta.net)09/21 Report--

On September 20, 36 Krypton reported that Xiaomi's smart driving team has recently been restructured to complete a new round of organizational restructuring. The reorganization of the intelligent driving team is mainly the merger of the two secondary departments of "perception" and "regulation and control" set up earlier, and reorganized into the "end-to-end algorithm and function department". The main work of this part is to be responsible for the development of mass production programs and to undertake the task of accelerating the opening of urban NOA. The reorganized department is led by Ye Hangjun, head of Xiaomi auto autopilot.

In addition, the "autopilot" team responsible for the pre-research work has been adjusted to a key development department to synchronously promote the research and development of L3/L4-level autopilot products. A person familiar with the matter told the media that Xiaomi plans to deliver end-to-end smart driving solutions this year to speed up the layout of Xiaomi cars in the field of smart driving.

Data show: end-to-end smart driving, referred to as E2E. It means that the perception, decision-making and execution modules of ‌ autopilot system are integrated into a unified AI model, and the final result is output directly by inputting the original data. This technology path aims to simplify the system architecture, improve the response speed and security of the system, and reduce the dependence on high-precision maps and lidar. To put it simply, it is an AI model, which only needs to input the original data to output the final result. Compared with the traditional "perception-decision-control" intelligent driving system, the "end-to-end" technical information transmission is faster and the maintenance cost is lower.

It is worth mentioning that Xiaomi took the lead in recruiting a smart driving team after it announced cross-border car construction in 2021 and has invested heavily in the field of smart driving. Lei Jun has previously said that smart driving is a key battlefield for smart electric vehicles. At present, Xiaomi has a research and development team of more than 1000, and it is expected to exceed 1500 by the end of the year. As Xiaomi SU7 is the first model of Xiaomi car, in terms of intelligence, officials have revealed that Xiaomi SU7 has invested 3400 engineers and spent more than 10 billion yuan on research and development.

Xiaomi has entered the auto industry relatively late, but it is also accelerating in the field of smart driving. In June this year, Xiaomi has pushed the city navigation assistant driving function for some approved users. At the end of last month, the official announced the upgrade of smart driving, Xiaomi SU7 city navigation auxiliary vanguard version began to launch, so that the city NOA "can be opened all over the country." It is understood that the upgraded version has higher flexibility and new path capacity. On September 19th, Xiaomi SU7 launched the OTA 1.3.0 upgrade to support city navigation assistance and optimize the capacity of trails. This function can be updated on major roads in the core areas of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Wuhan, Chengdu, Xi'an, Nanjing and Suzhou. It took Xiaomi more than three years from the establishment of the team to the delivery of NOA, the main road city of the ten cities today. With reference to Xiaopeng car in the current industry, it takes five years.

In terms of time, Xiaomi cars have made a lot of efforts in smart driving. However, compared with Huawei and Xiaopeng, there is still a certain gap. At present, Huawei's blessed Hangjie S9 has realized the full scene city NCA from parking space to parking space, and Xiaopeng city NGP has also realized the "nationwide drive" of unlimited city, route and road conditions. the new car MONA 03 is equipped with a pure vision scheme, which is cheaper with lidar, and can effectively deal with scenes that are difficult to cope with such as dim light, backlight, large light difference and so on. With the rapid development of new energy vehicles, intelligent driving has become the focus of many car companies, and consumers' attention to intelligent driving is also increasing.

This time, the reorganization of Xiaomi's intelligent driving team is undoubtedly in order to better survive in the fierce competition in the industry. Since the beginning of this year, many new car-building models have launched the uncharted city NOA, achieving 100% coverage of urban roads, and Xiaomi's smart driving progress needs to be further accelerated. Earlier, Lei Jun said that although Xiaomi started relatively late in smart driving, Xiaomi's goal is to be the first camp in the industry by 2024.

At present, the competition in the new energy vehicle market is particularly fierce. Xiaomi Automobile, as a cross-border car manufacturer, has to face too many competitors. As the first model of Xiaomi SU7, although it is favored by many young people in terms of ecological interaction and vehicle appearance, the advantage in intelligent driving is not obvious, and more practical results need to be produced in the future to make consumers really feel the value of being different.

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