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If there is a grudge in the car circle, the action of tossing up is no less than the rice circle.

Shortly after COVID-19 was diagnosed by Musk on the other side of the ocean, he angrily sent several tweets to Xpeng Motors, accusing him of stealing, using their old codes and so on. A stone stirred up a thousand waves, and fans of the two brands also quarreled in Weibo. How did this battle happen? We must comb from the beginning.

During the Guangzhou Auto Show in 2020, Xpeng Motors released the Peng Yi version of the derivative model of P7. Everyone with discerning eyes knows that this is actually a dazzling model of Xpeng, or an "appetizer" of Guangzhou Auto Show. The real "main course" is the lidar technology announced by Xpeng Motors.

Xpeng Motors said that all models produced after 202 1 will upgrade the software system and hardware system of autonomous driving, and will be equipped with lidar technology to improve the recognition rate and performance. By then, Tucki P7 will become the world's first production car equipped with lidar.

Hearing the news, Peng's friends were boiling. Thanks to the new technology, Tucki's new car may really surpass Tesla in autonomous driving. However, the festive atmosphere didn't last long, and Tesla CEO elon musk posted several explosive comments on Twitter that day.

As shown in the picture, Musk commented on a piece of news on Xpeng Motors: "Xpeng Motors has an old version of Tesla software, but it doesn't have our latest neural network computer." The irony between words overflowed the screen, trying to turn over the old account of "Tesla employees jumped off a building in Tucki last year" again.

Perhaps ridicule is not enough. Musk continued to comment: "They not only stole our code, but also stole Apple's code." Even in the end, he specifically pointed out: "This is only a problem in Tucki, and no other China company has it."

What is intriguing is that Tasha, an analyst at Ark Fund? Gini was the first to forward this tweet about news on Xpeng Motors, and commented: "Why does Tucki use lidar? I believe it will greatly improve the accuracy, but it will seriously limit the scalability of its autonomous method. Do they realize that they can't copy Tesla's method? "

Many people will think, WDNMD ... What does the feud between Tucki and Tesla have to do with a fund analyst?

▲ Tasha is on the left? Geordie

Of course it matters, because Tasha? Gini and Musk are old acquaintances, and this flattery needs patting! Such agitation between the two has contributed to the arrogance of Musk's above comments.

Boy, this is a group meeting. Young people really have no martial arts. Not to mention the fact that Tesla's spittle planetesimals have flown to Tucki's face. With the temper of CEO of Xpeng Motors, he naturally won't ignore this matter. So he Xiao Peng was angry with Weibo the next day, and the original text is as follows:

"It seems that Tucki's next-generation autonomous driving architecture, including the laser radar we released yesterday, makes some people in the West very unhappy and uses pigu to make continuous sounds. What I want to say is that rumors have long proved that you can't beat any competitors. From next year, you should be prepared to be defeated by us in China. As for the international community, we will meet. "

He Xiaopeng's reply is also extremely sharp, not only saying "we can't find the East", but even popping up human organs such as "Pigu", which is a bit too much.

So, why did Tesla break up with Xpeng Motors? Is their feud just because of an aurora radar? Is Tesla's goal Tucki alone or the whole domestic new energy automobile manufacturing industry? Let's analyze them one by one.

● Not only Xpeng Motors, but Weilai has also been DISS.

Yes, Tesla's attack was not targeted, but indiscriminate. Because as early as the beginning of this month, Weilai Automobile was ridiculed by Tesla in the dark.

165438+1At the beginning of October, the market value of Weilai Automobile soared, surpassing BMW, Ford, General Motors and other enterprises in succession, becoming the sixth largest automobile enterprise in the world. At this time, the market value of Weilai Automobile is 60 billion US dollars, and the price per share is 42 US dollars. This was originally a happy thing, and Musk suddenly came out and sent a tweet:

420? Is it? Ten? Times? Is it better? Than? 42! (420 is ten times that of 42! )

Musk said this because Tesla's share price just fell to $420. The implication is: Laozi's share price will fall ten times as much as yours!

This behavior is like the most annoying students in the class. A diligent junior finally got 70 points through his own efforts. And a "Xueba" who just slipped from 100 to 90 came over and sat next to you and said, "Look at you, you haven't been as tall as me after studying for so long."

This is very puzzling. There are so many companies that make pure electric vehicles all over the world. Why are all the car companies that have been visited by Tesla DISS domestic? After thinking about it, I think there is only one truth-Tesla is under pressure! This "schoolmaster" with unstable scores is afraid that those diligent students will get higher scores one day.

Since Tucki, Weilai and Ideality went public one after another, the business direction of the three companies began to get on the right track. Although there is still a gap with Tesla in some aspects, the gap is narrowing by increasing R&D investment. This has also been verified from the gross profit margin of enterprises, and there are too many data to prove that they have made money.

There are too many such examples, and the mighty apple is the best proof. Push the time back to a few years ago, the iteration of A-series processors was the highlight of Apple's autumn product launch conference every year. At previous Apple conferences, A-series processors will only be "vertically compared" with previous products, and will not be "horizontally compared" with competitors.

For example, when Apple released the A 12 processor, it only compared the performance, power consumption and other parameters with the A 1 1 processor, and advertised that it had improved several times or even dozens of times. To put it bluntly, with Apple's ability at that time, it simply despises Qualcomm Snapdragon, Samsung Orion and Huawei Kirin.

Until last year, when Apple released the A 13 processor, it actually found competitors in the same period as a comparison. Admittedly, its ability is still stronger, but it also shows that Apple's A-series processors are no longer a "monopoly".

Tesla is angry now precisely because it is also standing at this crossroads.

Where did the feud between Tesla and Tucki come from?

After talking about the current situation of the enterprise, let's talk about the feud between Tesla and Tucki.

Many people think that Tesla and Tucki have just "torn their faces" recently, but in fact, they accumulated a lot of grievances and dissatisfaction as early as a year ago, which is the above-mentioned "Tesla employees quit Tucki" incident. Many people know about it, and many people don't. In order to facilitate everyone to understand the grievances of these two companies, I will briefly talk about it.

Last year, Xpeng Motors was in a stage of rapid development. In order to speed up the landing plan of the new car, Xpeng is looking for people with lofty ideals to help it. Due to the limited talent pool in the market, high-paying job hunting has become a tacit "hidden rule" among major enterprises. This is also the status quo of all walks of life, and we have no reason to attack it.

At this time, many Tesla engineers heard the news and jumped to Xpeng Motors. The incident of tearing B was caused by a former Tesla employee named Cao. After Cao was ready to join Xpeng Motors, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Cao, claiming that he stole intellectual property and switched to the company.

Cao Guangzhi explained that Tesla had deleted120,000 files on his computer, disconnected his personal iCloud account, and deleted all browsing records, which fully met the resignation criteria. It was these preparations that made him decide to join Xpeng Motors.

This lawsuit has been entangled for more than a year, and Tesla has never found the real hammer that Xpeng Motors "stole". Cao also cooperated with the investigation many times because of this civil lawsuit, and has never pronounced a sentence.

After many fruitless investigations, He Xiaopeng finally couldn't help it. He suspects that Tesla is retaliating against the development of competitors on the grounds of civil litigation. And issued a statement saying that Tesla's behavior is "bullying." At that time, Xpeng Motors is satirizing Tesla's "petty".

Of course, we can only glimpse the grievances between car companies, and I believe there are more chaotic relationships that we don't know and can't imagine. But the end result is that the quarrel between ——Xpeng Motors and Tesla was forged.

● Lidar is an excuse for "tearing B", but it is not just an excuse.

Finally, let's set aside some space to talk about lidar.

In fact, Tesla developed lidar technology very early, but it has not been applied to cars. Musk once said in various public occasions: it is stupid to use lidar in cars! Why is Musk always reluctant to use lidar? According to the information we have learned so far, there can only be one reason-the cost is too high!

As we all know, to achieve automatic driving, it is necessary to equip the vehicle with a pair of "eyes" to observe the road conditions at all times. These "eyes" can be ultrasonic radars, cameras or millimeter-wave radars. Theoretically, any electronic component with detection ability can be used as the basic configuration of automatic driving. It is also based on this that global autonomous driving is divided into two major schools: "camera school" and "lidar school".

Tesla's choice is "camera pie".

Tesla's self-driving FSD, full name? Automatic driving, literally translated as "fully automatic driving". Its principle is to transmit the image data collected by multiple cameras to the central system and give it to the special chip for autonomous driving (FSD? Beta) is responsible for analysis. When the vehicle senses the obstacle ahead, it can measure the distance and give instructions.

In a sense, this can be regarded as a "high-order evolutionary version" of the early automatic assisted driving system. Tesla's soul configuration is a powerful central processing chip, which is indeed a configuration in the industry.

So, how does lidar work?

The working principle of lidar is very similar to that of ordinary radar, except that it uses laser as the signal source. The pulsed laser emitted by the laser hits trees, roads, bridges and buildings on the ground, causing scattering, and some light waves will be reflected. On the lidar receiver, according to the principle of laser ranging, the distance from the lidar to the target point is obtained.

The technology of lidar has been tried to be applied to the camera industry, which is called laser focusing. It also detects the distance of the object by laser, and then transmits the data to the camera chip to calculate the focal length.

But in the end, it did not become the mainstream configuration of cameras. The reason is that the internal space of the camera is inch by inch, so you should think twice about stuffing a small part. The size of the lidar itself is not small, and there is still room for CMOS, battery and anti-shake system inside the camera. As a result, either the camera becomes as heavy as a brick, or the size of the radar is reduced, and the speed of laser focusing is not up to expectations.

So this configuration is like a flash in the pan, and finally it is replaced by phase focusing with higher reliability and faster focusing speed.

As the saying goes, "the east is not bright and the west is bright", but the lidar does not find the correct position on the camera, but it is well integrated with the automatic driving of the car. On the one hand, the volume of the car is very large, and there is more space reserved for parts inside, so the problem of large volume of lidar is not a problem at all. On the other hand, the accuracy and sensitivity of laser detection are much higher than that of cameras, and the speed of collecting image data is extremely fast. Tesla always boasts that he has a fast collection and calculation speed, but in fact he is a slag in front of lidar.

So to sum up, lidar may be the most suitable sensor for developing autonomous driving. But as mentioned above, it's too expensive! As you can imagine, the cost of a laser radar is about dozens of times the sum of all sensors such as millimeter-wave radar, camera and ultrasonic radar.

Words are not intuitive. I'll give you a formula:

Lidar ≈ (millimeter wave radar+camera+ultrasonic radar) X? ordinary

N≥ 10

Attention! This is just the cost of a lidar! If you put one in front and one in the back, isn't this cost exaggerated? Therefore, as a business genius, Musk knows the benefits of lidar. Only driven by the cost, it is impossible to put all your eggs in one basket and invest heavily.

Moreover, the lidar itself is not perfect. There are also shortcomings, such as heavy rain, heavy snow, heavy fog, the most common foggy days in Beijing. These environmental factors will greatly affect the working efficiency of lidar, making its high cost not equal to its actual capacity. To put it bluntly, it is not worth the price.

We are well aware of Tesla's thoughts, but we can't speculate on Tucki's intentions. Maybe it's true, maybe it's to avoid Tesla's technology patent, or maybe it's to find a breakthrough from another direction ... In short, it's actually a risky and costly practice for Xpeng Motors to choose lidar as a sensor for autonomous driving.

At least at this stage, "camera faction" and "lidar faction" still have the opportunity to become mainstream autopilot sensors. I don't want to muddle along, but the answer to this question can only be decided by the future market.

As for Musk's saying that "lidar" is their remaining technology, I just want to say that when a person wants to lift the bar, he can tilt the earth by giving a fulcrum.

Write it at the end.

Quarrel between manufacturers is really normal. After all, we all want to make money, just to eat. The development of the market is always driven by capital. No matter who wins in the future, I believe that another enterprise will never take the attitude of "dying" and "mutually assured destruction" with the market. Otherwise, when all investors are fools? Did the wind blow away their money?

Therefore, as long as the company can develop smoothly, it is no big deal for the CEO to be slapped. To put it bluntly, an enterprise can't make big money without the courage to be flexible.

In the future market, the concept of enterprise is not important at all. Consumers pay with real money, which is the most important thing.

This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.