Financial Services Association, March 27 (Reporter Liu Yang) Facing the second half of intelligence, automakers have come up with “killer weapons” in the chassis field. On March 27, the reporter learned from Geely Automobile that based on a self-developed AI digital chassis, the company has recently completed the world's first driverless car drift. With this drift technology, it can achieve basic capabilities such as “crabbing” and “tank U-turning.”

“We will accelerate the application of high-end new energy technology such as AI digital chassis to mainstream products, and mass-produce products such as Geely Galaxy and Lynk & Co by next year.” Geely Auto revealed that driverless car drift is an important part of Geely's AI digital chassis technology, which highlights the company's cross-domain integration capabilities in various fields such as AI models, digital chassis, and intelligent driving. “The first time the big AI model got on the car, it was not limited to voice interaction in the cockpit, but was combined with overall control and connected to the chassis domain.”

A week earlier, Zhiji Auto announced that the Zhiji L6, which will be launched in May, will be the first to be equipped with the industry's pioneering technology “VMC Smart Digital Chassis”. According to reports, this system, which uses intelligent algorithms to enable central control of the vehicle, makes the L6 the first intelligent electric vehicle that intelligently simulates the “cerebellum” to coordinate and control the vehicle's movement posture.

To make a car walk sideways like a crab, the car needs to be equipped with a “cerebellum” to coordinate and control the vehicle's movement posture. According to Zhiji Auto, the first-generation VMC (Vehicle Motion Control) smart digital chassis technology equipped with the Zhiji L6 coordinates advanced chassis hardware such as rear wheel steering, intelligent electronically controlled shock absorbers, air suspension, and electric drive. In this way, the vehicle's acceleration, braking, steering, and shock absorption are no longer separate, and the vehicle's X, Y, and Z axes of freedom (front, rear, left, right, up and down) are coordinated, so that users can enjoy a more agile, safer and more comfortable driving experience.

“Along with industrial changes brought about by intelligent and electrified automobiles, automobile chassis systems are also evolving in multiple directions and intelligence.” According to industry insiders, with the reshaping of the chassis system value chain and the development of a new electronic and electrical architecture, it will be possible to use a central coordination motion controller as the “cerebellum” of the entire vehicle, and distributed black box systems controlled by traditional Tier 1 will gradually open up. Undoubtedly, this will give automakers more freedom. “The biggest revolutionary aspect of smart digital chassis technology is that it will completely break the previous situation where iterations of chassis technology were limited by suppliers, and help car companies truly achieve full stack self-research from the bottom.”

In April of last year, BYD launched the “Cloud” intelligent body control technology. On the basis of the original horizontal and vertical control technology, it completed the last piece of vertical control puzzle and achieved complete control of the six degrees of freedom X, Y, and Z of the car body. On this basis, the capabilities of advanced intelligent driving sensing sensors were further integrated, and the road pre-targeting function was realized. In November of the same year, before and after the Smart World S7 press conference, Huawei launched the “Touring chassis”. It also achieved multi-dimensional control of driving, braking, suspension, and steering through multi-modal fusion sensing and multi-domain collaborative control technology. In addition, the “AI smart chassis” in NIO's Banyan Rong 2.4.0 intelligent system not only uses car-side sensing sensors (lidar and camera) to scan the road ahead, NIO also uses group intelligence to generate 4D road condition layers, further enhancing the ability to sense the road surface in the cloud.

Under the influence of industry, market, capital, etc., China's smart chassis industry has further developed, and an industrial ecology is gradually being formed. According to the reporter's incomplete statistics, a total of 8 smart chassis companies were established in 2016 and 2018, which basically coincides with the time when the country began to centrally deploy new energy vehicles and intelligent connected vehicles.

“The smart chassis boom did not come out of nowhere; it is a necessary path for the intelligent development of automotive electrification.” The aforementioned industry insiders believe that by decoupling the electronic control system and the driver's mechanical interface, the chassis system adjustment method is more flexible, which can meet the individual needs of different consumers. At the same time, the chassis domain controller realizes software and hardware decoupling, which is conducive to supporting OTA upgrades and optimized iterations of core algorithms. “With the further development of China's autonomous car brands, the autonomy rate of smart chassis is also expected to soar.”