Original title: Apple Inc rebuilds the car, why can't Musk sit still? Source: boiling point of new economy

The boiling point of the new economy

Wang Yuquan, founder of Haiyin Capital, said in an interview not long ago, "stocks that can surprise investors in the future must be ahead of the industry, predict the future direction of technological development in advance, and be embedded in software and hardware." when the application is hot, then the value of these pre-embedded technologies will be stimulated. "

When he expressed the above view, he gave the example of iPhone12, because itPre-buried "lidar technology"。

It is understood that Apple Inc has added a LiDAR (lidar scanner) to this model. Through the beam principle, a higher resolution image can be obtained, with an accuracy of centimeters or even millimeters.

In addition to mobile phone photography, lidar technology is also used in geographical mapping, cultural relic protection, autopilot and other fields.

You could say that.Without lidar technology, self-driving cars would lose their eyes.Using the principle of remote sensing, it can make the driving car perceive everything around it in real time, detect the target and range, and make the car have the ability to distinguish in three-dimensional space.

There is a point of view in the China Intelligent Network Automotive Industry Development report (2019): at present, in the field of automatic driving and auxiliary driving of intelligent network connected vehicles, which is an important application scene of artificial intelligence, lidar is one of the core sensors to realize environmental awareness.

On December 22, 2020, a Reuters report said that Apple Inc put forward another steam-building plan and predicted that a mature "Apple Inc" passenger car would be on the road by 2024.

At about the same time, according to The Verge, key supply chain manufacturers revealed that Apple Inc plans to launch its first electric car, the Apple Car, in the third quarter of next year. "this is at least two years ahead of Apple Inc's original plan, and dozens of prototype cars are already on the road in California."

Apple Inc's technology for self-driving cars can be said to have laid the groundwork for lidar. Apple Inc has accumulated self-driving technology since 2016. GeekCar counted 18 technologies in 2019, from charging to autopilot.

In 2019, Apple Inc obtained more than 30 patents in the automotive field, including autopilot, AR navigation, in-vehicle VR, in-car payment, biometric, intelligent hardware, car diplomacy, virtual rearview mirror and other fields, according to the company.

In fact, this is not the first time Apple Inc has built a car.

In 2014, the company had a "Titan" within the company, aimed directly at cars. At first, Apple Inc's car plan was too ambitious and always wanted to start with car hardware. It was not until 2016, when Bob Mansfield, a former senior vice president of hardware of Apple Inc, took over the Titan automobile project that Apple Inc's research and development route changed from "hardware development" to self-driving system development.

In 2018, Bob retired, and in August of that year, Titan planned to be run by a man named Doug Field.Field, an old man from Apple Inc, moved to Tesla, Inc. for five years, specializing in vehicle engineering and manufacturing for Model 3.

By February 2019, however, Titan plans to cut 190 jobs, including 38 engineering project managers, 33 hardware engineers, 31 product design engineers and 22 software engineers. The completion date of the layoffs is set for April 16 of that year, according to the email.

All these twists and turns show that it is not easy to build a car.More than a year ago, Dyson announced the bankruptcy of its electric car plan, which meant that 20 billion dollars it had invested in three years had been wasted, while another Internet giant, Alphabet Inc-CL C, only dared to circle the self-driving car Waymo for small-scale commercial use, and chose to rent but not sell "as a limited-use taxi model (robo-taxis)."

The automobile industry is an industry that requires extremely high integration of upstream and downstream resources. Even if the wizards Musk, who subverted the industry, came in, it took him 17 years to make money for his Tesla, Inc..

It may be that the hardware of the car is difficult. For the core hardware of self-driving, the lidar sensor, "Apple Inc has decided to purchase the equipment from an external partner," Reuters reported on Dec. 22. "

However, when Apple Inc revealed that he was going to build a car this time, Musk, the founder of Tesla, Inc., came forward and questioned: "this is really strange. Tesla, Inc. has used lithium iron phosphate batteries in the production of the Shanghai factory, and the single battery is chemically impossible. The maximum voltage is magnified as low as 100x unless they are glued together."

Musk's doubt is because Apple Inc's new car-building plan has a special difference from Tesla, Inc., that is, battery technology.

Reuters reportedApple Inc plans to use a unique "single battery" design.By omitting the packaging and modules containing battery materials, the volume of the single battery is increased, and the space inside the battery pack is freed, so that the potential mileage of the car is longer.

In other words, Tesla, Inc. 's battery now looks like one, but there are thousands of small batteries arranged and combined inside.In this way, first, it is safer, and second, when there is something wrong with the battery, you do not have to replace the battery as a whole, and the battery can be updated without finding the problem.

Apple Inc's battery idea seems to subvert Musk's design, it is a whole, there is no combination of N small batteries, because the gap tied together by the small batteries is gone, in principle, at the same power, the volume of a single battery will be smaller than that of the combined type.

In additionThe "lithium iron phosphate battery" Apple Inc is testing is different from the high-energy "ternary lithium battery".When it is squeezed by an external force, it produces less heat, so it is difficult to explode, so it is safer. "

But at the same time, the energy density per unit area of lithium iron phosphate battery is lower than that of ternary lithium battery.

Tesla, Inc. uses a lithium iron phosphate battery. In order to achieve the battery life of the ternary lithium battery, the volume and capacity of the battery have to be increased. In March 2020, Chinese automobile brand BYDOn the introduction of a "blade battery", through structural innovation, can skip the "module" in the group, improve the volume utilization, and finally achieve the design goal of loading more cells in the same space.

Apple Inc's battery plan looks more perfect, a combination of battery life and lithium iron phosphate battery safety.

This proves,When Apple Inc talks about car building, he has two strengths: one is lidar technology, and the other is a single lithium iron phosphate battery. In addition, it has also completed a rich manpower reserve.

According to the incomplete statistics of workplace social platform LinkedIn, the special project team of Apple Inc Company has a total of more than 1200 people by 2020, including 170people from Ford Motor Company, more than 300people from Tesla, Inc., and more than 110people from private research institutions related to cars.

Guojin SecuritiesAnalyst Xu Maoyang believes that Apple Inc mentioned building cars again, not only to seek new growth points, but also for the future layout. Apple Inc's mobile phone business may have a peak signal, while smart cars are known as the mobile phones walking on the road in the future.

In 2020, the new power of car building in China achieved a sharp increase in market capitalization.Tesla, Inc., on the other side of the ocean, had a market capitalization of $86.1 billion in January 2020 and soared to $658.6 billion on December 31, making it the world's largest car company by market capitalization.

Xu Maoyang believes that Tesla, Inc. 's main advantages are intelligence, self-driving, data and brand. "Apple Inc is developing chips and Carplay systems, and Apple Inc can build application ecology and high-end brands, and its route in smartphones can be seamlessly transplanted to smart cars."

Interestingly, when Tesla, Inc. 's market capitalization reached 200 billion US dollars in August 2020, some analysts believed that the capital market's valuation perspective for Tesla, Inc. also gradually broke away from the traditional carmaker's point of view. more and more people begin to analyze the value of Tesla, Inc. with the attributes of software and technology stocks.

"driven by the software business (FSD), Tesla, Inc. 's business model is becoming more and more like Apple Inc."