Updated: 2012-09-17

Faced with the acquisition big move conceived by Cai Siqiang and others, Duke, who has not taken the initiative to inquire about the smart car project for a long time, began to pay attention to the progress of the project. You should know that although the various companies under SAL can make money now, when dozens of billions of dollars of real money are invested, if the relevant product research and development cannot keep up with the pace of investment, the investment cannot be converted into new wealth, it is of course a failure for Duke, the chief scientist.

However, in Qiyang Automobile's product planning, although smart cars mentioned the R&D schedule, it is a relatively long-term plan. After all, Qiyang Automobile is now mainly low-end products in China, and mid-range products with a sales volume of more than 150,000 yuan is very small. Based on this product price and cost positioning, it is impossible to plan out many intelligent features.

After all, the improvement of the brand is a long process and cannot be completed in a hurry. Therefore, the smart car research team focused on some intelligent auxiliary systems that were originally used in mid-to-high-end cars, such as intelligent navigation, intelligent induction wipers, intelligent constant temperature air conditioners, intelligent suspension adjustment systems, etc. These technologies are relatively mature. The Qiyang smart car research team hopes to achieve it on a lower cost basis and compete with competitors at low cost.

Some more high-end intelligent features, such as intelligent voice control, intelligent parking assistance systems, dangerous driving prompts, etc., are planned to be implemented in Qiyang Automobile's mid-range cars. This will greatly improve the technological content of Qiyang Automobile's mid-range cars, and thus enhance the competitiveness in the mid-to-high-end market of 150,000-200,000 yuan, and increase the sales ratio of Qiyang Automobile's mid-to-high-end cars.

I have to say that this strategy is a steady and steady tactic before the acquisition of Opel, with extremely high operability. In this way, Qiyang Automobile's products are mainly promoted from the middle and low end to the medium and high short. Under the same production capacity conditions, the overall sales and profits will rise sharply.

Taking Qiyang Automobile's current production capacity of nearly one million vehicles, if most of the sales are mid-to-high-end cars of 150,000 to 200,000 yuan, the sales will rise from the original 700,000 to more than 100 billion yuan, and the profit will be doubled more than twice. Therefore, this path is a very safe and enterprising approach.

However, with the famous brand of Opel and related world-class automotive platform technology, it is equivalent to providing a better development opportunity for the newly established Oriental Qiyang. It is not surprising that cars with the same technological content will be radiated through Opel's brand, even a 20% premium is more than 20%.

If Duke's smart car electronics technology is properly grafted with Opel's existing manufacturing technology, it can have a mutually promoting multiplication effect with the Opel brand.

You should know that Duke’s strongest thing is electronic technology now. No one can match the pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and voice recognition. These unique technologies can effectively improve the safety and comfort of cars, and provide drivers with better human-vehicle interaction interfaces.

Using Opel's brand foundation and integrating these high-end technologies, high-end models can even compete head-on with luxury cars like Mercedes-Benz and BMW.

Of course, Cai Siqiang saw such a great opportunity to vigorously promote the acquisition of Opel.

Now, Duke is needed to contribute to the realization of this strategy in terms of technology.

Judging from the current conditions, the so-called smart cars are certainly not about building a car robot that can be driven by autonomously. From the current technical level, the cost-effectiveness of developing fully intelligent cars is quite low, and the supporting environment is still very immature.

Although according to current technical conditions, it is feasible to realize a car robot that can drive automatically, it will cost a lot of money and use countless expensive sensors to create a car that can drive on its own under certain road conditions.

Because to realize a car that can drive automatically, it can not only be done by installing a GPS system, but also requires countless sensors to obtain current road operation information. The intelligent system needs to solve the problem of comprehensive judgment of driving environment such as roads, congestion, direction, pedestrians, obstacles, etc., automatically choose the best solution for the car's behavior, and then direct the car to pass, detour, slow down, emergency braking or stopping. These simple actions for people are an extremely complex computing process for the intelligent system.

For example, for known paths, GPS navigation can basically solve most navigation problems, but not all road information in this world can be updated in real time. You will always walk on some unfamiliar roads without GPS path information. At this moment, GPS navigation will lose its effect. Real-time image processing must be used to find the road together with the GPS system, and the scenery around the car will be processed into 3D images through special cameras. Then, the collected information is made by the optical orientation and ranging system to analyze where the road is, where the pedestrian is, and where the trees are obstacles.

This thing that humans can easily accomplish with the naked eye can be replaced by an intelligent system. To do this, various laser sensors, radar ranging systems, stereo camera systems and an extremely efficient computer system must be installed for the car to perform complex operations in order to approximate all the information that is easily perceived by the human eye.

Then, after extremely complex artificial intelligence programs, these information can be processed into the actions that should be taken at present and fed back to the current car operations through sensors. It can also be said that this kind of self-driving intelligent driving car in the true sense needs to be concentrated on the use of today's high-end computers, modern sensing, information fusion, communication, machinery, artificial intelligence and automatic control and other comprehensive technologies to complete it.

A smart car built according to this standard can be said to be without hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. For most drivers in the real world, who would spend such a high price now just to buy a monster that regards people as a fool and is full of sensors?

These cutting-edge technologies should appear on special-purpose products such as drones, rather than mass consumer products that millions of people can accept, so sci-fi smart cars like this can only appear in competitions, rather than real-world consumer products.
Chapter completed!