Wheel factory recruitment

On June 14, official website of Xiaomi Company began to take various positions on autonomous driving.

As can be seen from this picture, the job classification of this social recruitment is very rich: data platform, vehicle infrastructure, decision planning, millimeter wave algorithm, development tools, front-end platform development, embedded software, control, perception, high-precision map, simulation platform, etc. , a total of 20 positions. And before every recruitment notice, there is a word "urgent".

This should be regarded as one of the important signs of Xiaomi's own official efforts to build a car.

Of course, it is really impossible to build a car in three years only by Xiaomi's current ability-just a few days before the automatic driving position was released-on the 8 th of this month, Lei Jun paid a low-key visit to the R&D center of Great Wall Motor in Baoding. Although neither side announced the purpose of this trip, the industry thought it was related to Xiaomi's OEM.

At the 202 1 China Auto Chongqing Forum on June 13, Wang Chuanfu, Chairman and President of BYD Co., Ltd., made it clear: "In the future, BYD will support the development of Xiaomi Automobile in the automobile business, not only supporting it, but also negotiating some projects for the cooperation between BYD and Xiaomi in the automobile field." Of course, some analysts estimate that the cooperation between BYD and Xiaomi Automobile is related to batteries in all likelihood.

According to the location shown in the job recruitment information, nine times out of ten, Xiaomi Automobile will put the R&D center in Beijing, because Beijing has the largest number of autonomous driving talents in the country.

In fact, according to the "convention" of domestic new car-making forces or autonomous driving technology unicorns, important departments will not be located in only one city, so there is probably not only one R&D center for Xiaomi Automobile.

For example, Wuhan, which has deep cooperation with Xiaomi mobile phone. After Xiaomi joined the melee, some departments in Wuhan directly indicated that they should actively dock Xiaomi.

Shanghai, which also has a large number of automotive R&D talents, has the largest number of talents in the field of smart travel in China, according to the report of Global Talent Insights in the Field of Smart Travel released by LinkedIn, a global workplace social platform, at the end of April. Among them, Shanghai ranks first, which is relatively high in the world.

According to a multinational auto parts supplier, Xiaomi is planning to establish a research and development center in Anting, Shanghai.

Statistics show that as early as 20 12, Xiaomi began to apply for automobile technology patents, and more or less related patents will increase every year. By 2020, Xiaomi Group will have more than 800 automobile-related patents, of which invention patents account for more than 96%.

But in fact, most of Xiaomi's patents for designing cars can only be regarded as "icing on the cake". Most of them are "marginal" patents that sound interesting but not hard-core, such as "method and device for adjusting the volume of automobile horn", "method and device for detecting fatigue driving", "method and device for controlling vehicle preheating" and "method and device for vehicle Bluetooth broadcasting".

Public patent information data shows that compared with Baidu, Alibaba, Huawei, etc. The number of related patents of Xiaomi in the fields of "smart transportation" or "autonomous driving" is at a disadvantage, with a big gap.

In addition to quantity, Xiaomi has the least patent coverage. Especially in building a car, the difficulty and threshold are the highest, and it is also the automatic driving that can best reflect the research and development strength of enterprises.

The most comprehensive coverage is Baidu and Huawei. The former focuses on "vehicle hardware architecture", "image processing algorithm", "lidar processing algorithm", "autopilot system", "autopilot system-on-chip" and "virtual simulation test", and has the full-stack research and development capability of software and hardware for autopilot perception, decision-making and execution. Most of the related patents of the latter were applied between the end of 20 19 and 2020, and they were in the stage of "substantive examination", focusing on basic functions such as "automatic lane change method" and "trajectory planning".

Xiaomi's layout in the field of autonomous driving, except for some patents of DMS, has only one patent related to automatic parking. DMS is generally aimed at L2-L3 autopilot system, but at present, many intelligent driving technology companies and new car-making forces have begun to pay attention to L4 autopilot system.

Perhaps this is why Xiaomi began to recruit "autopilot engineers" and invested in two autopilot technology companies. On June 3, Xiaomi participated in the D-round investment of Mu Zong Science and Technology of 65.438+0.9 billion US dollars; On June 8, Xiaomi, Gao Ling and Meituan jointly led the investment in the D round of financing of Jose Technology, with an amount exceeding 300 million US dollars.

This is also the first time that Xiaomi has invested in the automotive field after officially announcing the construction of the car. Moreover, as far as the current situation is concerned, these two companies are the two companies with the highest investment amount among the 16 autopilot-related companies that received financing from May to June this year.

In less than half a month, Xiaomi, who is not bad at money, kept visiting car companies to seek cooperation, and began to invest heavily in recruiting autonomous driving talents, which shows the urgency of building a car.

Different from consumer electronic products, although "software defines cars" and "smart cars are four-wheeled mobile phones", in fact, the automobile industry chain is still complicated and lengthy, and more importantly, the requirements for safety and reliability are extremely high. Although Xiaomi is not poor in money, there is still a big gap between technology and experience, whether it is with other Internet/technology companies that first entered the field of car-making, or with new forces in car-making, or even with traditional OEMs.

At present, Xiaomi's deep cooperation with the OEM and investment in self-driving unicorns may be the fastest way to build a car.