The car map has been set, and Ali is going to enter the field to harvest.

"Electrification, intelligence, networking and sharing will change the automobile industry in unexpected ways." As early as the beginning of 20 14, carlos ghosn, then president of Renault-Nissan Alliance, expressed his concern that Internet companies such as Google would "invade" the automobile industry by taking advantage of the new four modernizations. In July of the same year, Alibaba signed an agreement with SAIC, announcing that it would manufacture "Internet cars" and formally joined the list of "intruders".

In the blink of an eye, six years have passed, and Alibaba's ecological map has been expanding, from the core e-commerce business to payment portals and local life services. From intelligent terminals, information entertainment and cloud service platforms, the prototype of "car-home-people" has gradually formed. At the end of this year 1 1, with Alibaba's shareholding in SAIC's smart high-end brand Zhiji Automobile, it officially entered the core automobile production field, and its layout in the automobile circle became increasingly clear.

Networking: reorganize the zebra network and set the goal of installing100000 vehicles in three years.

Unlike Baidu relying on autonomous driving and Tencent relying on application ecology, Ali's layout in the automotive field mainly relies on the terminal operating system.

20 14 On July 23rd, Alibaba signed an agreement with SAIC, announcing that it would build an "Internet car". As a result, Alibaba joined the battle for car mobile terminals. Prior to this, Tencent had already launched Lubao, a driving application, and Lubao Box, an auto part. Baidu also released CarNet, an in-vehicle information system. Compared with the other two "brothers", Alibaba seems to be a little slow.

Image source: Zebra Network official website

In March of the following year, the Internet Auto Fund initiated by Alibaba and SAIC each invested 500 million yuan to set up Zebra Network, and put forward the slogan of providing overall solutions for the entire automobile industry.

Zebra Zhixing is an open platform for Internet cars based on AliOS built by Zebra Network. On July 6th, 20 16, Zebra Zhixing 1.0 confirmed the product concept with voice as the core and map as the desktop. The first landing model is SAIC Roewe RX5.

Since then, Roewe RX3, RX8, eRX5, and other independent brands of SAIC, such as MG and Datong, have also been connected to Zebra Zhixing. At that time, the two sides were full of confidence and put forward the goal of winning about 6 million new car markets within five years (20 15-2020).

To some extent, zebra AliOS has made China enterprises "win" in vehicle operating system. But on the one hand, some car companies are reluctant to give up developing their own OS and open users and data portals; On the other hand, AliOS's business expansion has met with resistance due to Zebra's own shareholder structure and other problems.

In order to reverse the situation, from 2065438 to August 2009, SAIC and Alibaba announced the strategic reorganization of Zebra Network and AliOS, and expanded their cooperation areas to the fields of automobile travel platform, autonomous driving and automobile industry cloud.

At the same time, Alibaba established Zebra Zhixing Network (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd. to undertake the intellectual property rights and business of AliOS operating system as a whole, so as to facilitate the overall injection into Zebra Company after strategic reorganization. Crucially, after the strategic reorganization is completed, Alibaba will become the largest shareholder of Zebra Network. This means that the zebra finally got rid of the "SAIC bondage".

Compared with the previous generation system, Zebra 3.0 combines AI technology and is equipped with many functions such as AR-Driving. Image source: Zebra Network official website

According to the Zebra network planning, its future strategic planning is mainly divided into "trilogy": smart car, smart cockpit and smart car. At the same time, a series of organizational structure adjustments have been made, including the establishment of three new departments: digital transportation service department, industrial digitalization department and smart car cloud department; The algorithm engineering center is upgraded to big intelligence; Establish three laboratories: intelligent interaction laboratory, intelligent service laboratory and intelligent driving laboratory; Former strategic planning department and post-installation ECO? The product line was cancelled.

Based on this, in June this year, 5438+065438+ 10, Alibaba put forward a new goal for zebra network, and the installed capacity of car operating system AliOS should reach 65.438+million in three years. According to the data, from July 20 16 to September 20 19, the installed capacity of AliOS was only over 900,000 vehicles, among which the above Roewe brands were the main ones, including MG, SAIC Chase, Citroen, Skoda and Ford. Since the reorganization of Zebra Travel was announced in August 2065438+2009, only one FAW-Volkswagen has been added as the official partner. In the future, more brands are needed to join in order to achieve a substantial increase in magnitude.

Intelligentization: From Intelligent Logistics Transportation Platform to Vehicle-Road Coordination

Compared with the high profile of the Internet of Vehicles, Alibaba's autonomous driving is much lower-key. 20 17 10, Ali established Dharma Institute and set up an automatic driving department.

Different from Baidu and Tencent, Ali Autopilot's positioning is to build a smart logistics transportation platform, and put forward two business forms: unmanned distribution at the end and open roads. It's not hard to understand. After all, Alibaba started from the e-commerce business, and products are more likely to form a linkage from logistics.

In fact, compared with manned autonomous driving, the safety risk of using autonomous vehicles to carry goods is relatively low, the technical difficulty is relatively small, and there is greater freedom in laws and regulations, so it is easier to achieve large-scale landing in a short time.

In terms of technical route selection, Alibaba chose L4 (fully automatic driving), that is, driving is dominated by machines, and human intervention is not needed in most scenarios. At present, Ali's unmanned delivery vehicles have started small-scale operations in several campuses and parks.

Image source: Dharma Institute official website

Wang Gang, chief scientist of Ali AI Lab, once introduced that the map of Ali autopilot technology mainly includes three aspects: algorithm, hardware and system architecture.

In his view, the biggest bottleneck restricting the development of autonomous driving is still that the algorithm is not good enough. Therefore, Ali put more energy into the research and development of autonomous driving algorithm and put forward the concept of "small front desk, public platform".

"Small front desk" refers to automatic driving algorithm modules such as perception, positioning, decision-making and control; "Dazhong Taiwan" refers to the AutoDrive platform independently built by the Ali team. It consists of automatic parameter tuning module, network structure search module, active learning module, framework and basic cluster platform, which can improve the R&D iteration speed of autonomous driving technology.

In order to build a smart logistics transportation platform and promote the commercial landing of autonomous driving technology, Ali chose the vehicle-road coordination scheme on the technical realization path, that is, smart cars plus smart roads. In the thinking of Alibaba Artificial Intelligence Lab, there are not only smart cars, but also smart roads. The path is self-driving car+roadside sensing base station+cloud control platform, thus realizing the integration of cloud, road and car.

In addition to technology research and development, Ali's layout in maps, positioning and chips. It also provided great help for his own autonomous driving layout.

It is generally believed in the industry that high-precision maps are very important to realize automatic driving above L4 level. As early as 2065438+September 2006, Alibaba has completed the collection of high-precision maps of expressway and urban expressways in China. Subsequently, in order to further realize their goals on high-precision maps, Ali and China Ordnance Industry Group jointly established Chihiro Location in August 2065438+2005, and devoted themselves to providing high-precision positioning services. At present, with its four-year cooperation with Cadillac, Super? The cruise project has been commercialized, and Gaode has also become the first map manufacturer with high-precision map commercialization experience in China.

In cutting-edge technologies such as algorithm chips, Ali has gathered a large number of high-end talents relying on Dharma Institute and Pingtou Ge, which focuses on developing chips, to add strength to the research and development of autonomous driving technology. It can be seen that there is still little noise from outside, but in the field of autonomous driving, Alibaba has formed a relatively complete industrial chain.

* * * Enjoy: With Didi Kuaidi as the core, the network is widely dispersed.

Ali has an early layout in the field of car enjoyment. As early as 20 13, Ali paid attention to the mobile travel outlet. In May of that year, he invested in a fast taxi and merged with Didi Kuaidi.

In recent years, the development of the online car market has tended to be calm, but Alibaba has not relaxed. According to Tianyancha data, at the end of 20 19, Alibaba also invested in Guangdong Xindong Travel Technology Co., Ltd., and its business scope includes online booking of taxi passenger transport and car rental.

There are three main ways for Alibaba (including Ant Financial) to layout in the field of travel.

The first is investment and mergers and acquisitions. Since 20 13, Alibaba (including Ant Financial) has invested/acquired more than 30 enterprises in the field of big travel, of which more than half are leading investors or sole proprietors. The investment scope covers travel platforms, infrastructure, tool services and other fields. Including Hellobike, Yonganxing, Didi Chuxing, Gaode Software, Xpeng Automobile, etc., covering the entire upstream and downstream industrial chain in the field of travel.

Image source: T3 travels to official website.

The second is to cooperate with enterprises. There are two ways: setting up a joint venture company to invest in enterprises in related fields; Or cooperate with car companies to develop in-vehicle intelligent operating systems. In March last year, Ali joined hands with Tencent, Suning and other technology companies, as well as Changan Automobile, China FAW and Dongfeng Motor to establish T3 Travel Company, which is the most famous.

The third is bidding. Through bidding, Ali won the interconnection of guangzhou-shenzhen railway and Changzhou subways, Hongkong subway and other projects. In view of this, Ali chose to use Alipay to infiltrate public transportation and then cooperate deeply.

Although he has invested a lot, Ali's more ambitions in the field of travel still come from Didi Kuaidi, and the rest of the investment is aimed at the payment entrance of the travel market. Zhang Hongping, former vice president of Alibaba Group and managing director of Ali Capital, once said, we should not simply regard companies like Kuaidi and Didi as taxi software, they are more like the entrance to the future Internet. There is no doubt that the future travel company will be a big ecology, and there may be a company bigger than Alibaba now.

End of movement

Tsinghua University Global Industry Research Institute once published the research report "The Wisdom of Transformation —— Discussion on the Development of Automobile Industry under the Innovative Thinking of Internet", and regarded 20 15 as the first year for local Internet enterprises in China to build cars. Since the beginning of this year, Internet companies such as Baidu, Ali, Tencent, Weilai and LeTV have entered the automotive industry across borders, aiming at smart electric vehicles. Starting from the online sales, operation and enjoyment of vehicles, they have gradually involved in in-vehicle electronic products and intelligent solutions for vehicle networking, and finally entered the category of smart cars and intelligent manufacturing.

With the change of technology and market and the intervention of new elements and forces, the whole automobile industry is also undergoing profound changes. On the eve of integration, Alibaba is entering the game strongly.

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