Text | Photon Planet, Author | Wu Xianzhi, Editor | Wang Pan
 

‘The chassis is the last piece of the intelligence puzzle.’

A few days ago, a state-owned Tier2 shock absorber research and development director Duan Kang (a pseudonym) told Photon Planet that of the three major components of the car (engine, transmission, chassis), the engine and transmission are no longer a problem due to electrification, but only the chassis can never be bypassed.

Another engineer Lupin (a pseudonym) predicted as early as last year that the new forces must be back in 2022 to make up for the lessons, the most important part is to solve all kinds of hardware short boards. ‘There are safety considerations, but also about driving experience and comfort.’

The facts have indeed evolved as predicted by industry insiders. First, the extreme Krypton 001 can be optional 28,000 air suspension attracted a lot of discussion. Regardless of how the outside world to judge, need to admit, air suspension in the filtering, sound and driving experience, indeed a change in the new energy car ‘driving dizzy, sitting in the car more dizzy’ bad experience.

On June 15, Azera released the new model ES7 on the NT2.0 platform, which also involves a lot of optimisation of the suspension, such as carrying the self-developed ICC chassis domain controller, which can control the height of the vehicle's air springs, shock absorber damping, and electronic parking to adapt to the driving habits of different groups of people and driving levels.

Extreme Krypton 001 and Azalea ES7 highlight the self-developed chassis may have different considerations, it is certain that after the electrification of the old and new forces did not directly transition to intelligent as Robin Li expected, but have to turn back to make up for the hardware class.

01 New builds roll from car to car

‘Cockpit intelligence is very important, but BYD so pulling crotch of the car machine system can do monthly sales of 100,000 volume, fully illustrates the current market demand for intelligence is not strong.’ An industry insider believes that with the electrification in-depth, the new forces of the hardware short board is increasingly prominent.

It is not difficult to find, since 2020, regardless of the old and new forces mostly around the car to do articles, such as the interior, car machine system, dazzling features (such as ‘lights control’ high combination), as well as some car companies continue to create the concept. However, no matter whether the oil car or tram, in the final analysis, not around the basic function of driving a car.

‘Generally speaking, driving an oil car is not dizzy sitting in a car dizzy, while the tram is like sitting on a boat whether driving or sitting in a car dizzy.’ Duan Kang stood in the driver's point of view that the current tram is overly concerned about marketing, ignoring driving safety and comfort. At the same time, he is also a gearbox R&D supervisor, and since 2020, more and more customers have signed one order after another with his company.

Unlike the car system, kinetic energy, sales and service areas, at every turn to subvert the BBA, footsteps on the logic of traditional car companies, chassis technology is only tuned without subversion, little innovation, a number of engineers said that there is not much difference between the tram and the oil car in the whole chassis design.

‘Because of the standardised production process, the chassis of this industry has not changed much over the years, the only difference may be that the tram chassis space will be more than the oil car, more room for improvement.’ It is understood that the chassis of the oil car because it is necessary to put a large number of parts such as the engine, transmission, etc., often the layout is very compact, while the layout of the tram chassis will be quite loose.

Some details also show that the new forces in the chassis technology and components, and traditional car companies have a certain gap, which is mainly technical experience and data accumulation.

Taking shock absorbers as an example, it mainly contains at least ten grey box and black box parts, of which the grey box is jointly developed by the supplier and the car company, and the black box is developed by the supplier alone, and the car company either only grasps part of the data or cannot grasp it at all, so there will be a complicated process in the development.

Generally speaking, it may take about one year for car companies and shock absorber suppliers to complete the whole process of development, trial production, road test and mass production.

The first few months is mainly a programme review and sign an agreement, after signing the agreement for two months after the matching of samples, to determine the delivery time and the amount of delivery. Wait until both sides have reached an agreement to enter the third step - small batch production, and then loaded to participate in two rounds of road testing, which the second round of road testing is generally tens of thousands of kilometres of 100,000 kilometres ranging from the end of the road test before entering into the mass production process.

In the above process, most of the new car-making forces are inexperienced, often unable to accurately provide the demand during development, and suppliers often do not know why, and thus inefficient.

Duan Kang told Photon Planet that he encountered various difficulties when he was involved in the development of the reducer of a waist new force. "Traditional car companies are more rigorous, for example, according to what system development, provide very detailed information. New forces process is very chaotic, sometimes say which point in time to do a certain link, but provide all the information without any rules, sometimes we have made a finished product, they only add materials."

According to its observation, most of the new forces are more aggressive in hardware development, with shorter time cycles, and only know what they want in the general direction, and are unable to be specific about the components themselves. ‘Once asked about the details, the new forces can only call the supplier to give the programme, and even sometimes intentionally or unintentionally gesture us to refer to Geely, BYD and these autonomous car companies.’

In addition to the lack of experience in hardware development, new cars are often arranged in a clear way when looking for suppliers.

Some industry insiders told Photon Planet that due to the relative stability of the supply chain of car companies, new car makers either have to give a higher price tag when looking for suppliers or have to look for newly opened suppliers. Although the price of newly opened suppliers is low, but the level of craftsmanship is uneven.

The above sources revealed that a new force before the consideration of cost, so the A supplier opened a new B supplier joint development, even if the exact size, B supplier still can not meet the demand. Later, the order volume soared, A supplier was forced to provide ‘nanny’ service, arranged for specialised point-to-point development, the product is still difficult to meet the heavy responsibility.

02 Old forces crawling from under the car to the car

Traditional car companies not only have sufficient accumulation in the field of hardware, but also know the importance of tuning.

It is understood that different joint ventures over the years to obtain a lot of patented technology and expertise. ‘FAW's tuning master directly from Volkswagen to dig German experts, and raised a lot of tuning masters, like Toyota to find Japanese experts.’ Engineer Lupin mentioned, like FAW Dongji Gong (a shock absorber manufacturers) is a joint venture between China and Japan, most of its technology bought from Japan.

This does not mean that traditional car companies can rest easy with a mature supply chain, rich experience and technicians in hand, Planet Photon has learnt that individual traditional car companies have dared their suppliers for other reasons.

‘Overall, the most stingy is Changan, Geely and Great Wall have the strictest standards, BYD and Toyota are the easiest to co-operate with and give a higher gross margin.’ A chassis supplier said that in order to keep costs down, Changan is almost heartless to set up a special ‘original price engineers’ to achieve the whole process of cost reduction.

"Parts grey, black box more, Changan will ask you material to do what welding, what is the approximate formula. That's not all, but also ask you raw material suppliers are which steel mills, it's formula and time consuming is how much, the length of the pipe material thickness, the number of production processes, as long as there can be optimised, all optimised off."

Not only the decline of Chang'an let suppliers suffer, on the standard of the Great Wall is also very demanding suppliers called difficult to serve.

‘Although both value quality, but compared to Geely, Great Wall likes to suddenly change the programme, and does not extend the cycle, resulting in engineers have to work overtime.’ A supplier told Photon Planet that most programmes involving chassis are hard to get past Wei Jianjun's butt.

The above person recalled that a certain programme after several adjustments, the Great Wall side of the engineers have been very satisfied, so the withdrawal of the bid, gone through the internal approval, just waiting for mass production. As a result, Wei Jianjun's whim is to get on the car to experience, things instantly become tricky.

"Wei Jianjun said the Great Wall to do this car we sell hundreds of thousands of units, must be responsible for customers, the words of the people must personally on the car, his ass left one is not right, the right one does not match, the whole of our suppliers, regardless of the company's president, department heads, or the next level of supplier boss, early Saturday morning Qi Puff meeting to discuss how to solve the problem.

‘The most pitiful is the docking engineer, that day he was attending a wedding reception, nine o'clock in the morning, sitting in the auditorium, open teleconference.’

Perhaps the engineer's dedication touched the customer, or the customer may have a guilty conscience, "the Great Wall sent an email to our leadership, said thank you for the efforts of so-and-so engineers, for our tuning to pay a lot of overtime, overtime, evenings and weekends are not rest has been to meet the demand. The last sentence of the email is laughable: and then we'll tune it again!"

This, of course, does not alleviate the suppliers' grievances, not to mention that there are more problems than just those mentioned above.

Traditional car company departments are masters of dumping pots and pans, and it is extremely costly for suppliers to communicate with them. For example, department A's proposal is rejected by department B, but the supplier is asked to coordinate with them. Another example is the small batch trial production programme, or mass production was rejected, not to solve the inventory problem, etc., all make the supply suffering.

‘The traditional car company people are “procrastination” masters, mouth all say good good, a question is to look ahead.’ These products that have not been approved to throw or not, keep or not, can only be mute, have bitter to say.

Various cases show that the chassis tuning is not smashing money pile of material can be solved. Lupin mentioned, wire control chassis on the technical differences once opened, basically can not make up by increasing investment in research and development. Not only R & D, involving the development of the relevant lowest level components, the host plant can not be everything.

‘There may be only one programme to achieve a bend in the road, which requires at least three doctoral-level team, a control, one responsible for hydraulics, but also a minimum of ten years of debugging experience of the bulls to lead the team, but the country is almost impossible to put these three people together.’ Lupin believes that the programme also has very high requirements for modelling.

Traditional car companies chassis technology does not fall from the sky, but by manpower, financial resources, time to pile up, and most of the reverse development of the road, such as Geely Boyue reverse Toyota RAV4 chassis, and the Great Wall reverse development for many years before the release of the intelligent wire control chassis technology a year ago.

03 Chassis, the final piece of the puzzle

Interestingly, almost all of the automotive engineers asked by Planet Photon said that Azera's claims about NT2.0 involving the chassis and suspension were suspiciously exaggerated.

‘It's OK to blow yourself up like a Transformer and do power swapping, but it's never possible to do chassis innovation.’ An engineer said that over the years, the electronic process of the chassis is very slow, and the biggest change at the moment is only the CDC (semi-active suspension) in a less costly way, to achieve close to the Mercedes-Benz magic carpet experience.

Specifically, it is in the shock absorber added sensors, real-time feel the road vibration, and then add a solenoid valve to pass the information to the new controller, according to the previously written procedures and parameters to determine the degree of soft and hard road conditions, and finally by adjusting the battery valves and damping clouds, in order to achieve fine-tuning.

The person mentioned above, the domestic suppliers have gradually started chassis parts electronic, such as FAW Changchun related projects have been launched, is expected to be followed by other domestic suppliers this year.

But even if the CDC popularity, logically speaking is only for the physical range of adjustment, including hard, medium and soft three levels, it is difficult to go further. "For example, off-road vehicles require the chassis to be tuned softer because of its slow speed; while the sporty version has to be tuned very hard because it requires more manoeuvring. But exactly how soft or hard it needs to be requires the subjective judgement of experienced engineers."

Previously, there is a view in the industry that the biggest problem of the Azera ‘866’ era is that the chassis tuning feels loose, and some industry insiders speculate that it may be related to the wheelbase and strength is not high. ‘Volkswagen chassis is very hard, very solid, punch up the body without that kind of floating feeling.’

It should be noted that most of the new forces at the moment continue to advocate intelligence, while ignoring the hardware itself, is not wise. From the point of view of the previous Wuling Hongguang and the current BYD sales, the current market is still in the electrification climbing period, far from the intelligent stage.

On the one hand, most of the domestic consumption is located in the 300,000 low-end models mainly, intelligent perhaps too far ahead. On the other hand, as of 2021, the domestic new energy vehicle ownership of 7.84 million, accounting for only 2.6% of the total number of cars, indicating that the electrification process, the majority of people are still stuck in the ‘first car’ demand.

As the name suggests, as the first car, first of all to meet the user's daily travel needs, so practical, safe and cost-effective is the most important reference basis. Only when the market penetration rate is high enough, step by step to the ‘second car’, intelligent may be really towards the wind, but even so, the hardware involved in the safety, comfort and stability is still all car companies must be the front of the problem.

‘First, regardless of the tram or oil car, resolutely never buy the first batch of cars; second, when everyone is driving a tram, petrol stations are closed, I will consider changing the tram.’

A car company engineer said although some extreme, but shows that the new car indeed can not ignore the traditional hardware process problems, perhaps extreme kryptonite 001 and azure ES7 opened the prelude to make up for the lesson, the follow-up will have more car companies to follow. (This article was first published in the Titanium Media App)

This article was republished from Titanium Media, Article | Photon Planet, Author | Wu Xianzhi, Editor | Wang Pan
Original Link:2022, the battle for the chassis of car companies - Titanium Media Official Website (tmtpost.com)
First image credit @Visual China