Huawei and GAC have launched the Qijing brand. What's the difference between it and the models in the "Jie" series?

Another powerful player from Huawei in the new energy vehicle field may be coming soon.

Just a few days ago, Qijing officially announced that its first car had completed design finalization. After a series of verification tests, it is estimated that it will make its official debut next year.

The Qijing Automobile here is precisely the cooperative brand jointly launched by Huawei and GAC last month, and it has quite a high profile.

At the end of June, Feng Xingya, the chairman of GAC, visited Ren Zhengfei, the CEO of Huawei, in Shenzhen and proposed to jointly develop youthful new products. Three months later, Xu Zhijun, the rotating chairman of Huawei, led a team to GAC, officially announced the Qijing brand, and personally participated in the design review and finalization of the new car. The pace was extremely fast.

Guys who often participate in design reviews must know how much pressure and high requirements this means.

Fortunately, both parties are very satisfied with the finalization result, which has further raised people's expectations for Qijing.

That being said, many guys, like me, may have a question in mind. That is compared with the HI model and the Smart Selection Cars, what exactly are the differences of this new non-"Jie" series brand, Qijing?

On the basis that the former has achieved great success, what is the purpose of Qijing's emergence?

Although there is not much information released so far, in my opinion, Huawei and GAC position Qijing on the one hand to fill the market gap, and on the other hand, it is the next potential candidate for "Chinese-made cars".

You should know that although the HI and Smart Selection Car models are two independent business lines, in essence, both are models led by one of the partners.

In the former, the automobile enterprise takes the lead, and Huawei acts as the system solution provider. In the latter, Huawei takes full control, and the automobile enterprise provides support in production and manufacturing.

The advantage of this approach is that it can give full play to the advantages of the leading party and precisely target the user group. For example, the audience of the HI model mostly consists of supporters of traditional automobile enterprises, while the owners of Smart Selection Cars tend to be "geeky middle-class" people who are willing to accept cutting-edge technologies.

However, there is actually a larger and more potential group waiting to be explored between the two.

They don't have prominent labels, and they don't require their cars to have a particularly strong advantage, but it must be a "safe choice" without obvious flaws.

Most likely, they are the target of the Qijing brand this time.

Since its establishment, Qijing has weakened the previous one-party leadership and instead adopted an approach similar to a joint-venture automobile enterprise, allowing both Huawei and GAC to make joint decisions, complementing each other's blind spots while leveraging their own advantages.

Simultaneously with the establishment of the Qijing brand, Huawei has dispatched teams from different fields such as product, marketing, and finance to work on-site at GAC Group for "zero-delay" communication with teammates. On GAC's side, it has joined Huawei's IPD (Integrated Product Development) and IPMS (Integrated Product Marketing) systems to improve work efficiency.

Here, the former is responsible for optimizing R & D and management processes. Ideally, it can shorten the time for products to enter the market by 40% - 60% and save 50% - 80% of R & D resources. The latter can formulate corresponding marketing strategies according to different stages of the main process to facilitate the successful launch of new cars.

Under this kind of two-way cooperation, Huawei and GAC in the Qijing brand are more like two partners starting a business together. Although there are many difficulties and challenges, the upper limit they can reach is significantly higher.

Don't think I'm exaggerating. Just look at the respective advantages of GAC and Huawei, and you'll understand the pressure that Qijing will bring to existing new players in the market under their joint efforts.

You may not know that although GAC Group is not in the leading position in the new energy era, it is one of the OG players in the Chinese automobile industry that has contributed the most classic models. Its strength and heritage in car manufacturing are truly profound.

What it brings to Qijing is the "shield" that gives people full confidence.

As early as 1985, the Guangzhou Automobile Industry Corporation and the French Peugeot Automobile Company jointly established Guangzhou Peugeot, one of the first batch of joint-venture automobile enterprises in China. At that time, the main model, the Peugeot 505, became extremely popular in the domestic market due to its cool appearance and exquisite workmanship, with annual sales exceeding 30,000 units.

After the establishment of GAC Group in 1997, it not only successively won joint-venture projects with Honda and Toyota brands but also brought countless classic national popular cars such as the Highlander, Accord, and Odyssey to people through industrial integration and technology introduction in the following decades.

After nearly half a century of development, GAC now has one of the most powerful system capabilities in China, covering R & D, manufacturing, and the supply chain.

Even a large-scale testing wind tunnel, which is rare in China, was built by GAC itself, and it was made into the world's first "triple-in-one" wind tunnel laboratory integrating aerodynamics, acoustics, and thermodynamics.

In terms of quality control, which people value the most and are most concerned about for new players in the automobile industry, through the well-known full-life-cycle QDR quality management system in the industry, GAC can often use the highest standards in the design, production, and usage processes to create safe and durable high-quality products.

You can tell how good GAC's quality control reputation is in the industry by looking at people's evaluations of the Accord and its sibling models back then.

In contrast, what Huawei provides to Qijing is obviously the sharpest "spear" to open up the market.

In the current melee of intelligent driving in China, no matter how the competition unfolds, Huawei always remains firmly in the first echelon. The reason is that as early as 2021, Huawei's intelligent driving demonstration video went viral in the entire automobile circle.

In the video, an ARCFOX Alpha S maneuvered nimbly in the bustling downtown area of Shanghai in an almost fully autonomous driving mode on complex roads and among dense traffic, looking just like a science fiction movie.

It was equipped with the first-generation Huawei intelligent driving system introduced through the HI model.

Over the past few years of development, in almost every evolution of intelligent driving technology in China, such as the transition from high-precision map solutions to map-free driving across the country and from modular algorithms to end-to-end networks beyond rules, Huawei has been involved. Most of these evolutions were initiated by Huawei.

Many friends may only have heard that Huawei's intelligent driving system is powerful but don't know exactly how. Here, I'll give you a very intuitive example:

In most models with intelligent driving capabilities, the hardware is probably in a state of being made up of components from various manufacturers. The intelligent driving chip is from Company A, the lidar is from Company B, and the cameras and domain controllers are from other companies.

This will lead to a consequence. Due to different communication protocols, when signals are transmitted between these components, time errors will accumulate due to translation. From the perception of the environment to the final action of the car, the accumulated time delay may be several hundred milliseconds.

For high-level intelligent driving where accidents can occur in the blink of an eye, these seemingly small errors are actually very fatal.

To solve this problem, Huawei started researching self-developed intelligent driving hardware more than a decade ago and began pre-research on hardware such as lidar in 2016.

With a cumulative R & D investment of 20 billion yuan, Huawei has now become the only intelligent driving brand in China that can independently handle sensor, chip, algorithm R & D, and model training.

In models equipped with Huawei's intelligent driving solutions, both the hardware and software are developed by Huawei. This can not only significantly reduce the aforementioned communication delay but also make the algorithm iteration speed and the actual performance of intelligent driving functions more efficient and safer compared to competitors' solutions.

This is why Huawei's intelligent driving system alone can already be the biggest selling point of a car.

Looking back at Qijing now, you should understand the pressure it poses to its competitors.

In terms of technology, it has Huawei's top-notch capabilities. In terms of the system, it has GAC's decades of car manufacturing heritage and has far better control capabilities over quality control and after-sales service than other new players in the market.

This is actually quite close to people's understanding of a "safe car".

I wonder what you think of this brand that will launch a new car next year. For me, perhaps because I've heard too many exaggerated claims from new players in the market, when I heard Feng Xingya, the chairman of GAC, say that the reform of IPD is a long-term task and the Qijing brand needs to adopt a long-term approach, I felt that at least this brand has a calm and correct attitude towards car manufacturing and users.

In this intensifying new energy vehicle elimination race, I think this sense of stability is what people value more in an automobile enterprise than stronger configurations and lower prices.

It is said that the new car Qijing will launch next year will be a high-end smart new energy vehicle priced at around 300,000 yuan.

When the new car is launched, I think people will find that once a big ship turns around, it will sail forward