The news that "the supply of chips was cut off, 15 automobile factory stopped production, and the price of chips in China rose by 30%" came out, and the problem of "lack of chips" in the automobile industry once again came to the center of public opinion.
When it comes to chip shortage, many people will inevitably think of Huawei. A paper ban by the US government has made Huawei Mate 40 series mobile phones the swan song of Kirin chips. The shortage of chips led to the price increase of thousand yuan mobile phones. Let's go back to the automobile industry. Chip supply is mainly concentrated in the body control system (ESP, ECU and other chips), which directly leads to the failure of the driving computer and the lag of vehicle production.
However, unlike Huawei's mobile phone being strangled by the US government, the lack of auto chips this time is not due to the chip blockade, but the demand for domestic auto chips has greatly exceeded expectations, and some auto companies have insufficient pre-judgment on the market, making some production capacity shift to electronic products. And so far, only NVIDIA, Mobileye and Tesla can realize mass production of self-driving chips, and the import rate of automobile chips exceeds 90%, so domestic manufacturers are always passive in the future development of automobile intelligence.
In the short term, this chip outage may have an impact on the delivery of new cars. Fortunately, this chip outage hardly involves intelligence and autonomous driving, so the impact is very limited in the long run. Nevertheless, this chip crisis has once again sounded the alarm of "independent research and development of chips" for the domestic automobile industry.
Under the background of the new four modernizations of automobiles, automobiles have changed from "hardware-oriented" to "software-defined". With the advent of the electrification era, in recent years, the demand for chips in the automobile industry has greatly increased, even approaching the volume of the electronic product industry. There is no doubt that in the future, whether it is vehicle intelligence or autonomous driving, chips will play an increasingly critical role.
Tesla is a good example on the road of self-developed chips. Today, Tesla has become the world's largest car company by market value, and its strong chip self-research and software development capabilities have contributed. From Musk's decision to develop his own chip to the launch and mass production of HW3.0 chip, Tesla once again leads the industry in chip cost and autonomous driving.
There is no doubt about the advantages of self-developed chips for a car company, but unlike many traditional industries, chips, as a highly integrated and sophisticated industry, have many steps from raw materials to chip manufacturing, and many problems such as algorithm iteration are involved in the later stage. Therefore, on the road of self-developed chips, besides spending huge R&D expenses, we have to invest a lot of manpower and material resources. If we are not careful, we may fall short. This kind of risk is not affordable for every car company.
Nevertheless, independent research and development of chips is still the only way for future automobile development, and automobile chips have been paid more and more attention. In September last year, China Automotive Chip Industry Innovation Strategic Alliance was established, and Weilai assembled professionals from chip and other related industries to develop autonomous driving chips, and then Lingxin 0 1, the first all-domestic automotive ai intelligent driving chip with completely independent intellectual property rights, was officially released. In addition, traditional car companies such as Geely and BYD have also moved towards the track of self-developed chips.
From the perspective of automobile life, the interruption of the supply of on-board control chips is a short-term crisis in the automobile industry on the surface, but it is actually an excellent opportunity to appeal to domestic automobile manufacturers to develop their own chips. However, this is by no means that all OEMs are eager to develop their own chips. After all, most automobile manufacturers are facing huge market pressure at this stage. If we venture to develop chips again, we will suffer great damage if we are not careful.
For most car companies, first of all, they should have the risk awareness of "walking with one leg", and then slowly learn relevant experience in the process of cooperation with suppliers, and gradually change into a situation of "walking with two legs" in self-research and procurement, and gradually increase the proportion of self-developed chips in the future, and truly master the core technology in their own hands. It can be predicted that with the development of autonomous driving technology, chips will no longer be exclusive to suppliers. If domestic car companies want to win more voice, they must join the blue ocean of self-developed chips.