Geely Debuts “Jiyue” Brand and Readies Automotive Robot Jiyue 01 Launch
Recently, Geely Holdings Group (hereinafter referred to as Geely) will officially launch the high-end intelligent automotive robot brand “Jiyue”. This is a significant development for Geely and Baidu since their “Automotive Robot Strategic Cooperation Project” in 2021.
Geely has become the production manufacturer for Jiyue, and the brand’s first model is named Jiyue 01, which may quickly enter mass production.
In terms of strategy, Jiyue and Jidu represent different stages of the “Automotive Robot Strategic Cooperation Project”. Jidu represents the first step in automotive robotics, focusing on refining and delivering intelligent product solutions to empower subsequent vehicle models. As automotive robot products mature and enter commercialization, Jiyue, Geely’s high-end intelligent automobile brand, emerged.
Jiyue will comprehensively coordinate the brand management, market layout, and other work related to automotive robots, while continuing the concept, products, and services of automotive robots. The product quality, safety standards, and service experience will remain unchanged.
In March 2021, Baidu and Geely joined forces to launch the “Automotive Robot Strategic Cooperation Project,” with Baidu taking the lead. Behind Baidu are two major shareholders: one is the “Whampoa Military Academy” of autonomous driving, and the other is a leading domestic car manufacturer with a mature vehicle production system and high sales volume.
An industry insider previously stated months ago, “The strategic cooperation between Geely and Baidu aims to achieve breakthrough development by creating a disruptive product, rather than the gradual development approach adopted by mainstream manufacturers. Therefore, two years ago, both parties joined hands to establish Jidu, focusing on the research and development of AI intelligent technology innovation solutions. These technological foundations are likely to propel the entire smart automotive industry forward.”
In the “arms race” of computing power in new energy vehicles, the Geely Jiyue 01 is the first domestically produced model to adopt the fourth-generation Snapdragon automotive digital cockpit platform – 8295. The AI computing power of Qualcomm’s 8295 chip is 30 TOPS, which is eight times that of the mainstream 8155 chip on the market. The computational capabilities of CPU, GPU, and other major computing units have increased by more than 50% compared to the 8155 chip. It can be said that it is currently the most powerful auto-grade chip and belongs to a product of “the next era”.
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From the perspective of the product concept, the Jiyue 01 defines a new concept for intelligent car development with advanced intelligent driving capabilities and highly interactive abilities – free mobility, natural communication, and self-growth.
Essentially, the realization of these three product concepts relies on AI capabilities. AI is the core driving force behind the advancement of Jiyue autonomous vehicles and robots. These vehicles and robots need to possess multimodal fusion human-machine interaction abilities, engaging in natural two-way communication with users. Among them, voice interaction is the most direct and natural way.
Technology companies crossing boundaries to empower the intelligent automobile industry has become a major trend. Among them, Huawei’s Smart Selection mode is relatively successful, adopting a collaborative research and development model to provide empowerment for whole vehicle intelligence solutions, deeply participating in product definition, styling design, marketing, user experience, and other aspects.
Huawei’s cooperation with Seres is a major benchmark for the Smart Selection mode. Taking the sales volume of AITO Wanjie in 2022 as an example, in the non-complete delivery year of 2022, the delivery volume of two models of AITO Wanjie exceeded 70,000 vehicles. In October 2022, AITO Wanjie set a record-high delivery of 12,018 vehicles, creating a new record for the fastest growth of intelligent electric vehicle brands on the race track.
Similar to Huawei’s Smart Selection mode, Jidu particularly emphasizes the empowerment of advanced intelligent technologies, with some trade-offs in terms of the level of involvement and depth in the entire vehicle. Based on Geely’s existing leading SEA architecture, Jidu focuses more on productizing and engineering Baidu‘s comprehensive open AI capabilities. For example, it has developed intelligent architectures such as JET for seamless integration across domains, advanced intelligent driving with multi-domain integration, millisecond-level fully offline voice recognition, and pioneering full localization of AI algorithms.
Jidu continues to focus on the definition of intelligent automotive products and AI technology innovation, creating a comprehensive solution for advanced vehicle intelligence.
In this new strategic adjustment, Geely, Baidu, Jiyue, and Jidu in the “Automotive Robot Strategic Cooperation Project” can maximize their respective resource advantages to better promote the large-scale marketization and popularization of automotive robots.
Now, the birth of the high-end intelligent automotive robot brand ‘Jiyue’ signifies that automotive robots have taken a step closer to being delivered to the market. The price of the mass-produced Jiyue 01 has become a suspense.
Pricing is crucial. Taking NIO as an example, on May 11th, NIO did not announce the pricing for a long time. Eventually, they pushed a message on their official app seeking opinions on the pricing of the new ES6 model from users. The final answer will be revealed when the Jiyue 01 model is launched.
Overall, the launch of the Jiyue brand and the Jiyue 01 model marks a significant moment toward successful mass production and delivery. The strategic cooperation between Geely and Baidu in car robotics is now filled with more certainty.