On April 8, at the spring new product launch conference held by Huawei, Huawei also announced details about its Huawei HiCar business. According to Tencent News, the models supporting Huawei HiCar have been basically confirmed, and have entered the final commissioning stage, which is expected to be launched on the market this year.(refer to Huawei aims big with its ambitious HiCar Project)
It is understood that at the official press conference of Huawei P40 series models, Huawei consumer business CEO Yu Chengdong demonstrated the HiCar solution on the spot, connecting mobile phones with the car to share multimedia, using mobile phones as a car key, and even using a mobile phone to connect in-car lenses.
At the same time, with the support of the AI capabilities of Huawei’s mobile phones, the operators also showed more advanced functions, which can monitor whether the driver is fatigued and drive in real-time, and provide safety reminders.
In short, Huawei HiCar realizes the interconnection of mobile phones and car infotainment system, not the car operating system, but the mapping scheme of cars and smartphones. For a simple understanding, HiCar is a smartphone-to-vehicle mobile phone interconnection solution, similar to Apple CarPlay and Baidu CarLife in China.
As early as 2014, Apple and Google have released the mapping solution for car-to-mobilephone, CarPlay and Android Auto. At that time, their purpose was simple, to bring the advantages of the mobile Internet era into the car.
At the press conference yesterday, Huawei showed the real-machine operation screen of HiCar, the mobility solution, for the first time. It can be seen in the actual machine operation screen of HiCar this time that it is able to call the camera in the car to link with the mobile phone to perform video calls and other operations.
In the screen, the operator also showed some more advanced functions, such as fatigue driving safety tips, etc., and said that HiCar currently supports more commonly used apps in the car’s vehicle engine system. In addition, Huawei said that HiCar can use the 5G network capabilities of mobile devices to enhance the data interaction capabilities of the vehicle-machine system.
What HiCar realizes is the interconnection between mobile phone and vehicle, which can establish a channel between mobile phone and vehicle, extend the applications and services of mobile phone to the car, and realize the complete interconnection between car and mobile phone and other IoT devices.
Regarding the future development status of HiCar, Yu Chengdong said in an interview with the media on April 9 that many automotive products, including China and foreign auto brands, will integrate Huawei ’s HiCar solution to realize the interconnection between mobile phones and car screens and cameras in the future.
In 2015, Huawei began to emerge in the field of in-car systems. At that time, it achieved public cooperation, especially the application of the open standard MirrorLink, and it is a in-car system that the industry believes can compete with Apple CarPlay. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of mobile phone models at that time, and most car companies chose CarPlay and CarLife to adapt, Huawei missed the development period.
Based on the previous “failure” experience and years of accumulation in communication modules and 5G technology, Huawei began to exert efforts in the automotive industry again in 2019. In May 2019, there were media reports that Huawei broke out some recruitment information on certain recruitment software. The positions revolved around electric vehicles and new energy vehicles, including vehicle thermal management system engineers, control system product managers, and motor system design experts Wait.
The above-mentioned job positions are basically the core technical positions of electric vehicles, such as thermal management and vehicle control. These two should be regarded as two important and difficult product projects in the development process of electric vehicle manufacturing.
In May 2019, it officially established the BU (BUSINESS UNIT), a smart car solution, and organized its business into five major segments: smart electric, smart car cloud, smart cockpit, smart network connection, and smart driving. According to reports, this department is Huawei’s first-level department, its positioning is to provide ICT components and solutions for smart cars, to help companies build cars, rather than build their own cars.
In August 2019, Huawei released the HUAWEI HiCar Ecological White Paper. HiCar is the human-vehicle-home smart interconnection solution launched by Huawei, which enables mobile phones, automobiles, and more smart devices to have the ability to interconnect.
According to the introduction of the white paper, HiCar can achieve deeper integration with vehicles. Not only AI voice interaction, face recognition, but also automatic driving and the ecological integration of human-vehicle-home. HiCar can also use the 5G network capabilities of mobile devices to enhance the data interaction capabilities of the vehicle in-car system.
It is worth mentioning that Huawei HiCar is another distributed potential after the Harmony OS. HiCar leverages on the distributed technical capabilities that Huawei upholds. After the mobile phone and the vehicle are interconnected through a distributed bus, a “super terminal” will be formed, allowing the mobile phone and vehicle to call each other’s hardware capabilities, thereby achieving seamless connection and user experience.
It is reported that HiCar was born specifically for the next generation of vehicle in-car interconnection. Huawei defines it as vehicle in-car interconnection 2.0, which not only establishes a channel for mobile phones and car interconnections but also extends the application and services of mobile phones to automobiles. Interconnected with mobile phones and other IoT devices. In contrast, the interconnection of traditional mobile phones and vehicle mainly implements the screen projection function, which is interconnection 1.0.
According to media reports, Huawei HiCar ecological partners have more than 30 car manufacturers, including Audi, FAW, GAC, BAIC, Chery, JAC and other car companies have joined, more than 120 models.
Read Also: Surpass Apple? Huawei HiCar In-Car System to officially launch in 2020
Why does car manufacturers choose HiCar for adaptation?
The global outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic, the global auto industry’s shutdown and production, and the shrinking supply and demand of auto parts have given Huawei an opportunity to enter the auto industry at a low cost.
Japan, one of the world’s three largest auto-producing countries, including Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Mazda, Suzuki, Subaru, Mitsubishi and Daihatsu have all announced that they will suspend domestic car production in Japan.
The three major German automakers Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW have also announced the suspension of production in Europe. Lamborghini, Rolls-Royce, Porsche, Bentley and other car manufacturers in Europe announced the suspension of production.
In addition, General Motors, Fiat Chrysler and Ford, the three largest automakers in the United States, decided on March 18 to accept the request of the Union of Auto Workers to temporarily close their plants in North America.
Under the impact of the epidemic, Huawei HiCar plan gave the car industry in trouble a new option. Moreover, with the development of edge computing and cloud computing, the development of vehicle computing power and ecological integration, only a set of independent OS can bear the demand for intelligent development of vehicles and the application of new technologies.
Therefore, Huawei’s bigger goal is not just the car system, but the operating system. With the implementation of the vehicle engine system, it can be seen that the importance of automobile-related business to Huawei is self-evident. Huawei ’s chairman Xu Zhijun once compared it with the mobile phone business: “Maybe ten years later in the automotive industry, Huawei is very powerful, like the current mobile phone industry. “
