/PRZWT/SHENZHEN, May 22, 2024 - On May 16, 2024, the "ZERON POINT · 0:2024" press conference kicked off with a shock. With the official launch of its Taicang headquarters base, ZERON Auto officially announced to the world the strong rise of new forces in the field of new energy heavy trucks. The press conference lasted for two hours, but the amount of key technical information released in an intensive manner even exceeded that of large technology factories, which undoubtedly dropped an information bomb on the industry.
Founded by two industry giants - Huang Zehua, former Tucson Future co-founder and vice-president of engineering, and Zhang Hongsong, former vice-president of BAIC Foton Daimler and general manager of Sany Heavy Truck, the two are making a big move in the new energy heavy truck market at a deliberate pace.
From 1.0 to 2.0: A Three-Step Strategy for the Future
The strategic trilogy of OneAuto is clear and forward-looking.
The first step: enter the new energy vehicle market based on the 1.0 two platforms, realize the positive development of the core system, accumulate customers and data, and achieve market breakthroughs.
The second step is to fully develop the 2.0 platform, which is a brand-new heavy truck platform for new energy and an intelligent vehicle platform for autonomous driving, so as to achieve rapid market surpassing.
The third step: fully integrate autonomous driving and vehicle intelligence, commercialize road operations, and achieve absolute leadership in products.
Aiming at the blue ocean, short-term strategy shows wisdom
Facing the highly competitive heavy truck market, Zero One Auto took a unique approach and chose to enter the market from the huge short- and medium-distance transportation market. The market accounts for 70% of the heavy truck stock market, about 8 million units, and the matching degree with new energy electric heavy trucks is extremely high, which is strongly promoted by policies. This strategic positioning demonstrates Zero One Auto's keen insight and precise grasp of the needs of the local market. It is targeted and does not follow blindly.
Zero Action Smart Card Alliance was established
Zero Intelligent Transportation Alliance, ZITA. The full name is "Zeron Intelligent Transportation Alliance". It is an ecological alliance for intelligent heavy truck technology jointly promoted by Zero One Automobile, United Heavy Truck, and Sanhuan Automobile. It is committed to building an open heavy truck technology ecosystem and jointly promoting the progress and development of new energy intelligent technology.
In this alliance, Zero One will provide open vehicle technology, control technology, intelligent technology, testing and testing technology, and share supplier systems, quality control systems, and product standards. Through the "Zero Smart Card Alliance" jointly established with traditional car companies, Zero One shows an open and cooperative mind, sharing technology and resources with traditional manufacturing companies, maximizing each other's advantages, and jointly promoting the leap of new energy intelligent heavy truck technology, or bringing new ideas for the innovation of the heavy truck industry.
Jingzhe and Xiaoman, technology and innovation go hand in hand
The highlight of the press conference was the public debut of two heavy trucks of Zero Auto, "Jingzhe" and "Xiaoman". These two models are not only ingenious in design, but also combine a number of industry-first technologies. From the minimalist style of the design aesthetics, to the high-performance output of the Matrix Moment Intelligent Integrated Electric Drive System, to the energy-saving, lightweight design and advanced battery technology, each is the subversion and transcendence of the industry status quo by Zero Auto.
In particular, the Matrix Moment Stone intelligent integrated electric drive system, with its ultra-high integration and efficiency, has redefined the power standard of new energy heavy trucks. The Matrix Moment Stone intelligent integrated electric drive system is the first developed by Zero One, and it should also be the first casting three-stage, three-speed four-in-one electric drive system for heavy trucks to be delivered to customers in mass production. It is extremely simple, highly integrated, and has complete functions. It is 13% higher than the traditional central drive, with a dual-bridge output power of 1061 horsepower. It adopts AB-bridge combination, and the output peak power is 857 horsepower. The fastest acceleration of 0-80 kilometers is only 29 seconds, and the maximum climbing capacity is 30%.
Also worth mentioning is the commercial vehicle heat pump thermal management system first applied by Zero-One Automobile in the industry. The heat pump thermal management technology of the Zero-One 1.0 platform has a higher degree of integration, better reliability, lower failure rate, reduced the number of parts by 12%, and reduced the comprehensive energy consumption of vehicle thermal management by 15%. In winter, the battery insulation capacity is stronger, the battery life is longer, and the thermal management energy consumption in low temperature conditions is reduced by up to 28%. In terms of energy saving performance, Zero-One's innovative technology has achieved a significant reduction in vehicle energy consumption and operating costs, further enhancing market competitiveness.
"Chiko" system, vehicle data platform
In the field of intelligent driving, Zero One Auto has also shown its ambition and strength to lead the industry. The 1.0 platform has deeply integrated intelligent vehicle control technology, while the future-oriented 2.0 platform heralds a comprehensive leap in autonomous driving technology.
At the press conference, Huang Zehua shared the internal secret weapon "Zhizi System", which aims to be massive, real, transparent and efficient, and builds an intelligent ecosystem linking the car, cloud and user. By integrating diverse functional modules, it has brought unprecedented changes to vehicle management and Client Server.
The core competitiveness of Zhisub System lies in its extreme use of data. The number of vehicle signals monitored by the system exceeds 3,000, and each vehicle can generate a huge amount of data of 4.2TB during its life cycle. This data torrent provides Zero One Automobile with rich analysis materials and optimization space. Through deep mining of these data, Zhisub System not only realizes real-time monitoring and fault warning of vehicle status, but also provides more than 1,000 improvement directions based on real needs for product iteration, promoting continuous improvement of vehicle performance and service experience. More importantly, Zhisub System has reduced more than 50% of ineffective and inefficient processes within Zero One, doubling the overall company efficiency. This is also the secret behind Zero One, as a new force, in just two years, with an average team of less than 100 people, to create two mass-produced models.
Innovative iteration, water drop redundancy, wire-controlled chassis
Globally, the shortage of drivers is becoming increasingly serious, especially in China, which is expected to face a huge shortage of nearly 3 million drivers in 2030, which poses a huge challenge to the logistics and transportation industry. As an important production tool in economic activities, the unmanned transformation of commercial vehicles can not only effectively alleviate labor shortages, but also significantly reduce logistics costs and improve economic efficiency. Therefore, commercial vehicles have naturally become the preferred field for large-scale application of autonomous driving.
The development speed of the hardware system is far behind the iterative speed of the software system, and it has become the main contradiction restricting the implementation of autonomous driving. It is precisely because of this insight that Huang Zehua decided to return to China to start a business, hoping to design a really good car for autonomous driving to promote the large-scale popularization of autonomous driving.
To this end, Zero One Positive has designed a vehicle for "electronic drivers", that is, a vehicle platform that fully meets the needs of autonomous driving, and named it ": Water Drop Redundancy Wire-controlled Chassis System". The water drop system redefines the underlying standard of autonomous vehicles with its high reliability, full function, high performance, full redundancy and digitalization. The system not only significantly reduces control delay and improves execution accuracy, but also ensures that the vehicle can drive safely in any situation through full redundancy design. Coupled with an efficient fault detection mechanism and a significant reduction in system cost, the water drop system not only achieves a technological breakthrough, but also shows the potential for large-scale production in cost control, paving the way for the commercial application of Zero One vehicles in driverless heavy trucks.
Autonomous driving black technology, end-to-end shows extraordinary potential
At the end of the press conference, Huang Zehua, founder & CEO of Zero One Automobile, announced "One More Thing" to the guests and audience in a classic scene of paying tribute to the legendary Steve Jobs in the technology industry, which drew a perfect and surprising conclusion to the whole press conference. This "One More Thing" is not a lie, Huang Zehua shared his latest achievements in the field of autonomous driving. As the co-founder of the world's first autonomous driving IPO company, Huang Zehua has been mysterious about autonomous driving after returning to China to found Zero One. The black technology brought this time - a new autonomous driving system, all surprised the industry. The genius boy may be about to exert his strength.
The traditional autonomous driving system will be composed of nearly hundreds of different algorithm modules, and there is currently only one - the new autonomous driving system is an end-to-end autonomous driving system based on a large model. In short, from the initial sensor input to the final driving decision generation, the entire process is completed automatically by the model without any manual intervention or operation.
In the actual training process, Zero One's smart driving team found that the visual data had already made the model have a very strong generalization ability, and such a model was the same as the thinking process of humans. Humans can complete all the actions of driving through their own eyes and a smart brain. A new architecture model like Zero One only needs camera data and a large model to drive in the real world through repeated training. It does not rely on the lidar, high-precision positioning system, high-precision millimeter wave radar and high-precision map that are necessary for traditional architectures, which greatly reduces the deployment cost of the system.
This technology of Zero One Automobile has achieved the world's top performance in multiple academic and open data competitions, and has demonstrated its excellent scenario diversification ability, which is 1,000 times higher than the existing system, while reducing the system complexity by nearly 90%. This disruptive technology of Zero One not only heralds the dawn of autonomous driving technology leaping to L5 level, but also opens up infinite possibilities for future urban transportation, marking that Zero One Automobile has taken the lead in the new era of new energy and intelligent driving.
Conclusion:
The "ZERON POINT · Zero 2024" press conference of Zero One Auto is not only a starting point, but also a prelude to a new era in the new energy heavy truck industry. Jingzhe and Xiaoman, these two names full of meaning, seem to herald the upcoming spring of Zero One Auto in the field of new energy heavy trucks. In the days to come, the performance of Zero One Auto will undoubtedly be highly anticipated. Let's wait and see how it will ride the waves in the fierce market competition.
