From knock-off old-man's electric vehicles to industrial giant

Chapter 184 Mr. Xu, you're too straightforward!

As soon as these words came out.

Xu Yi was slightly taken aback.

In the field of car manufacturing, Xingchen has rarely encountered situations where its purchases have been rejected.

However, upon closer examination, it's actually understandable when you think about things like lidar.

After all, Xingchen is no longer just pursuing car manufacturing; it wants to truly start working with the world's leading technology companies in the same field of cutting-edge technology and compete on the same stage.

In areas like autonomous driving.

Whether it's hardware, chips, or talent, every aspect is very difficult to manage.

Domestic lidar technology is only in its early stages, having only been around for a few years.

The hardware is all newly developed.

How much production capacity can we expect?
-

Despite the fact that Xingchen Automotive is a large company.

Hesai Technology also has several large, regular clients.

This includes the procurement of autonomous driving test vehicles by traditional automakers such as Baidu Apollo, NIO, XPeng, Changan, and Geely.

Baidu Apollo has the largest order volume, with as many as 60 to 70 driverless cars currently running data in various cities.

The usage of the other companies was not large.

The remaining order volume has been almost completely distributed.

Li Yifan said that the production capacity of a few dozen units that could be squeezed out was all thanks to Xingchen Motors' efforts to expand production after learning of Xingchen Motors' intentions, and that this was squeezed out in the following two quarters.

In their view, they had already shown "full sincerity".

"The production volume won't be delivered until next quarter?"

Xu Yi clearly could not accept this outcome.

He thought for a moment and then asked, "So, who did your company allocate all its production capacity for this quarter?"

Li Yifan sincerely stated, "The orders for the first two quarters were all supplied to the Baidu Apollo team, who are also our long-term clients."

The customers of domestic lidar companies mainly come from the test vehicles of technology companies.

Before Xingchen arrived, the two sides had already established a long-term supply relationship.

After all, production capacity is not large, and orders can be fulfilled quickly by taking advantage of low costs.

Xu Yi wasn't surprised to hear that Baidu had snatched his order.

After all, there haven't been many autonomous vehicles operating in China in the past two years.

But given this company's track record, they always get up early only to arrive late, making it a waste of industry resources to hold onto this order.

You should know that even if you order a 40-60 line lidar from overseas, you can't get it immediately.

Currently, there are only a handful of such companies worldwide, and their production capacity is very limited. Their orders are all supplied to high-tech companies.

Xu Yi asked, "Have you signed supply contracts for your orders from the first two quarters?"

Li Yifan hesitated for a moment: "Although not yet, but..."

"So, I'm planning to invest 100 million yuan first?"

"what?"

-

This sudden turn of events.

The people in charge at Hesai Technology were truly stumped, and they were momentarily stunned!
Xu Yi chuckled and rephrased, "What I mean is, is your company short of funding? I see that you seem to be facing some financial constraints in terms of R&D and production line expansion?"

“We are a bit lacking in R&D, but Mr. Xu, you…” Li Yifan was speechless.

“That’s settled then. We at Starry Sky have always been keen on supporting the supply chain,” Xu Yi decided.

"Mr. Xu, you're too straightforward!"

...

After a moment of hesitation, Li Yifan quickly made the choice that best suited his heart!

Hold Xu Yi's warm hand firmly!
One hundred million!

Ok.

—This transition was a bit abrupt.

But it hit the bullseye perfectly.

Hesai Technology is currently in a very awkward situation.

Orders are plentiful, but research and development funds and funds for capacity expansion are severely lacking.

After all, with this production volume, even if all of it were sold, it would be completely impossible to support the subsequent research and development of a high-precision hardware company.

Therefore, they are actually trying to prepare for Series B financing internally.

Hesai Technology's first round of financing was not large, and its original focus was on advancing laser gas telemetry business, which was not favored by investors.

It wasn't until the past two years, when they transformed and produced domestically made lidar, that they gradually started to get orders and attracted the interest of some investors.

But let's be honest.

No company has yet produced any results in autonomous driving. As a hardware component for autonomous driving, the future prospects of LiDAR are also quite bleak.

Not to mention that no one dares to invest, big capital certainly isn't optimistic about it.

Li Yifan is currently only somewhat confident about two institutions.

One of them is Mi Qun, a partner at Lightspeed China Partners. They met at the beginning of their business and he is optimistic about the future of LiDAR.

Another one is Baidu Capital.

They have the largest domestic procurement volume of lidar.

Naturally, Baidu's supply orders were placed first.

But now.

But suddenly, Star Cars appeared out of nowhere.

The eyes of the Mr. Xu in front of them were clearer, but his sense of purpose was so strong that it made them a little at a loss!

“Actually, I am quite optimistic about the development of domestic LiDAR. Xingchen will continue to expand in the direction of autonomous driving in the future, and the LiDAR hardware for early testing is very crucial for us... Can you give us Xingchen the LiDAR order from Baidu on Hesai in advance?”

Xu Yi's goal was simple: to intercept Baidu's LiDAR business and, incidentally, acquire Hesai Technology, a highly promising future leader in the LiDAR industry.

There are very few companies in China that are truly dedicated to hardware research and development.

Not to mention cutting-edge hardware like lidar.

Li Yifan exchanged glances with co-founders Xiang Shaoqing and Sun Kai.

"Of course, if the funding issue can be resolved, Hesai's lidar can be prioritized for supply to shareholders!"
Actually, the situation at Baidu is a bit complicated; their self-driving car project may be put on hold in the short term.

Li Yifan said affirmatively.

In short, they completely forgot about Baidu, with whom they had been cooperating for over a year.

But we can't blame them for that.

After the announcement of the mass production of the Pandar40 40-line LiDAR, there were changes in Baidu's autonomous driving business unit.

It is said that an internal restructuring is underway.

The original Apollo team was forcibly split into two parts, with the primary focus being securing orders from automakers and generating profits through the sale of high-precision maps and cloud computing.

This led to the departure of members and leaders of the original core team.

Therefore, the order contract for this batch of lidar was put on hold.

As for financing plans, it's likely that they won't be able to begin until after this round of internal changes at Baidu, when the strategic importance of intelligent driving is redefined.

按照禾赛科技当前的年营收约3000-5000万元，A轮的估值已从2亿元上涨至3-4亿元，星辰科技投资一亿可轻松占据20%股份。

With this funding, expanding production capacity is secondary; their subsequent research and development plans will be greatly guaranteed.

……

Xu Yi laughed when he heard this.

Even without being told in detail, he could guess what was going on with Baidu.

Ultimately, it's the inherent flaws of Robin Li and the core group at Baidu that have plagued them from the very beginning.

Too much emphasis is placed on short-term gains.

I always get up really early, but I always miss the market.

The autonomous driving algorithms and hardware solutions are not yet mature, and the safety has not been fully verified, yet they are rushing to make a profit.

What's the difference between this and pulling up crops before they're even ripe and selling them?
"It's not just about the initial LiDAR. Once the costs of subsequent R&D and mass production decrease and become acceptable for high-end models, Xingchen Automotive can still provide stable order procurement to verify autonomous driving algorithms from the high-end to the low-end."

Xu Yi offered another reassurance.

This time, it's a true stabilizing force.

Based on the current procurement of high-tech driverless cars, less than three thousand can be produced per year.

What Xingchen Automotive can offer is a longer-term bundle of mass production orders.

As long as the cost of domestically produced LiDAR can be reduced to around 10,000 yuan, then vehicle installation can officially begin.

This is something that no other investment institution can match.

Upon hearing this, Li Yifan and the others were even more shocked.

"Yes, production capacity is only one factor restricting the development of LiDAR. We believe that mechanical LiDAR is still not very stable, and its parts are expensive and have a limited lifespan..."

We are currently experimenting with using semiconductor technology to manufacture galvanometers to replace large motors and rotating components. This would significantly reduce the mass production cost of mechanical LiDAR and enable the creation of higher-performance semi-solid-state LiDAR.

Li Yifan immediately outlined their next research and development goals.

They had been planning this research and development route for a long time.

With sufficient funding, it's not impossible to produce a sample within a year.

“Well, the vertical angular resolution and point cloud density of a 40-line LiDAR are limited after all. If a single LiDAR can achieve a performance of more than 128 lines, it will be more accurate in complex scenes and sparse point cloud areas, and will have a greater grasp of intelligent driving scenarios in urban areas…” Wu Xinzhou said.

The current problems with lidar are not just its high cost.

In fact, it also has obvious shortcomings in performance, and its future is uncertain.

For pedestrians and objects more than 100 meters away, the point cloud data returned by the 32-line lidar is quite sparse.

Small targets at close range are easily excluded by noisy algorithms, and the low angular resolution often leads to misidentification of adjacent small targets.

"This is also the direction we are working towards. However, Baidu has also purchased a batch of 64-line LiDARs from Velodyne, but in the Apollo solution, it has not achieved a breakthrough effect compared to 32-line LiDARs," Li Yifan added.

“The massive point cloud data places high demands on computing power. Even if the point cloud is sparsed and then projected to build a map, fusing camera and millimeter-wave multimodal perception is still a major challenge and requires more computing resources. Moreover, non-data layer fusion filters too much information... Apollo cannot yet solve the dimensional differences of loose fusion, let alone deal with complex urban scenarios.”

Wu Xinzhou shook his head slightly.

The current system on driverless cars can be described in an abstract way.

It refers to "limbs" and "brain".

If we compare algorithms to the brain and computing power to brain capacity, then cameras, millimeter-wave radar, and lidar are like limbs and eyes.

The current situation is that the brain functions very slowly and has a huge congenital defect.

Its brain capacity is as small as a walnut.

The information transmitted by the eyes and limbs is fragmented and disorganized, requiring filtering and discarding of most of it before it is processed in the brain.

If there is to be improvement, it should be an overall improvement.

Only through multifaceted development can one cultivate a complete and well-rounded individual.

"By the way, are you familiar with both of these core teams at Baidu's Intelligent Driving division?"

LiDAR is one aspect.

Xu Yi quickly understood the meaning behind Li Yifan's previous sentence.

He was referring to the previous batch of people who left the Apollo team, and the current batch of people who are still on the job.

I feel a little itchy inside.

Xingchen Automotive's intelligent driving team has just been established and is still lacking a large number of core elites.

Baidu, as the "Whampoa Military Academy" of China's intelligent driving industry, is undoubtedly highly prestigious. They recruited talents from Silicon Valley and Google with great effort, and even established a "Young Marshal Plan" for this purpose.

Calling them elites is an understatement; many of them became leaders in other new energy vehicle companies in later generations.

This is your chance!

……

(End of this chapter)