Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This year, opportunities and obstacles have become particularly clear| Variable 2022

"Choose your own path. "Every second of the R & D department of automobile enterprises is facing the same problem. In 2022, there is nothing new about automotive technology; in 2022, there is nothing new about the world.

As the new energy revolution progresses this year, opportunities and obstacles become particularly obvious.

In the pure electric world, energy density and charging speed almost step on the critical line of diminishing marginal utility. The way out seems to be beyond electrochemical technology, with more complete integration of the body and battery on one side and more complete separation of the battery on the other.

Hybrid is also expected, more multi-faceted DHT hybrid continues to shine, more integrated extended range is also expanding the camp. The only certainty is that markets trust individuals, not categories. Success is always concrete success, failure is just concrete failure.

One Body Die Casting: When Factory Press Ctrl+V

In April, Tesla's Texas plant opened for the first time with a carefully designed "complete body"Model Y decomposition model: 4680 batteries, CTC battery packs and front/rear body panels molded in one piece. For one-piece die casting, see "Your Model Y, Being" Pressed "Late last year.

Domestic new car brands have been on board, Wei Lai as early as ET5 in the rear cabin floor adopted large size die-casting parts. At the end of the year, the new generation ES8 added a large integral cast front torsion box to the left and right on a similar basis.

In cooperation with Topp Group, Chinese Express/Gaohe won the first integrated die-casting part based on 7200 tons giant die-casting machine in China for the new car HiPhi Z delivered this year. Gaohe is not alone. At the end of the year, MPV Krypton 009 uses the 7200-ton die-casting machine of Lijin Group to create the world's largest integrated die-casting rear body part.

Overseas car companies also did not watch, Mercedes-Benz released the concept car EQXX at the beginning of the year, equipped with a bionic design called BIONEQXX integrated cast aluminum rear body. Volvo announced a 7 billion yuan electric vehicle factory, which also includes 8000 tons of die-casting machines.

Car companies have launched integrated die-casting technology, giant die-casting machine in 2022 became a hot potato. Wencan shares, a representative stock, rose from about 30 yuan/share in April to nearly 100 yuan/share in four months."Integrated die-casting" also became a new concept plate within the year.

One body die-casting has a promising future, but it is not unimpeded. In February of the beginning of the year, a news item titled "280,000 Tesla hits 200,000 maintenance costs" appeared on Weibo. A "Su B" license plate Model Y is only reversed into the corner, but hit a sky-high price.

People began to examine whether large, one-piece die-cast parts would adversely affect maintainability and even insurance costs. But the trend towards one-piece casting is hard to reverse, and Tesla has made several fine-tuning of cast parts, including considerations for ease of repair for minor accidents.

One body die-casting is already a highly deterministic trend, but whether one body die-casting will continue to expand its application scale indefinitely, or even become the ultimate solution for future automobile production, is actually no longer so certain. ("The End of the World in Automobile Manufacturing Is Integrated Die Casting?")

BMW has said it will not follow suit, and its bottom line is that applications based on die-casting processes, but not integrated super-large parts, are very mature. Although aggregation and integration are easily regarded as the right way, this one-way absolute advantage may only be a phased concrete manifestation.

In the end, the world will care only about cost-effectiveness, not whether it looks like there is enough Occam.

CTC Battery: Thor's Power, infused into the soul

Strictly speaking, only the pure electric vehicle with Cell-to-Chassis (CTC) structure is the real "battery" into a part of the body, which is regarded as the real "original electric vehicle."

CTC applications are still Tesla belt head, Texas factory production of Model Y using CTC structure 4680 battery. According to Tesla, the weight has been reduced by 10% and the endurance has been increased by 14%, but note that this is the result of the combination of integrated die-casting, 4680 and CTC.

The CTC structure of the Texas Model Y is simple and crude: Tesla "pulls out" the floor structure at the bottom of the car body, directly "mounts" the seat on the top cover of the battery pack, and then connects it to the "bottomless" body after the battery pack is formed.

There was soon a follower in the country, but this follower was not an "imitator." ZeroRun came up with its own CTC technology only half a month later, but in a very different way from Tesla's CTC. (Tesla Apprentice, Learning to Run)

Zero running is to regard the body as a whole, while the battery pack is a "lidless" structure. The battery pack is sealed by the body floor as the upper cover until it is connected with the body. In the previous definition of Academician Ou Yangming Gao, this method is also called "CTV (vehicle)."

CTC is further known as BYD Seal's so-called CTB (body) technology. In addition to the difference in the name, BYD CTB is closer to Tesla's CTC method, but CTB still retains part of the transverse and longitudinal beam stress structure in the body part, unlike Tesla's underbody is a complete transparent hole.

Whatever CTC they are, they fulfill the "no battery, no car." From then on, batteries, like the reactors in Iron Man 1, were embedded in the bodies of these electric vehicles in an indispensable manner.

As an integrated technology-battery integrated in the limit state of the vehicle, CTC eliminates the structural duplication of the battery pack and the body floor, thereby reducing the overall height of the battery pack, increasing the space inside the vehicle and the battery pack, reducing the structural weight, and increasing the contribution of the battery pack to the body stiffness.

But CTC, accordingly, faces the eternal conundrum of integration technology, maintainability. According to overseas media analysis of Tesla CTC battery pack, maintenance CTC battery pack requires 143 disassembly steps, 171 installation steps, a total of 314 steps, which is only disassembly and assembly.

Tesla and BYD CTB need to remove a series of cabin components such as seats once they need to remove the battery pack. The zero-run CTC doesn't even have something to call a "battery pack," and once the battery bottom cover is removed, it exposes the battery cells and may face more cumbersome after-sales problems.

Such a high degree of integration of CTC may or may not be the inevitable result of the development of electric vehicles. EV companies and cell suppliers need to demonstrate that they have the ability to convince users of battery structures that are almost no longer replaceable (or extremely cumbersome to replace), or that CTC can give vehicles some obvious comparative advantage.

Series Hybrid: The Simplest and Most Complex It is difficult to say whether incremental programming inspired serial-parallel DHT or serial-parallel DHT spawned incremental programming. In 2022, there are still people fighting for "who is more advanced," while the Zengcheng and DHT brothers are on the side, eating French fries and hugging their waists ("How does" Zengcheng "become a savior").

Since we say series hybrid, it includes both pure series incremental hybrid and series-parallel DHT hybrid. It includes both PHEV derived from the two and HEV derived from the two. This is a "series hybrid" coalition attack on pure fuel vehicles.

Serial-parallel DHT is already an old friend. BYD DM-i will be fully fired in 2022. All major independent automobile enterprises have come to an end. Wuling has launched its own DHT hybrid, lowering the SUV threshold of DHT HEV to just over 100,000 yuan.

There are a lot of new players in the extension process, the ideal gradually blossomed, and the questioning world became a force reinforcement. There are traditional independent new brands such as Lantu and Deep Blue, pure electric players such as Zero Run and Nezha joined midway, and Nissan e-POWER entered China to open up the extended HEV market. Of course, there are also self-tour home such a finish not victory.

Series-parallel DHT and series-extended range are still the classic "simple system vs complex system" debate. DHT provides a more open possibility, which can operate in series extended range mode, or can be connected to direct drive or even parallel on demand; extended range is nothing more than "closing" the direct drive path, providing only one option of series extended range.

DHT may seem superior at first glance, but simple systems have simple benefits. The add-on doesn't have to be based on the predecessor. The Deep Blue SL03 is a rear drive with a pre-range extender; it's much easier to explain the add-on than DHT to consumers who are scratching their heads.

More crucially, the theoretical disadvantage of extended range high-speed cruise conditions is precisely the weight that is getting lower and lower for most consumers today. Today, people use more cars than three or five kilometers of lazy people, in addition to clear their frequent intercity commuting crowd, the theoretical weaknesses of the program almost only stay in theory.

However, there are other considerations from a business perspective, and car companies rely more on butt decisions. Traditional automobile enterprises, based on mature supply chain and maintenance system, will naturally tend to "add a little" DHT; new brands, a blank paper, there is no possibility of direct drive. More realistically, extended range is often easier to use large batteries and then shout high prices.

Change electricity again: not to do magic medicine, still a wonderful prescription Since Wei Lai made a big bet on changing electricity many years ago, there has finally been a second wave of influential electricity change tide. Ningde Times released a unique EVOGO"chocolate" modular power exchange system, SAIC Feifan and Geely Ruilan have entered the power exchange this year.

The battery replacement mode represented by Weilai always has a limitation, that is, it is difficult to accommodate different physical specifications of battery packs in the same battery replacement system, which even causes the "upside down" of Weilai product line to a large extent, that is, the high-end model of the same battery pack has less battery life than the entry-level model.

Weilai is still so, Ningde era as a battery supplier, even need to deal with different brands of different models. Therefore, EVOGO adopts ingenious "chocolate" modularization, and the vehicle can freely choose to carry 1-3 modules, and even choose whether to replace a certain module when changing electricity.

This high degree of freedom allows EVOGO to achieve greater compatibility. EVOGO models can be selected in different body sizes, but the number of battery modules is different. The vehicle is also more free in use, for example, only one fully charged module is left in the power station, and only one module can be replaced.

However, opening up the high degree of freedom of combination will inevitably face the problems that flexible systems always face. EVOGO divides the battery pack into three (up to three) modules, so that each module can be replaced with each other, although the module is small, it must be complete. If water cooling is used, multiple external interfaces will have to be added, while adopting air cooling will greatly reduce the performance ceiling.

Modular power exchange is a clever innovation and qualitative change for a certain type of electric vehicle, but as a special product of "charge-exchange"/"integration-open" coordinate system towards the right end limit, it is also destined not to cover the whole field, such as "when there is no wind, everything will look like a tuyere."

2022 is not a good year for advanced automotive technology that is still outside the application stage. The sudden rise in funding barriers, the loss of belief in growth stories, the unprecedented importance of cash flow, and everything that has happened to autonomous driving illustrate the problem.

However, the most important automotive technologies are always indisputable, solid-state batteries, sodium-ion batteries, lithium metal batteries, all-solid-state laser radar... These long-dormant new technologies are still waiting for reality.

This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: autoweekly (ID: autoweekly) Author: Hu Ao

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