The Revolution of New Energy Vehicle Architecture Integration and Future Trends

Wang Chuanfu once said: 'The first half of the new energy vehicle is electrification, and the second half is intelligence.'

In the first half of electrification, it can be divided into two logical branches. The first branch is the replacement of the fuel-powered three major parts by the three-electric system, and the second branch is the great change in the vehicle architecture.

People are often familiar with the former, but very strange to the latter.

What is the great change in the vehicle architecture?

We all know that a fuel car must install a huge engine, and the engine is connected to core components such as the transmission with a mechanical transmission shaft. The three major parts of the fuel car determine the basic layout of the car chassis, and other parts can only be laid out on this basic architecture. In other words, the innovation space of the fuel car's whole vehicle architecture is not large.

But a pure electric vehicle is completely different. It cancels the three major parts of the fuel car and is replaced by the motor, battery and electric control. Since most of the batteries are in a form similar to a flat plate, this gives great innovation space to the whole vehicle design of the electric vehicle.

For example, since there is no engine in the electric vehicle, this leads to that the front cover of the electric vehicle can add an additional crash beam.

The most typical example is that in the SUV of the fuel vehicle era, many car buyers think that the SUV has too poor handling, is not as good as the off-road vehicle when driving in the muddy ground, the price is too high, the trunk insulation is not good, etc., and even throws out statements such as SUV is not as good as a station wagon and a hatchback two-box sedan.

But today, the motor has solved the problem of the engine and transmission occupying the space in the front compartment, and the headroom has become larger due to the thicker chassis caused by the battery. In addition, the acceleration of the three-electric system doesn't have to worry about additionally. So, the pure electric SUV has become a category with high price and quantity favored by consumers.

A major change of the electric vehicle compared to the fuel vehicle is that it replaces various exhaust pipes and transmission shafts with wires, and these wires can be integrated through reasonable layout design, just like an integrated circuit board.

The most typical example is the 48V platform architecture brought by Tesla Cybertruck. Tesla uses the dataCAN bus to run gigabit Ethernet cabling, which connects all wires to the same cable, connects more powerful computing chips, and fewer MCU units, which reduces the total cabling by 77% and reduces the copper usage by half.

Compared to the 12V electrical architecture that has been used for more than 70 years, the 48V wiring and components are smaller, lighter, more integrated, and more adaptable to the increasingly complex on-board electrical parts and software systems to meet the higher power demand. This promotes the development of autonomous driving.

It can be seen that there are two inevitable trends in the great change of the whole vehicle architecture, that is, integration and integration.

T he so-called integration is to make the various parts of the whole vehicle become a whole. Its greatest advantage is to reduce the complexity of the supply chain and reduce the cost. The most typical example is the integrated die-casting.

The so-called integration is essentially the law that cannot be bypassed in analyzing the development process of consumer electronics - Moore's Law.

Electric vehicles and consumer electronics have the same wonderful effect. In the cost of the whole vehicle, the three-electric system and automotive electronics account for more than 60%, and both of them have extremely strong pan-Moore's Law characteristics. Among them, the cost performance of the battery will be rapidly iterated through the application of new materials and new technologies, and the automotive electronics, which accounts for the second largest proportion of these electronic components, itself follows Moore's Law.

Therefore, the cost of the electric vehicle has formed an interesting 'twin cost curve': the whole vehicle cost curve is almost the same as the battery cost reduction curve, and like a smart phone, it can achieve non-linear reduction.

Specifically, the trend of various electronic parts is more and more concentrated and more like a chip.

From the perspective of industrial development, the development space of integration is much larger than that of integration. The most typical example is that the computer in the 1950s was very huge and needed an entire building to hold it, but today's computer, that is, the mobile phone that you and I use every day, can be taken away even in the pocket.

So, from the perspective of the industrial endgame, in the future, the electrical and electronic architecture of the electric vehicle will inevitably evolve in the direction of integration, concentration and integration. An example that reflects this trend is the CTC chassis - the concept of the skateboard chassis structure proposed by Leapmotor in 2022.

After understanding the trends of integration and integration, let's look at the battery again. The author believes that the development of the battery will also definitely follow the general trend of integration and integration. In the future, with the mass production of solid-state batteries and the improvement of energy storage technology, the capacity and volume of the battery will definitely be further concentrated and will be integrated with the chassis in an integrated manner. The greatest advantage of this is high integration, compact structure, and at the same time can increase the body rigidity and safety.

The car companies must be pursuing higher integration and stronger economies of scale. For example, Tesla, which has the ultimate pursuit of integration and integration, also had the idea of battery swapping in the early days, but later chose the CTC architecture with a more simple structure - integrating the battery pack into the body.

For example, at the press conference of the 2023 Geely Extreme Krypton Brick Battery, when a media asked about Geely's cooperation with NIO on battery swapping, it was officially confirmed that it was the Rui Lan brand that focuses on the online car-hailing market that participated in the NIO battery swapping cooperation, not the Extreme Krypton. The answer from the Extre me Krypton side is that since battery swapping requires standardization to form an economy of scale, and the big trend in the future is the integration of the battery and the body, the CTC architecture and the CTB architecture are the big trends.

At present, the two global new energy giants - Tesla is betting on the CTC architecture (battery chassis integration), and BYD is betting on the CTB architecture (battery body integration), and both are betting on integration and integration.

This article comes from the WeChat public account: Automobile News Agency (ID: automobile-news), author: Zhu Yujia