Not particularly surprised if they outsourced a lot of things. Even many major OEMs are outsourcing their ADAS (just rebranding them). Mobileye is a big supplier.
Wow, didn't realize there was such a mess at XPeng. To be fair to them however, what happens in their US subsidiary may not necessarily be representative of what is going on at their China HQ. Of course we are unlikely to get as good a picture of the internal workings of their China HQ.
You will find similar reviews at any company. For example look at Cruise 3.5 Glassdoor reviews.
When Xpeng assembled their team in SF, they didn't have a production car to develop on, so there weren't any production development.
They were scheduled to get their car in 2019. So the development team spent time researching SOTA DL Algorithms and creating demos with the prototype cars they had for investor to show what they are capable of doing.
Its funny shrine puts an emphasize on that, yet This is exactly what Tesla did, created a fake demo in 2016 using Nvidia software to impress customers and investor and to sell a product and passed it off as their own work. Even then early on, their AP software was based on Academic GoogleNet from 2015 (Inception net) for several years (2016-2018/2019 I believe).
This is perfect example of the pot calling the kettle black.
The reviews are from 2018 which is 3 years ago (an eternity in the AV industry) and you can see other reviews saying their team is research and developing algorithms and demos till they receive the cars in 2019.
@shrineofchance like always tries to distract from actually addressing why their model and prediction that supposedly based on fact or data but isn't at all.
In Xpeng's 2021 Q1 Investor conference they said: "we’re able to collect highly valuable rate cases with our customers using NGP. We’re now able to achieve fast iterations of our algorithm on a weekly basis, based on our advanced closed-loop data capabilities. With the growing number of P7s on the road, I believe Xpeng will have the largest and fast growing Smart EV fleet close-loop data capabilities on China’s road network."
Shrine can't imagine another company other than Tesla collecting data from production cars, this is how strong thier bias is and how much Tesla has clouded their logic and reason.
They do OTA/FOTA updates which shrine was not aware of. Their recent update was for Navigation Guided Pilot, An navigate on autopilot equivalent.
We examine news that Xpeng Motors recently released an over the air update for its P7 electric vehicle that added over 40 new functions.
insideevs.com
They use a multi domain controller, which replaces the hundreds of ECU found in cars with a single computer unit. It facilitates the communication between the main chip (Nvidia..whatever) and the car's actuators. You either design and create your own hardware or work with tier 1s to create one based on the chip of your choice. With Xpeng they used Nvidia's Xavier.
This has nothing to do with the AV software that Xpeng is actually creating/created.
"Desay SV argues that: tier-1 suppliers and OEMs will collaborate in the following two ways in the area of autonomous driving domain controller:
First, tier-1 suppliers are devoted to making middleware and hardware, and OEMs develop autonomous driving software. As tier-1 suppliers enjoy edges in producing products at reasonable cost and accelerating commercialization, automakers are bound to partner with them: OEMs assume software design while tier-1 suppliers take on the production of hardware and integration of middleware and chip solutions.
Second, tier-1 suppliers choose to work with chip vendors in solution design and research and development of central domain controllers and then sell their products to OEMs. Examples include Continental ADCU, ZF ProAI and Magna MAX4."
/PRNewswire/ -- The "Global and China Automotive Domain Control Unit (DCU) Industry Report, 2018-2019" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's...
www.prnewswire.com
QNX is the most popular OS for providing functional safety, security and real time operation and is a standard in the auto industry. Its in over 150 million cars. SDC companies either use QNX or Linux. But to disparage Xpeng because they use QNX secure OS is like disparaging a company because they run their software on Linux or Windows.
The QNX OS for Safety is a microkernel OS for embedded systems certified to IEC 61508 SIL 3, ISO 26262 ASIL D and IEC 62304 Class C.
blackberry.qnx.com
Alot of SDC companies uses Nvidia Drive OS including Zoox because it has embedded RTOS, hypervisor, NVIDIA CUDA libraries, NVIDIA Tensor RT and other components optimized to provide direct access to DRIVE AGX hardware acceleration engines. which is needed for the acceleration of deep learning models that Xpeng will be developing.
Nvidia DRIVE OS is
NOT Nvidia DRIVE AV or Nvidia DRIVE IX.
This has nothing to do with the AV software that Xpeng is actually creating/created.
Again what you are doing is equivalent to disparaging companies for using windows/android/linux and drivers that come with it.
NVIDIA DRIVE® OS is a foundational software stack consisting of an embedded real-time operating system (RTOS), NVIDIA Hypervisor,
NVIDIA® CUDA® libraries,
NVIDIA TensorRT™ and other modules that provide you access to the hardware engines. DRIVE OS offers a safe and secure execution environment for applications such as secure boot, security services, firewall and over-the-air (OTA) updates.
Details:
- Multiple guest operating systems
- 64-bit user space and runtime libraries
- NvMedia APIs for hardware-accelerated multimedia and camera input processing
- CUDA parallel computing platform
- Graphics APIs: OpenGL, OpenGL ES, EGL with EGLStream extensions
- Deep learning libraries: TensorRT, cuDNN
For anyone wondering what QNX OS (which is integrated into Nvidia Drive OS by Nvidia) is and what it isn't. Take a look at the link below.
QNX OS for Safety
Streamline your products’ functional safety certifications with a microkernel operating system pre-certified specifically for safety-critical embedded systems, and toolchains pre-qualified for building these systems. Ideal for building complex safe systems, the QNX OS for Safety is a full-featured, deterministic OS designed for use in every sector where functionally safe, reliable embedded software is critical: medical devices, industrial controls, aerospace, automotive, power generation, robotics and rail transportation.
For anyone wondering what a multi domain controller like IPU-03 is. Take a look at the link below.
Multi Domain Controllers
Today, every electronic control system in the car, such as Instrument Cluster, Infotainment, Anti-lock braking system, Engine Management System, Transmission Control Unit, and Body Control Management is a self-sufficient unit with its own sources like ROM, RAM memory, microprocessor or microcontroller, I/O and power supply. The idea of automotive domain controller is to replace multiple distributed ECUs with a single powerful central computer with multi-core. Multi-core processing technologies integrate multiple ECUs into one single chip. In a multi-core solution, these individual ECUs retain separated and independent processing space. However, a lot of redundant components like housing, drivers, wire and harnesses, and power supplies can be eliminated. These not only largely save cost but also the component's weight and space. Moreover, communication between ECUs is within the processor itself instead of communicating over an external network like CAN or LIN, this will reduce the data latency and system complexity considerably.
/PRNewswire/ -- The "Global and China Automotive Domain Control Unit (DCU) Industry Report, 2018-2019" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's...
www.prnewswire.com
