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While using Huawei ADS, Changan is also increasing its investment in self-developed intelligent driving.

Text丨Zhang Jiahao
Edited by Cheng Manqi

We have learned that Han Junyu, former senior manager of Baidu's visual technology department, recently joined the Changan Intelligent Driving team and reported to Changan's Chief Intelligent Driving Technology Officer Tao Ji.

Han Junyu joined Baidu in 2012 and is an early employee of Baidu's IDL Deep Learning Lab. He is engaged in visual AI research and development and has developed technologies and products such as visual models, digital humans, face recognition, OCR (character recognition), and visual intelligent hardware.

Tao Ji, the overall leader of Changan Intelligent Driving R&D team, and Han Junyu once worked together at Baidu. Tao Ji was the general manager of the autonomous driving division of Baidu's former Intelligent Driving Group (IDG), and later joined L4 truck company Qiangua Technology as CEO. In the second half of last year, Tao Ji joined Changan Automobile as Chief Intelligent Driving Technology Officer, reporting to Changan President Wang Jun.

Changan announced in April this year that the intelligent driving AI big model technology research and development team that Tao Ji is preparing to form has started to tackle the new generation of intelligent driving technology solutions based on "end-to-end" big models and "multimodal" big models. After joining, Han Junyu is expected to participate in the research and development of Changan's intelligent driving big model and related multimodal models.

According to public information, Changan's entire self-developed intelligent driving R&D team currently has about 600 people. The Changan Qiyuan E07, which will be released in the second half of this year, will be the first model equipped with Changan's self-developed L2+ solution. It uses the NVIDIA Orin X platform and is equipped with a laser radar. It can achieve high-speed NOA and can be upgraded to urban NOA in the future.

Traditional car companies now mostly adopt a strategy that focuses on supplier integration and is supplemented by self-research. Changan is one of the few car companies that has invested resources in self-research of high-end intelligent driving.

Last year, Changan Chairman Zhu Huarong said that Changan Automobile will invest a total of 200 billion yuan by 2030 and add a technology innovation team of more than 10,000 people. At a press conference in July this year, Changan Automobile President Wang Jun said that all Changan Qiyuan products will be equipped with near-L3 autonomous driving capabilities as standard in the fourth quarter.

On the other hand, Changan is one of the traditional automakers that has the deepest cooperation with Huawei. Avita, a joint venture with Huawei and CATL, and its own brand Deep Blue, all use Huawei's ADS intelligent driving solution. Just this week, Avita invested 11.5 billion yuan to become the second largest shareholder of Huawei's intelligent car solution company Yinwang Technology, holding 10% of the shares.

Changan has stated that its self-developed intelligent driving and Huawei solutions will be installed on different models.

Tao Ji and Han Junyu both came from Baidu. Since this year, many former senior talents of Baidu Intelligent Driving have flowed into other companies:

- Luo Qi, one of the technical leaders of Baidu's original intelligent driving L2+ business, joined NVIDIA's automotive division as engineering director, responsible for prediction, planning and control.

- Zhou Peng, head of Baidu's cabin driving fusion intelligent driving technology, has joined BYD and is responsible for the development of end-to-end large-model regulatory control algorithms.

- Su Tan, former general manager of Baidu IDG (Intelligent Driving Business Group) Automotive Business Unit, joined Microsoft Cloud and reports to Yuan Xin, President of Microsoft China. After Su joined, Microsoft established a separate automotive team. In the automotive field, Microsoft Cloud mainly provides cloud services and high-performance computing platforms for car companies and intelligent driving companies.

Baidu is known as the "Whampoa Military Academy" of China's intelligent driving.

It is understood that the business focus of Baidu's intelligent driving department has been mainly on fully unmanned driving solutions in the past two years, supporting Robotaxi (unmanned taxis). As of April this year, the cumulative number of orders for Baidu's Carrot Run on open roads exceeded 6 million. The main car brands that purchase Baidu's L2+ solution are currently Jiyue, a joint venture between Baidu and Geely and controlled by Geely.

Title image source: Changan Qiyuan