Research on modular platforms: explore intelligent evolution strategy of automakers after modular platforms become widespread.

By analyzing the planning of international automakers, Chinese conventional automakers and emerging car brands for modular platform architectures, autonomous driving and other technologies, the report explores the significance and role of modular platform architectures in new energy vehicles in today’s electrification and intelligence development.

The path of new energy vehicle development is gradually clear: modular architecture + intelligence.

For a model or a range of models, there are two most important automotive architectures: chassis & body architecture, and electronic and electrical architecture. The chassis + electronic architecture platform provides a further guarantee for the scale, development speed and reliability of new energy vehicles. With vehicle intelligence, the software platform, autonomous driving, intelligent cockpit and electrification of vehicles have become important indicators affecting vehicle performance.

The exclusive all-electric platform architecture has become the foundation for R&D of vehicle models.

In the R&D process of new energy vehicles, there are two different technology paths: new energy vehicles (PHEV+EV) are refitted on conventional fuel-powered vehicles, also known as “fuel to electricity”, and most still have fuel-powered models; products are built on brand-new exclusive all-electric platforms/architectures.

In the early development of new energy vehicles, most conventional automakers developed new energy vehicles by way of “fuel to electricity”. Yet as new energy vehicles boom, such new energy models are not enough to meet the development needs for more intelligent, more optimized, more integrated and higher performance new energy vehicles. The all-electric platform technology has matured. To adapt to the development trend for electrification, conventional automakers have launched exclusive all-electric modular platforms/architectures, and will develop more in the future.

For example, from 2019 to 2030, Volkswagen will make intensive efforts on modular platform architectures, E/E architectures, intelligent driving systems, software platforms, intelligent cockpits and electrification platforms: from 2024 onwards, the Scalable Systems Platform (SSP) will replace MEB and PPE as the main architecture of new battery-electric vehicle models; the centralized E/E architecture will substitute the domain architecture as a standard part of the SSP; in the field of autonomous driving and intelligent cockpit, VW.OS2.0 will become the mainstream software platform; the IVI system MOS 4.0 based on Samsung Exynos Auto V9 will become the mainstream cockpit system.

City NOA system is produced and applied on a large scale.

China’s upcoming L3 autonomous driving standard will favor the fast commercial application of autonomous driving. From the perspective of the autonomous driving systems of new energy vehicles, the commercial use of city NOA systems has become the key to L2+ ~ L3 autonomous driving systems.

As Xpeng, Li Auto and Avatr among others announced the layout of city NOA (navigate on autopilot), the system that offers point-to-point intelligent driving assistance goes into mass production and wide adoption in 2023.

Intelligent Driving 3.0 of Li Auto has enabled city NOA from highway NOA, and notified beta users in the second quarter of 2023. It will spread to 100 cities of China in late 2023.