"Outsiders don't really know how much money the auto industry burns, but as an outsider, I actually have a good understanding before entering this field, so you don't have to worry about the lack of funds in Guanghui Auto," Jiang Hui said to Pi Wei.

Since Pi Wei was worried, Jiang Hui felt that he still needed to say a few more words to dispel his concerns.

After all, not everyone knows the future direction of the world economy, not everyone knows that 2008 is the best time to acquire assets, and not everyone knows Jiang Hui's various layouts for the future.

Besides, since Pi Wei has this concern, it is estimated that some other executives of Guanghui Automobile also have it, but they just didn't say it.

"Mr. Jiang, factory investment is only a threshold for investment in the automotive industry, and the subsequent research and development and promotion of new models are also very expensive, and this kind of money is a continuous investment," Pi Wei continued.

How much money does it cost to develop a model, Jiang Hui actually has a concept in his heart.

The later Hongqi H7 was developed based on the Crown's platform, and it is said that it also spent more than 10 billion yuan, and it is estimated that it will be more than this if it is developed completely from scratch.

On the same day, Hongqi's expenses were an exception, an industry "joke", and could not represent the overall level of the industry.

However, at least it can be seen that the automotive industry is indeed very money-burning.

"I know that it is very expensive to develop a new model, all our first models are based on Ford's powertrain and CRV body structure, and we will launch it with some adjustments in appearance, and the next model will still be based on the same idea, so that Guanghui Automobile will have hematopoietic ability, alleviate its demand for foreign funds, and embark on the road of a virtuous circle."

"Mr. Jiang, I am relieved that you can realize this, our mid-size SUV has basically completed the preliminary development and began to enter the product verification stage, and when our equipment is installed in a few months, we can start small batch production of trial models, and further carry out various verifications," said Pi Wei.

"Do we have to do a lot of verification?", Jiang Hui asked a more layman's words.

"There are a lot of automobiles, compared with other mass consumer products, the comprehensive evaluation of complexity and reliability should be the first place.

The number of casualties caused by traffic accidents in the world each year is consistently the highest among all injury factors. Although the reasons for this vary widely, many are subjective reasons rather than genuine car design.

However, as the most commonly used means of transportation, the car is always difficult to get rid of, which also leads to the pursuit of quality and reliability in automobile research and development is extremely strict", Pi Wei did not think that Jiang Hui asked this question how ignorant, after all, it is not an industry insider, it is difficult to understand what tests need to be done before a car goes on the market.

"And product validation is the most expensive part of product development," Pi Wei continues.

"Oh, is that so, why is product verification the most expensive link?", if you don't understand, you ask, Jiang Hui didn't pretend to understand there, if you don't ask now, it's easier to make a fool of yourself in the future.

"Although the technology of virtual analysis has greatly improved in recent years, and many experiments have been replaced by virtual analysis, it is essential to build hundreds of real vehicles for various experiments in the current process of developing a car.

The cost of these pre-production cars is very high - at least dozens or even hundreds of times the price of production models.

In other words, it is equivalent to spending money equivalent to the price of tens of thousands of production models in the early stage of verification", Pi Wei's answer is indeed a bit unexpected.

"Do you need so many prototypes to do the tests?".

"Yes, throughout the development process, we have about three rounds of integration verification at the vehicle level, and the rest of the component and subsystem level validation follows these three rounds, but it's normal to add one or more rounds of testing.

The verification at the three-wheeled vehicle level corresponds to the verification of infrastructure parts, preliminary design concepts, and final design products.

Before the start of each validation phase, a number of prototypes are built with self-validated parts, and then the verification test specifications for the whole vehicle are run, and the content of the test is different in each round, and the problems found are different, and these problems are solved and will be tested in the next round of verification. ”

"In other words, the reason why our product verification is the most expensive development stage is because we need to make more than 100 prototypes," Jiang Hui said, summarizing some of Pi Wei's content.

"Yes and no, these more than 100 prototypes must account for the bulk of the cost, but there are still a lot of other places to spend money on product verification. For example, our crash test will have a relatively high cost, which is not only the prototype car required for the crash test itself, but also the crash dummy used in the test is also very expensive.

At present, only one safety system company in the United States in the world supplies collision dummies, each selling for 1 million yuan. In the crash test, four dummies are placed in the car, and more than 100 sensors are installed throughout the vehicle, and various data can be obtained to simulate a real person in a collision.

For example, the head sensor mainly measures acceleration, which can lead to brain death if it is too large, and the neck sensor mainly measures the shear force, whether it causes a broken neck or a serious injury to the spine.

In addition, more than 10 high-speed cameras are set up on the left, right and top of the collision table, which can record more than 1,000 photos per second for researchers to analyze every detail of the collision in detail.

All of this is made of money," Pi Wei said with emotion.

"It's no wonder that independent brands have not been able to do joint venture brands over the years, and cars really need some accumulation."

"Yes, product verification alone, is not the general independent brand can all invest, after all, the projects involved are too numerous, including a variety of tests in different working environments, high temperature conditions in Turpan, extreme cold conditions in Heihe, high humidity conditions in Hainan, Tiannan and Haibei must be taken care of.

There are also all kinds of road surfaces all over the world, asphalt roads, cement roads, gravel roads, dirt roads, uphill roads, downhill roads, and even bad roads that have been crushed by heavy vehicles. The differences in car usage habits of different customers also require different targeted tests. Testing of these new functions now increases the amount of validation required for the integration of complex functions into the vehicle.

The reason why the reputation of the joint venture brand is good after all, is that the testing work of the people has been done sufficiently, and many problems have been solved before mass production, unlike independent brands, and there will always be some small problems when using them," said Pi Wei.

(End of chapter)