The spread of COVID-19 has brought a great blow to the automotive industry. However, from the burst of online shopping after SARS and the rise of fintech industry after the financial crisis in 2008, we can see that there will be opportunities if there are difficulties.

  The automobile industry is an industry with both tradition and future. Its dependence on energy gives it traditional attributes, while the intervention of science and technology makes it full of a sense of future. COVID-19 has shut down the auto industry, but it gives policymakers more time to think about how cars can better meet people's needs in the future.

With the development of automobile industry, great changes have taken place in the electronic and electrical framework of automobile. In the early 1990s, the average number of MCU in a car was less than 10. Now the number of MCU in a car is 10 times that of that time, and the number of MCU in some high-end cars even reached 300. The rapid growth of the number of MCU makes the demand for software in the automotive industry higher and higher. With the deepening of the Internet, car cloud collaboration is becoming more and more common, and new intelligent functions and service needs need to be updated almost every month. Visible to the naked eye, the automotive industry is moving forward along the path of the PC and mobile phone industry.

The Enlightenment of smart phones is that if a technology can improve the simplicity and pleasure of consumers' life, it will be sought after even if it is complex and expensive. The same is true of smart cars. More and more D-class cars are appearing in front of everyone with the appearance of smart cars. These luxury car manufacturers are entering the lower technical fields such as operating system, hardware simplification and signal processing, in order to fundamentally ensure their uniqueness and convenience among consumers. When the intelligent vehicle becomes a complex software based computer, the software will determine the travel experience of users in the process of using the vehicle, and make the software system become the main core competitiveness from the foil of the past.

In fact, in the past few years, many domestic and foreign manufacturers at different levels, from BMW to Chang'an, have already put the idea of smart cars into the company's development strategy. Comprehensive intelligence sounds beautiful, but to complete such an upgrade, traditional automobile enterprises need to shift from an equipment enterprise with a mature supply chain system to a software enterprise with core technology and stronger innovation awareness. Developing an intelligent platform for a car may require more than 300 million lines of code, an order of magnitude higher than the windows operating system. The frequent interaction between in car software and cloud services makes the actual load of the vehicle networking cloud connected to tens of thousands of vehicles equivalent to that of an Internet application with a daily life of tens of millions of levels. Software development focuses on timeliness, which is a great challenge for car companies with traditional work rhythm. The car companies themselves attach importance to the attribute of assets, and it is difficult to attract it talents with high salaries. Because of this, software companies and other digital technology enterprises are changing from secondary and tertiary suppliers to primary suppliers of vehicle enterprises and become one of the indispensable members of vehicles.

In terms of the development history of automobile, the appearance and supply chain can be imitated and used for reference. However, Tesla's uniqueness lies in its self-developed automatic driving chip and artificial intelligence algorithm, and continuously provides real road condition data for in-depth learning with the largest number of fleets. For the automotive industry, what they need is the deep involvement of a parts supplier like Tesla, so that they can better do "intelligence".

Smart cars can not only reshape the in car experience, but also make car brands stand out in the highly competitive market. The outbreak of the epidemic also made people have a new understanding of intelligent vehicles with functions such as keyless entry, vehicle ventilation in advance and real-time epidemic alarm. For auto enterprises, if they can grasp this window, they can better grasp the future.