Hon Hai Precision Industry Co’s (鴻海精密) MIH platform for electric vehicles (EVs) is to become an independent business unit in July, the company said at the first MIH Open Platform Alliance membership meeting in Taipei yesterday.
More than 1,200 companies in the EV supply chain have joined the alliance since its inception in October last year.
Hon Hai chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) said that the firm’s goal is to consolidate Taiwan’s EV component makers so that they can cooperate with each other.
Photo: Chen Rou-chen, Taipei Times
“Due to Taiwan’s limited domestic market, it is hard to develop a business-to-consumer model,” Liu said. “However, a platform to bring together all of the nation’s talent on a business-to-business basis is perfect for the development of EVs.”
The development of “software-defined vehicles” was central to the member-only meeting in the Songshan Tobacco Factory in Taipei, which was livestreamed online.
“In the future, you will be able to develop 80 percent of an EV’s functions on the cloud,” Hon Hai chief technology officer William Wei (魏國章) said.
“Our goal is to provide vehicle developers with a complete stack development environment that mimics today’s development environment for consumer electronics,” Wei said. “It will be like what we had for desktop computers for the past 20 years and for smartphones in the past 10 years.”
Wei said that the EV development cycle can be shortened, from five years to two-and-a-half years, and development costs and risks reduced through cloud-based systems.
EV design can be streamlined by “pushing the whole system layer to the application layer,” Wei said.
“We push the domain of battery management into the application layer so that everybody can join in disrupting the space,” he said.
Among the MIH members is Tony Lin (林東閔), chief executive officer of Aeon Motor Co (宏佳騰), a maker of electric scooters.
Lin said that through flexibility in EV development, a whole new mobility market would emerge.
The MIH platform can accommodate vehicles as diverse as busses and microvehicles, he said.
“When you call a Uber you are hiring a five-person sedan with a driver to carry one passenger,” Lin said, referring to the California-based ride-hailing service.
“What if in the future you can just hire a 1-seater autonomous car?” Lin said. “Taiwan needs this alliance to bring us together so we can be seen by the world.”
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