In the era of new energy vehicles, the relationship between traditional vehicle manufacturers and suppliers is being broken, and suppliers are cutting in from different angles to realize closer bundling of interests with vehicle manufacturers. on December 24, Ningde Times officially released the skateboard chassis product Granite Chassis, which will also be the first to be applied to Avita.

According to Ningde Times, with the help of Granite chassis, the new car launch cycle of OEMs can be significantly shortened, and the development cost and BOM cost (material cost) can be significantly reduced. At the same time, the chassis is highly scalable, and the car design will accelerate towards more modularization, personalization and intelligence. In other words, in the era of software-defined cars, car companies can significantly reduce investment costs in electrification and further focus on the intelligent segment by choosing Ningde Times' skateboard chassis. This will be a huge market. Some organizations expect that by 2030, the penetration rate of the skateboard chassis will reach about 5%-10%, with a market size of more than 100 billion. Specifically, Granite Chassis is a set of CIIC integrated intelligent chassis centered on electricity, focusing on intelligence and safety, and positioning itself as an efficient and safe base.

Wall Street Journal learned that Ningde Times' Granite Chassis adopts a “three-dimensional bionic tortoise shell structure”, where the body structure and the energy module structure are integrated above and below, deeply coupled, and superimposed with a carrier-type blocking structure, so that once it is subjected to violent impact, it can maximize the slowing down of chassis intrusion, and reduce the deformation of the energy module. In addition, Granite chassis also uses 2000MPa hot-forming steel and 600MPa aluminum alloy materials with extremely high strength, and the combination of these materials and innovative structures greatly improves the support strength of the chassis.

Yang Hanbing, Managing Director of NDT (Shanghai) Intelligent Technology, said that the NDT Granite chassis is the flagship version of the CIIC ultra-high safety chassis, which can achieve 120km/h frontal collision without fire or explosion under charged conditions. Safety has always been one of the core issues in the century-long history of the automobile industry. Ni Jun, Chief Manufacturing Officer of NDT, emphasized that safety is the cornerstone of automotive products, and once a safety problem arises, it will trigger a series of negative impacts and even affect the life safety of users. At the event site, Ningde Times demonstrated the crash test of Granite Intelligent Chassis vehicles. A car hit head-on at a speed of 120km/h remained stable after a violent collision, without fire or explosion. Immediately following this, they demonstrated a frontal center column crash test. Despite the severe deformation of the impact column, the airbags of the test vehicle popped out normally, and the battery pack was only 21 degrees, with no thermal runaway. Currently, the industry-standard C-NCAP crash test speed is 56km/h, and the frontal collision achieved at this speed produces collision energy equivalent to a 12-meter fall; while a 120km/h frontal collision is equivalent to a 56-meter fall, and produces collision energy 4.6 times that of the former. The design of Ningde Times Granite Chassis takes the battery as its core, and adopts Cell to Chassis technology to realize the structural sharing of the electric core and the chassis. This design enables the Granite chassis to absorb up to 85% of the vehicle's collision energy on the basis of the decoupled structural design of the upper and lower bodies, far exceeding the collision energy absorption capacity of ordinary chassis of about 60%. In terms of electric core safety, Granite chassis incorporates NP technology and high-toughness energy-absorbing insulating film with an elongation rate of up to several hundred to ensure a high safety coefficient. It is worth mentioning that the body of the electric core has been subjected to three ultra-severe tests, such as 60km/h skidding impact, 90° bending, and violent sawing to destroy the cross-section directly exposed, and still does not catch fire or explode. In terms of the lightning cut-off high-voltage system, the system is able to cut off the high-voltage power supply within 0.01 seconds at the moment of collision and complete the release of residual high-voltage electrical energy within 0.2 seconds.

Yang Hanbing also emphasized that based on the Granite Integrated Intelligent Chassis, it can facilitate car companies to build cars more freely and efficiently. “Based on the Granite chassis, vehicle companies can save resources, focus on the development of richer user experience features, reduce the duplication of chassis development, the development cycle of the entire vehicle can be significantly shortened to 12-18 months, and consumers will wait for a new car to hit the market for a shorter period of time.” Yang Hanbing said. In terms of production costs, Ningde Times' skateboard chassis products can enable OEMs to save 60%-70% of development costs; OEM BOM costs can be reduced by about 5%. Chen Zhuo, president of Avita Technology, also announced at the conference that Avita has become the first new energy vehicle company to adopt Ningde Times Granite chassis. Chen Zhuo also said that all Avita models will use NDT batteries and will not use batteries from other brands. In Chen Zhuo's view, the era of electrification and intelligence has arrived, and the wave of customization will follow, and the Granite chassis brings a good opportunity. In the future, several car companies plan to develop new models based on Ningde Times' Granite chassis. In addition to Avita, BAIC New Energy also announced in early December that it will develop a new model platform with Times Intelligence based on an integrated smart skateboard chassis and push forward to realize the landing of several scenario-based models, and a number of other car companies have plans to cooperate with Ningde Times. Huatai Securities expects that by 2030, the neutral estimate of the market share of the skateboard chassis is at 4.8%, and the optimistic estimate is at 10.4%, which means that the market size is at the level of 100 billion to 200 billion. Ningde Times will also find a new growth point. It will no longer be just a simple battery producer, the battery production, loaded into the car, but can be further tied to the OEM, for the OEM to provide electrification + intelligent integrated application solutions. Of course, this also requires OEMs to establish further trust between OEMs and suppliers, and be able to hand over more production processes to suppliers like Ningde Times. In this process, the traditional supply chain relationship is further subverted, and a new industrial pattern is gradually taking shape.