Huawei Launches A Smart Cockpit Powered By HarmonyOS 

Huawei has launched a smart cockpit solution for electric and autonomous cars based on its HarmonyOS which will be powered by its Kirin line of a system on chip (Soc) solutions at the Shanghai Motor Show. This comes after the company announced a slew of components for OEMs for V2X capabilities a week ago at the trade show. 

"Through its hardware ecosystem, Huawei has realized the interconnection between distributed devices inside and outside vehicles, and the connection of those devices to computing and software platforms. Meanwhile, Huawei has opened up APIs to help automobile manufacturers, tier-1 suppliers, and ecosystem partners quickly develop differentiated services and features that meet user requirements, enabling an optimal, interesting, and enjoyable driving experience of users" said,  Wang Qingwen, the GM of Huawei's smart cockpit product.

Huawei has designed modular SoC for cars that will be pluggable and easy to upgrade to maintain the peak performance of the cockpit. In simpler words, one will be able to upgrade the chipset as one can upgrade on an assembled desktop computer. 

The HarmonyOS is a scalable OS Huawei had designed a couple of years ago as an alternative to Android which could scale use cases. This also includes automative solutions. It provides one-chip multi-screen, multimedia-concurrency, run time deterministic assurance to meet the requirements of the mobility scenarios. Through the operating system, the vehicle head unit can also connect with other intelligent devices and terminals and share information. 

The Cockpit vision leverages Huawei's expertise in the smartphone space

Huawei has launched an AR-HUD and Huawei Cockpit Vision. The AR-HUD comes into play for autonomous driving purposes. The AR-HUD projects on to a large display with HD video quality and provides driving safety assistance and well as immersive audio and visual entertainment. 

The Cockpit vision features a massive 15.6-inch 2K screen with narrow bezels combining for a 87 per cent screen-to-body ratio. It will also be integrated with a Kirin SoC with ethnologies like NFC, mmWAV radar, one-touch transmission, one-touch connector and gesture control. Huawei is basically extending the smartphone experience onto the car. Huawei after all was the leading smartphone manufacturer in the world for a short period in 2020 and was tipped for leadership had it not been for US trade embargoes which have damaged its smartphone business. 

Huawei made a series of announcements for autonomous cars at Auto Shanghai 2021

Huawei already has more than 50 partners for third party applications and more partners are expected claims the company. 

"It is our dream to bring digital to every cockpit," Wang Qingwen said. "We hope to work with automotive manufactures, tier-1 suppliers, application partners, and peripheral hardware partners on Huawei's software operating system and core computing platform to achieve shared success and accelerate cockpit intelligence," he added.