Tencent missed the boom of smart phones. On the eve of iWatch's launch, it was not eager to follow up wearables. What is Tencent's first smart hardware expected by the industry?
However, an expert will not attack easily. Once he attacks, he must be supernatural and unimaginable! Recently, this question has finally been answered. Tencent's first hardware will be a product related to the Internet of Vehicles - Lubao Box.
There are already many mature products on the market of intelligent boxes of the Internet of Vehicles. The so-called smart box is more based on the On Board Diagnostics (OBD). Ordinary users may not notice the existence of this system. Its main task is to provide engine and ambient temperature, vehicle speed, intake air volume, oxygen content in exhaust and other data to the electronic control module ECU (which can be understood as an automobile computer) of the car. With these data, ECU can improve the efficiency by advancing or lagging the ignition time and correspondingly increasing or decreasing the fuel. Once the efficiency is low, it means that the vehicle emissions exceed the standard, which is also the original intention of the OBD system.
Most of the smart car boxes are connected to the OBD system in the car by adding a Bluetooth module and connecting it to the mobile phone app to make it "smart".
While OBD is a data port of the vehicle, the data that can be obtained from this port is either provided by the vehicle manufacturer through the instrument panel, or the manufacturer's data needs to be cracked to obtain additional vehicle control functions. For car owners, OBD data is of little value. Third party manufacturers, how to use these data to play tricks, it is up to each of the eight immortals to show their magic.
From the function definition of Lubao Box, the general goal is to create an OBD product with the lowest cost and the simplest functions, which will provide users with more services besides navigation.
On board experience of Lubao Box
What's the magic of Lubao Box? The author had a car experience today.
The function of Tencent Lubao App is essentially based on the map app, and at the same time, the report of road conditions is added to the navigation column.
Road condition reporting is based on crowdsourcing mode. If we can give good guidance and have a large enough user base to freely and voluntarily feed back real-time road conditions, we believe it will become a killer feature of the App!
In the "My" navigation bar, select the vehicle model → insert the device → connect the device to access the Lubao box. In use, during the process of inserting the device, the App can not only "view the live picture of the interface location", but also provide the function of "turning on the flashlight" because the garage is dark, so the humanized design is everywhere!
In addition to navigation, the main functions of Lubao Box are as follows:
Fuel consumption analysis
Novices are not very skilled on the road. If they cannot drive at full speed in the city due to congestion, they often do overspeed, sudden braking, rapid acceleration, sharp turns and other operations, and fuel consumption is very obvious. The Lubao box interface can remind the current fuel consumption status and travel costs in real time. After driving, you can view the detailed driving records and score the driving, It can be seen from the data that there is room for improvement. It is very helpful for beginners!
Physical examination of the whole vehicle
Driving safety is an issue that car owners pay close attention to, but there is nothing new. For example, most cars have such an indicator light on the dashboard, which will light up the "CHECK ENGINE" prompt when the engine encounters a fault, reminding the car owners to go to the repair shop:
What are the advantages of Lubao Box here? As an Internet product, more connections with the outside world are its advantages. Tencent Lubao has cooperated with PICC, Pacific and Ping An auto insurance companies. In case of major vehicle failure, users can call the corresponding warranty manufacturer at any time to apply for maintenance services:
Compared with simply checking the data, I believe that the service Tencent Lubao can provide is what users value most.
Future direction
To be honest, the functions of the early Lubao box are very simple. It's a little smart for the sake of intelligence. However, the product director of Lubao Box also admitted that in order to avoid compatibility, the early generation mainly focused on vehicle adaptation, and more functions will be launched later.
Tencent has never been good at making hardware. In fact, compared with the meaning of hardware itself, the data obtained from OBD is the real treasure house! It has great commercial value for insurance, automobile manufacturers and automobile service providers, especially for OEMs. Vehicle data obtained through OBD is of great significance for improving vehicle design.
For Tencent, this time we started with intelligent hardware, which is essentially a software service, so we have a lot of imagination. In the short term, Tencent Lubao will cooperate with PICC and Shell to provide car owners with "access to offline car rescue and maintenance services". It is unknown that there will be more killer functions in the future. The hardware of Internet of Vehicles, together with Tencent Maps, has the power to fight in the mobile map market!
