SAIC's high-end EV brand IM Motors announces two EVs with wireless charging and 1,000 km range
IM Motors, a joint venture between China's largest auto group SAIC, Zhangjiang Hi-Tech, and Alibaba Group, announced on January 13 its first two mass-produced electric vehicles.
The new cars will have 400kW of power and 700N-m of torque and will have a 0-100km/h acceleration time of 3.9 seconds.
The new vehicles will be equipped with a new battery developed jointly by SAIC and CATL, using new technology with an energy density of 300Wh/kg per cell.
The battery gives the vehicle a maximum range of more than 1,000 kilometers and achieves zero degradation for 200,000 kilometers under NEDC conditions. The company says the battery achieves the "highest safety level of never spontaneously combusting".
The new car's battery pack has a capacity of 93kWh as standard and 115kWh in the premium model.
IM Motors' vehicles also support wireless charging, making it the first car brand in the world to have 11kW of powerful wireless charging technology in mass production.
The new vehicles will be available for pre-order during the Shanghai Auto Show in April 2021.
The new vehicle's visual perception solution uses Nvidia's Xavier, with an arithmetic power of 30-60 TOPS.
The vehicle is equipped with 15 high-definition vision cameras, 5 millimeter-wave radars, and 12 ultrasonic radars. Among them, the LiDAR solution is Nvidia's Orin X, which can achieve 500 to more than 1,000 TOPS of arithmetic power and supports 3 LiDARs.
IM Motors says its vehicles will have point-to-point zero-intervention autonomous driving capabilities by the end of 2021, as national regulations allow and as high precision maps become available.
IM Motors will also enable automated valet parking and summoning in select commercial centers in first-tier cities, and gradually expand to select commercial centers in other cities starting in 2022.
The new model's computing center and cockpit center use NXP's I MX8 and Qualcomm 8155, respectively, and the entire vehicle implements TTTech multi-chip real-time data interaction and supports 1Gbps Ethernet communication.
The vehicle uses a 39-inch liftable Incell giant display screen with a resolution of 6240x720.
SAIC's high-end EV brand partners with CATL to develop cars with range of up to 1,000 km
Wireless charging...really? That will be a game changer, if Zhiji can pull it off.
But then again can you imagine a rust belt of charging stations?
And yet the wireless charger is said to place more of a load on the grid. What's that about?
C'mon, "wireless charging" seems premature, maybe they're just talking about the driver's phone only.