On November 26, Shanghai Group, Pudong New Area, and Alibaba Group held a signing ceremony to jointly create a new high-end automobile brand "Zhiji Auto".

SAIC Motor announced on the 26th that in order to accelerate the creation of its own high-end intelligent pure electric vehicle brand, the company plans to jointly invest with Zhangjiang Hi-Tech and Hengxu Capital *** to establish Shanghai Yuanjie Intelligent Technology Equity Investment Fund Partnership (Limited Partnership), a special

Invest in high-end smart pure electric vehicle projects.

The announcement also showed that the fund plans to invest specifically in a high-end smart pure electric vehicle project (tentatively named "Zhiji Auto") with Alibaba (China) Network Technology Co., Ltd. (including its designated subordinate investment entities).

According to SAIC executives, the founding round of financing for this project has reached 10 billion yuan.

On October 12, some media reported that SAIC Group is embarking on a new electric smart car project code-named "L", which is regarded as the "No. 1 Project" internally by SAIC.

It is reported that the project was prepared two years ago and focuses on high-end intelligent new energy vehicles.

The project team is personally led by Chairman Chen Hong, with President Wang Xiaoqiu as the general commander. Vice President and CFO Wei Yong, Vice President and Chief Engineer Zu Sijie and other senior executives are also members of the project team.

?This time, the project was named "Zhiji Auto".

It is reported that Zhiji Automobile’s first car is currently positioned as a sedan.

"It is expected that winter testing will be carried out in Heihe at the end of this year, and we will be able to see a large number of new cars on the road next year." Intelligent and digital transformation have become the common sense and main theme of traditional car companies in 2020.

SAIC started planning to build a software center in March this year. In April, it publicly recruited software talents from the public. On July 21, it announced that its software center would be named "Zero Beam Software Branch."

?SAIC Zero Beam mainly focuses on intelligent driving system engineering, software architecture, basic software platform and data factory, including SOA software platform, new generation centralized electronic architecture, cloud service platform, computing power chip, automotive big data platform, and edge artificial intelligence

applications, smart cockpit systems, etc.

?The establishment of Zero Beam can be seen as a prelude to Zhiji Automobile.

The cooperation between SAIC and Alibaba began in March 2015. Both parties invested 1 billion yuan each to establish Banma Network.

In July 2016, SAIC launched the Roewe RX5, the first Internet car equipped with the Zebra Intelligent Mobility system.

But in May 2020, Zebra Network completed its strategic reorganization and SAIC withdrew.

The establishment of Zhiji Automobile will also restructure the cooperative relationship between SAIC and Alibaba.

Both SAIC and Alibaba need to prove themselves again in the era of smart cars.

This article comes from the author of Autohome Chejiahao and does not represent the views and positions of Autohome.