One More Thing！ What you will see is that this new BMWs will be more BMW than ever before.

At a press conference in 2023, Oliver Zipse, CEO of the BMW Group, followed Steve Jobs' example and pulled out a "little black box" from behind him, claiming that it would make the new generation of BMW more BMW than all the previous ones.

It may be a little twisty, but in other words, this thing can bring BMW back to the most essential experience in the era of electrification - the ultimate driving pleasure.

The old guys who have a deep understanding of the culture of modified cars must be no strangers to this thing, it is an ECU. Brushing "first-order", "second-order" or "special tuning" refers to rewriting the ECU program to release different degrees of power from the car engine.

We all know that the engine is a very sophisticated instrument, air intake, fuel injection, ignition, exhaust and a series of actions must be completed in milliseconds to ensure its normal operation, all of which are controlled by the driving computer (ECU), based on various considerations at the factory, the ECU program set by the manufacturer is often more conservative, so the pursuit of more radical power of the old buddies, often by rewriting this part of the program, to the engine for different degrees of power release.

Recently, BMW has released more information about the Heart of Joy and its performance in test cars, so that we can see why it is different from other ECUs in existence.

In addition to the ECUs that control the engine mentioned above, there are also multiple ECUs that control the suspension, chassis, exhaust, brake, and other systems, and they transmit and communicate with each other through the CAN bus. The ECU and the corresponding hardware tuning style are different, and often bring different control orientations such as comfort and sportiness to the vehicle.

How do so many ECUs communicate with each other, and it is widely used to concentrate them on the communication bus (CAN) of the car, but there will inevitably be some communication delays and slow response problems between the various systems.

But now, BMW has managed them under one system, which will reduce the latency between the systems to within milliseconds, while also providing higher response accuracy, which is said to be 10 times faster than the previous system.

What does driving pleasure look like in the age of electrification?

A senior BMW engineer explained that the "Heart of Joy" combines the power and torque of an electric motor, the ability to slow down and brake the vehicle, and a variable power source, as evidenced by the fact that BMW recently put it on a new test car, the Vision Driving Experience, which was stress-tested at a power limit of around 000.0 Nm.

Even at top speeds of 144 km/h, the car does not need to brake, relying solely on the braking power provided by kinetic energy recuperation to slow down the car to a safe corner.

At the same time, the response delay from the engine to the powertrain to the individual wheels will also be reduced, so the response time will be faster when accelerating, and the wear and tear of brake pads and tires during braking will also be reduced, in BMW's words, "the pleasure of stopping".

This brand new set of things we can first experience on the next generation of the BMW 3 Series.

You may wonder why BMW didn't think of integrating these ECUs until now, and this shouldn't be a natural idea.

The problem lies in the "car regulations", as we mentioned earlier, ECUs not only control the engine, but also control the braking, steering, passive and active safety systems that are crucial to driving safety, so stability and reliability are often more important than advanced, even now, most of the ECUs of the models are provided by Continental, Denso, Bosch, Delphi and other "Tire 1" that has been precipitated on it for nearly a hundred years.

BMW is not the only car company to innovate in ECUs.

Like the Heart of Joy, the S800 released at the previous time uses a more centralized ECU architecture.

According to the analysis made by the blogger's bodyguard's garage, the difference in the world is that Hongmeng is based on its own professional capabilities in the field of communication, and has also achieved self-development on the control chip of the ECU, so that the vehicle domain also has the possibility of introducing AI reasoning capabilities, so that the suspension system can also have a certain degree of independent learning ability, and deduce different strategies according to different road conditions, so as to make the driving experience more stable and comfortable. This is exactly what the in-box communication and "spatiotemporal reasoning" mentioned in the press conference mean.

Another interesting thing I found in interviews with BMW engineers is that they felt that using the same suppliers resulted in a similar driving experience even across different brands. This reminds me of a sentence Lei Jun made after the Beijing Auto Show last year - "The volume of the rim is completely homogeneous. This is making products, and it is completely dependent on Meng."

As for the story of Xiaomi SU7 from the end of the day, the outside is XXX and now the delivery speed can't catch up with the order speed, everyone knows it.

The reason behind this can actually be seen by everyone, just like the mobile phone circle, at a time when "parameters" and "performance" are gradually becoming transparent, the unique use "experience" may be becoming the key competitiveness of a car.