Automotive Head-up Display (HUD) Industry Report: Installation of OEM HUD for Passenger Cars Soared by 94.1% Year on Year in China in 2018

In 2018, 308,900 units of OEM HUDs were installed in passenger cars in China, a 94.1% upsurge from a year earlier, according to our recent report -- Automotive HUD Industry Report, 2018-2019.

We worked out 2019Q1 lists of passenger car HUD supplier ranking by competitiveness with efforts from secondary research, data processing, and investigation & integration to evaluation & analysis. Denso came to the top spot among all suppliers and CarRobot ranked first among Chinese suppliers.

HUD was in vogue from 2014 to 2015. NAVDY that was a typical supplier then, however, doesn’t appear on our latest HUD industry chain.

NAVDY followed a digital light processing (DLP) technology roadmap, but DLP HUD had some drawbacks like complicated design and high cost. In TI’s case, its first-generation DLP chip only worked at temperatures of -40-85℃, short of automotive standards. Navdy raised USD42 million from Qualcomm and several other venture capital firms. Navdy HUD which should have been launched in the first quarter of 2015 came out just in recent two years. In October 2016, the product was put on sale, but its price surged to USD799 from the pre-sale price of USD299. In 2018, NAVDY had to go into liquidation after its failure in aftermarket. 

Many a HUD start-up applied Navdy’s technology between 2016 and 2017. Using DLP as display system only left them a range of technology bottlenecks and often deferred launch of products. Most of them then turned to thin film transistor (TFT) display technology. Examples include CarRobot who designed its first-generation HUD with DLP technology but changed to TFT for its second-generation products. 

In 2018, TI officially rolled out the 2nd-generation automotive chips DLP3030-Q1 and DLP5530-Q1 featuring smaller size and wider field of view and sufficing for AR head-up display (HUD). DLP3030-Q1 sees the digital micromirror device (DMD) footprint reduction by 65%, enabling smaller picture generation unit (PGU) design. It can operate between -40°C and +105°C

Technically, DLP is the best and most mature display technology by far. Therefore, Sunny Optical and other giants are still optimistic about HUD based on DLP technology, and they even spend tens of millions of yuan on introducing free-form surface mirror production lines.

The second HUD craze since 2018 arises from the emergence of AR HUD.

AR HUD, the augmented reality head-up display technology, superimposes some driving information in the driver's field of vision reasonably and combines it with real traffic conditions. Compared with HUD, AR HUD displays a wider range from a farther distance, and it is more complex. HUD is just a device that projects and displays information, while AR HUD needs to be deeply integrated with ADAS to achieve more advanced effects and functions.

Given the deep integration of AR HUD with ADAS, the burgeoning development of ADAS as a must for automotive intelligence has driven the demand for AR HUD.

 The image display of AR HUD is generally distributed in two or three layers. For instance, the AR-HUD of Nippon Seiki boasts three layers: the near field display layer, the far field display layer, and the side layer. The near field display layer is mainly a presentation of vehicle status, the far field display layer displays ADAS information, and the stereo side layer offers lane or navigation information.

Amid the intelligent connected trend of cars, any automotive electronic product is difficult to be independent. As an automotive electronic product, HUD has been an integral of the cockpit electronics solution and the overall ADAS solution.

Panasonic Automotive showcased its latest SPYDR 2.0 at CES 2019, which is a single-chip cockpit domain controller solution integrating Driver Monitoring System (DMS) with Head-Up Display (HUD). Besides, SPYDR 2.0 can integrate In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI), dashboard, surround view system, Active Noise Control (ANC), HUD and four IVI displays on a platform

For this integration trend, traditional Tier1 giants enjoy first-mover advantages, whereas independent HUD suppliers have to establish close cooperation with other product suppliers. The collaboration modes -- Jiang Cheng + Baidu, Carrobot + China Unicom, Carrobot + AI Speech, etc. just follow the integration trend.