There is a post on Douban that resonates with many netizens:
"I find that people's ideals have been shrinking with age. When I was a child, I wanted to be a person who stood tall in the sky; when I was a teenager, I felt that I could become a rich generation and change my destiny; when I graduated from college, I felt that it was already good to be a university teacher; and now, I can run a public institution. Almost. ”
The netizens who followed the post are also very talented, and a direct sentence broke the idea of many people, "Just because the ignorant are fearless." ”
However, when we grew up and realized that our dreams were gradually shrinking, a car brand called "Ideal" was unwilling to admit its crisis, and its founder Li Xiang was still living in his childish dreams.
After entering the second half of 2021, Ideal did usher in the outbreak of product sales.
From the top of the list of new car-making forces in August to the first time in November, it was also the first time that a Chinese brand model (including fuel vehicles) with a starting price of more than 300,000 yuan had achieved a single-month delivery of more than 10,000 yuan.
Numerically, the ideal car business is doing well.
This also seems to be within the expectations of the industry. Li wants to be very aware of the current needs of most Chinese consumers like large cars, so he made the ideal ONE into a full-size 6-seat SUV with a length of more than 5 meters and a width of nearly 2 meters, and eliminated the double armrests of the second row of seats, equipped with a full-car voice and a quad screen machine, with the aim of allowing all family members to get satisfaction in the car.
These thoughts seem to hit the target user: 86% of the 100,000 owners of the ideal ONE have children, and 37% of them have two children, which is a good match for the vision of the "daddy crowd".
However, behind these "take care of all family members" visions, there are corresponding efforts and costs, the most typical of which is that the ideal ONE must adopt range-extended power technology.
Generally speaking, the car use scenarios of home users are basically divided into two categories, urban and long-distance. Li wants to find a way to take care of the two major scenarios at the same time, to achieve "urban electricity, long-distance oil", which must use the extended range technology.
As the industry says, the extender is not backward, but it is by no means new, and the ideal car is just a new routine of playing a marketing method.
According to the owner of the car, the fuel mode of the ideal ONE has a higher fuel consumption at high speed than that of a fuel car. But Li Xiang believes that even if the fuel consumption of 100 kilometers is 1 liter higher, and 4,000 kilometers are driven a year, it only costs 200 yuan more to refuel. If you want to reduce fuel consumption, you need to increase the direct drive structure, which will increase the frustration and affect the driving experience; the body will become heavier, and it will also increase the power consumption of the city's cars.
It is based on this calculation that the ideal ONE becomes the most suitable product that consumers can find among the products that are not outstanding.
In this regard, a well-known media gave an accurate summary: "Electric drive technology, degree of intelligence, marketing model... If the various systems on the ideal ONE are separated, each system is not enough to reach the strength of the head product, but it is the system above the average level that is integrated into the ideal ONE, coupled with the ideal's timely response to the market and the adjustment of the market's product structure, which makes the ideal ONE become this 'person who appears in the right place at the right time'. It can be said that the hot sale of the ideal ONE is the result of localization, the victory of logical thinking, the crystallization of system engineering, and the mapping of the market environment. ”
Indeed it is. However, for such a specific product at a specific time, the ideal ONE can maintain the heat for how long, the industry is not optimistic. "In the past three years, ideal has only one ideal ONE, but in the past three years, China's new energy car manufacturing technology has made rapid progress, the advantages of ideal ONE are getting smaller and smaller, and the market of ideal ONE can only shrink more and more."
This is true, but Li Xiang is reluctant to admit it. He once said, "For a long time, Apple has relied on the iPhone to be a blockbuster, why can't the ideal ONE be?" ”
Optimistically speaking, it is called persevering in faith; pessimistically speaking, it is called not knowing the current situation. Looking at the current situation of the ideal car, this is Li Xiang's helplessness, because there is no second product that can expand the voice of his brand.
It is true that the ideal ONE has a very accurate positioning, but the ideal ONE has only one model. From the perspective of enterprises, how can a product support the market value of the ideal car of 100 billion? From the consumer's point of view, having only one model means that the ideal car does not give consumers the right to choose within the brand, and this is exactly what a mature company needs to do.
As the internal industry said, ideal car because it aims at the current pain points of pure electric vehicles, so it launched the ideal ONE, a range extended hybrid model. However, as we all know, from the perspective of the general trend of global automotive electrification development, no matter how beautiful the ideal car depicts range extender hybridization, range extender hybrid is a transitional technology in this vehicle electrification revolution.
It is rare to get the first place in a monthly delivery with a single model, but the other side of the coin means that it faces a lot of market risk. As listed in the Hong Kong stock prospectus, the "risk factors" listed in the Hong Kong stock prospectus, such as the single model, the advantages of range extender technology are no longer there, and the supply of parts is interrupted, which makes the prospect of the ideal car seem blurred.
Li wondered if he didn't want to develop pure electric vehicles. According to its prospectus disclosed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Ideal Auto will launch at least two high-voltage pure electric models per year from 2023. But for the ideal of not having any experience in the field of pure electricity, it is actually no different from starting from scratch.
The new model will wait until next year, and the mainstream development direction of pure electric models will wait until 2023. New energy car market all kinds of opponents have entered the game, the competitive situation is changing, Li wants to bet that the supercharge system will not mature rapidly in these years, competitors in advance layout, rapid expansion of the supercharge or replacement system will not form a barrier to energy replenishment.
Whether you can win the bet is unknown. But the ideal pure electric, late to come is really passive.
Is it That Lee wants to see the shrinkage of the ideal ONE? No way, he's a good product manager. Li Xiang once said that today, 20%-40% of his role is the product manager of the car, and 60%-80% of the role is the product manager of an organization. It's very good, but it's a pity that he is like a spoiled child who doesn't grow up, showing off all over the world with a little achievement, and completely lacks a crazy entrepreneurial temperament of "moving towards the ideal".
Zhang Ruimin, the newly departed chairman of Haier, said when Haier changed: "Don't care about the loss of the present, because the future will make the loss of the present full of meaning." ”
Haier is different from the situation faced by the ideal, because the main goal of the ideal is to make a profit, which makes Li want to compress the cost, but he calculates the cost compression to research and development, which is a bit excessive.
All along, Li Xiang has been known for being "frugal" in his investment in research and development. From 2018 to the first quarter of 2021, the total R&D expenses of the ideal are less than 3.6 billion yuan, which is less than the R&D expenses of NIO in 2018. In the first half of this year, this situation has not changed, Weilai, Xiaopeng, ideal research and development expenses of 1.571 billion yuan, 1.399 billion yuan and 1.168 billion yuan respectively, ideal is still in the last place.
According to the third quarter financial report, the entire Q3 Ideal Automobile invested 889 million yuan in research and development expenses, while in terms of sales, general and administrative expenses, Ideal Automobile invested 1.02 billion yuan.
Sure enough, the saying "if you earn, you will save" applies to the family, and it also applies to the ideal car business.
Of course, lower investment brings more "savings", which makes the ideal cash flow far more than other new car-making forces, whether this is related to Li Wants's commitment to investors, the probability is possible.
Three years of grinding a sword is indeed conducive to the polishing of product strength, the disadvantage of the ideal ONE alone is becoming more and more obvious, and at the end of the mixed 2021, Li Xianghe's fault tolerance rate has been reduced beyond relentless. When Li wants to treat the ideal as a business, he must also conduct more self-examination when he receives applause.
This is the ultimate meaning of "ideal".
Write | Water miao
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