As 2021 gets into history, I think it's worth looking back at what's happened in the auto industry over the past year. The term "inner volume" can very well summarize the development process of the automotive industry in the past year, and we can see some clues at the Shanghai Auto Show at the beginning of the year and the Guangzhou Auto Show at the end of the year.
"Upward" is the key word of the Shanghai Auto Show, especially the upward trend of traditional independent brands is very obvious. Under the premise of solidification of brand cognition, most car companies choose to adopt a multi-line combat strategy, and since this year, a number of high-end sub-brands hatched by traditional independent car companies such as Extreme Krypton, Lantu, Salon, and Confidant have mushroomed into the public eye.
It seems that the market of more than 300,000 will become a battlefield for independent brands to fight in the next 2-5 years. Although these new brands have entered the high-end automobile market with pure electric products, it seems to be a blue ocean, but in fact, it is surging and the competition is extremely fierce. Otherwise, we would not have seen the scene of lidar "flying in the sky" at the Guangzhou Auto Show, and it is inevitable that everyone's strength will be rolled in when they are in one place, but how to "seek change in the volume" is worth thinking about.
Rules made by traditional powerhouses
The upward road of traditional brands must first face the obstruction of traditional luxury brands. Many people will think that with "pure electricity" as a prefix for products, they will not participate in the head-on competition with fuel products, but the high-end car market of more than 300,000 does not appear out of thin air, so it is difficult not to let consumers have the idea of product force benchmarking. It is precisely because of the existence of this idea that many car companies will use the "same level benchmarking method" to improve their product strength.
As early as ten years ago, when independent brand products tried to beat joint venture brands in the low-end market, the "peer benchmarking method" was a major means, and it was common to reverse research and develop a popular model. However, we must admit that due to the disadvantage of brand recognition, the competition between most independent brands and joint venture brands will eventually fall on the price, that is, compete in terms of cost performance. Such a competitive approach is effective in the low-end market, but the high-end market does not eat this set.
Of course, we can see many examples, such as a second-tier luxury brand because of repeated price wars with first-line luxury brands, resulting in its own brand image is difficult to recover, and eventually fell into a dilemma.
Since the purpose of independent brands entering the high-end market is to achieve an upward breakthrough in brand power, it is the best choice not to make a fuss about price. The second way to promotion is to increase the original price, in the form of "stacking" to reverse increase the cost performance of the product, such as 4 years ago Weilai put the air suspension configuration down to the level of 500,000, followed by the extreme krypton, Lantu these brands will be the configuration down to about 300,000, further enhance the competitiveness of the product.
However, in the high-end model market, the traditional heroes have made their respective brand images deeply rooted in the hearts of consumers through years of market operation, in other words, the rules of the high-end model market are that brand value orientation is greater than product orientation. For example, BMW's pure electric product iX3 can frequently surpass Weilai ES8 and ES6 in single-month sales, which is enough to show that if you want to achieve a breakthrough in this environment, it is relatively difficult to simply rely on product power to launch an impact on the traditional haoqiang, the main reason is that independent brands lack word of mouth and recognition in the high-end automobile market, and brand disadvantages will directly affect the product.
There is more than one way to change
Various new ways of playing are the main means for independent brands to break through in the high-end market, such as user operation. Obviously, in today's Internet public opinion environment, few people make a fuss about Weilai's product strength, and Weilai's entire user service system is the key element for them to enhance the added value of products and gain a firm foothold in the high-end market.
To be honest, no independent brand has been truly defined as a high-end brand before WEIlai, so after the experience of the past, imitators flock to it, so this year we hear the most words is "user co-creation". When everyone is characterized by service and as much as possible to meet the needs of users, they are caught in the vortex of "benchmarking competition", the lack of innovative inner volume is cool thinking, and homogenization does not conform to the high-end market rules of brand value orientation.
So you may wish to change your thinking to meet the needs of users in the high-end market. In fact, high-end does not have to be equal to luxury painting, luxury is one of the additional needs generated by consumers in automobile products, and services are also additional needs, smart car companies should look for needs in the budding period among users, and implement it at the product level.
In the past year, the car companies that have thought most clearly about the "change in the volume" are Salon Motors. Sharon's brand positioning is the world's first warm and cool mecha technology brand, which is completely an unusual car company, from the mecha style design language we can easily speculate that "personality" will be the core selling point of Salon cars.
Today's automotive market demand can be divided into horizontal demand and vertical demand, horizontal is the user's basic demand for model size, for example, according to horizontal demand can be divided into A0, A, B, C, D five levels of the market. Vertical demand is the element of dividing the market segment, which can be divided into three major sectors: practical, luxurious and personalized, for example, the luxury B-class car market we often say is a segment of the market where two demands are superimposed.
At present, the personalized market is still a blue ocean. Although there are also many car companies on the market that make products under the banner of personalization, most of them are "dancing with baggage", they want to go out of the circle, but no one really dares to go out of the circle. For example, the alternative styling of the salon mecha dragon, if in a normal car company, the product manager must consider the market acceptance and other issues, they want personality but are afraid of challenging consumers and have an impact on sales.
There are two sides to challenging consumers, of course, there will be people who are conservative about the mecha style, but the people who can accept it must be the people who resonate with it, and this part of the people will become die-hard fans of the product. The mech dragon is still in the stage of its debut, and we can't completely take a negative view of such a product. The path of personalization hasn't really been tried before, so it's completely inconclusive as to how big the market space is. Instead of rolling you to death in one direction, it is better to achieve the arduous task of brand upwards in a new way that is not broken and unbroken.
4 x LiDAR
Not the product of disorderly competition
"Is it really necessary to have four lidars?" It is another question from the outside world about the first product of Salon Motors, the Mech Dragon. Under the normal thinking logic, since there is a lidar on the car, we should see more functions superimposed on the original L2 level assisted driving functions.
At present, the function announced by Sharon on the first product, The Dragon, is the Captain-Pilot Captain Intelligent Driving System, which can realize the "high-speed + city + parking + interconnection" end-to-end intelligent assisted driving in all scenarios. In fact, the three major scenarios of high-speed, urban and parking have not been proposed for the first time in the auxiliary driving scenario, and some car companies have tried to land these three scene functions under limited perception hardware conditions.
Since you can't do more "no one has me" function, should The 4-laser radar solution from Salon Motors be seen as a product without competition? Do you want to get more attention than others because you want to get more attention?
In fact, Salon Motors' plan to launch 4 lidars has the following two points of thinking.
The first point is greater safety, which is an important prerequisite for achieving various advanced driving assistance functions, and more high-performance sensors can enable safety and reliability to reach the delivery capacity of more complex working conditions.
The advantage of the five-fold 360-degree perception strategy built using high-definition cameras, surround cameras, lidar, millimeter wave radar and ultrasonic radar is that it is faster and safer to achieve functional landing, taking the two assisted driving systems of lidar and millimeter wave radar as an example, the two auxiliary driving systems use the most perception hardware, the two actually have their own advantages and disadvantages, such as lidar's angular resolution and distance resolution is higher and easier to image, but the penetration ability of rain decay and haze particles is not as good as millimeter wave radar.
Because of the different weather conditions, different road environments and other objective factors, so no kind of perception hardware can now be seen to be able to solve the problem alone, and the five-fold 360-degree perception is outstanding is prepared. At the same time, Sharon Mecha Dragon also laid out a dual MDC intelligent driving computing platform to provide computing power support for powerful perception hardware.
Because the view that more hardware is piled up to launch more functions is completely wrong, no car company that is responsible for users will be radical like Tesla and lead to accidents, step by step is the most secure way to develop autonomous driving.
The second point is to enhance the high-definition camera perception algorithm through powerful perception hardware. High-end intelligent driving strong visual solution, which is beyond doubt, Yang Jifeng, head of autonomous driving products at Sharon Zhixing, has also publicly expressed his agreement with this view, but more lidar must not be the end of automatic driving, but on the way to the end, car companies need more data to support the training algorithm.
What is most lacking in the current autonomous driving industry is the data from the feedback from the sensors under complex road conditions, and the strategy of sharon with more high-performance sensors is also to achieve the safety and reliability of the product to achieve the delivery ability of more complex working conditions. In this way, more data is obtained for full test verification and better improves the ability of machine vision.
The new wave of automobiles is an important opportunity for our own brands to achieve upward breakthroughs, the era of software-defined automobiles The world's automobile industry is standing on the same running line because of intelligence, and we need to master the core algorithm and software technology in our own hands to realize the revival of the national automobile industry.
In this way, the salon mecha dragon is far more than a lidar, and after careful consideration, you will find that their long-term layout in software and hardware is logical.
epilogue
From the official unveiling of the salon mech dragon at the Guangzhou Auto Show, the discordant sound followed, and the core reason for this result was that the salon's products were indeed too amazing, regardless of the shape, technical route or price. Perhaps Salon is the most controversial car brand in 2021, but in a highly homogenized market, Salon may go further with its unique personality.
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