Author | morty
Edit the | Jingyu
In November 2021, the ideal car had 13,438 insured vehicles. With the ideal of 24 months, the monthly sales exceeded 10,000, and this model also became the first "explosive model" in the new forces with a monthly sales of more than 10,000. What is more noteworthy is that in the national November sales of medium and large SUVs, the sales of the ideal ONE overwhelmed a number of established Ashkenazi competitors.
The ideal "blockbuster logic" broke the myth of the Ashkenazi system, and the ideal ONE even won the "third best luxury SUV sales in November".
"Blockbuster", a word that should not have appeared in the automotive industry, but the ideal used it to complete the counterattack. Such a "new phenomenon" is rare in the automotive industry for a long time.
The ideal ONE sold almost the | of the three cars sold by the German rivals Data sourceCAC Data Terminal Retail Data
Ideals take a "lonely" path. Among the new car-making forces "Sanjie", NIO is currently selling three pure electric SUVs of different sizes and sizes, while Xiaopeng currently has two cars and one SUV model to cover a wider range of people. The ideal only uses one product, facing a sufficiently accurate user group, to leverage the market around the product force of accurate users.
But the "blockbuster" actually hides a crisis. As the first car of the new car-making force, it is more like a desperate bet to create a blockbuster, after all, the opportunity to play cards is likely to be only once.
After carefully understanding the "Ideal ONE" product, you will feel the "more eccentric" experience from every product detail, biased towards the feelings of home users.
No one is different for the sake of being different. These eccentric product strategies are the reasons why the ideal can now "catch up later", and under the appearance of products and technologies, the deeper is the choice of Li Xiang's strategic thinking.
Because the "explosive model" of the product does not seem to be the ideal goal, the "explosive model" is only the result of a car company's focus on product strength.
01 "Native Demand" for Blockbuster Products
If you simply label the new car-making forces, Weilai is a system service, Xiaopeng is intelligent, and the ideal is product power.
More precisely, it is currently the product force of the ideal ONE as a "daddy car".
This actually stems from the real needs of founder Li Xiang. When he started Ideal Car, Li wanted to pick up his children often, but he found that getting on and off the bus was not friendly to the elderly and children. More importantly, Li's "empathy" made him think that the cars of the past were more about serving "drivers" and "rear bosses", but often ignored the needs of family cars, and rarely considered the exclusive design of the elderly and children.
So the simple idea of creating a car for families with children came to life.
The results are not unexpected. Ideal ONE is a product that has won the favor of multi-generational home users: 86% of Ideal ONE users are more than two generations of home users, and 88% of home users are families of three or more.
More than 85% of owners have children and 40% of owners are two-child families; more than 40% of ideal ONE users use the third row of seats at least once a week, of which 54% of car owners say that children will like the third row of the ideal ONE because they can have their own independent space.
Behind the ultimate product strength is the ideal and accurate R & D strategy. This stems from Li Xiang's native needs and the fact that users were accurately targeted as family users with children at the beginning.
"Making a product is not a showmanship, everything is to provide value to the user." This is also Li Xiang's mantra.
As the first company to successfully commercialize range extended range (EREV) electric vehicles in China, the ideal range extended range (EREV) electric vehicle is the biggest "point of controversy" when pure electrification has become the mainstream consensus.
But Lee wants to think that "blockbuster products" don't need "radical" technology, but "just the right" solution.
From the perspective of product development, the power mode of the extended range depends on the "energy replenishment anxiety needs" of home users, and the more mainstream pure electric solution is difficult to meet the needs of users: "A person travels, there is no problem in finding a charging pile, and there is no problem in charging." But if you take the elderly and children at home to find a charging pile and other charging piles, the experience is very bad."
In fact, it is difficult to determine whether there are "home users" or "electric vehicle mileage anxiety" in Li Xiang's mind. But there is no doubt that ideals choose extenders to solve them, and their complementarity creates a "trade-off" in the development process.
In addition to the basic power, the development of intelligent functions is also to meet the "accurate" home users. The ideally developed "vehicle multi-tone zone interaction technology" supports up to 4-way vocal separation and 6-way sound zone detection, which can realize all-vehicle multi-channel pickup, vocal localization, noise reduction, echo cancellation and voice wake-up.
It seems overdecorated, but this is to meet the control needs of multiple users in the car, and at the same time to achieve "single sound area locking" to avoid children deliberately waking up the voice. This also allows nearly 30% of non-main driver users to talk to the intelligent voice assistant "ideal classmate" through voice in the car.
Even after such a long time, the ideal is still the only one among many car companies that has this mass production technology.
"To make a product is to make multiple choice questions, to take and trade off. The ultimate experience, there is no way to do both." The ideal product manager says so.
A similar choice is reflected in the subsequent upgrade of the ideal ONE product. At the hardware level, the ideal is even more concerned about the getting on and off of the rear family members, as well as the comfort of the ride, and even spending tens of millions of dollars to make the seat softer. At the software level, Ideal ONE has carried out about 18 OTAs in total, leading the industry in iteration speed, and even reducing vehicle fuel consumption through refined control.
It is precisely in every detail of the product that the "home user" is further advanced, so that this product condenses the "sales vote" of the home user.
02 The power of "Sniper Mode"
The single-mindedness of efficiency and restraint seems to be always on display in the strategy of the ideal car.
"Focusing on a model in an efficient R&D approach to become the best seller at the same price was something we decided when we founded the company." Lee wanted to say on a conference call for the company's first quarterly earnings report.
"Only do the ideal ONE car in three years" This is a kind of "strategic focus" entrepreneurial strategy that Li wants to carefully restrain in the early days when all resources are limited. After the early SEV project was hampered, he decided to focus his R&D strategy on one product.
It is said that there is no chance of trial and error in automobile entrepreneurship, so the new forces of car manufacturing are more or less inevitable in the early days of their establishment. But Li Xiang used a more "efficient and healthy" way to achieve the first stage of car manufacturing and entrepreneurship.
"Only one car in three years", "only one car has one configuration and one price", "everything you want is given to you, and assisted driving becomes the standard", etc., the "specificity" behind the ideal ONE product has won it the title of "efficiency benchmark".
The ideal ONE driver assistance is equipped with a high-definition camera
Only one model with a configuration has changed the mindset inherent in the automotive industry. Ideally, this would not only reduce the uncertainty of flexible production for the "production side", but also maximize the value obtained by users. Some industry insiders have analyzed that the large-scale procurement of the ideal ONE single model is also conducive to better cost control. Ideal Auto may become the first car company in "Wei Xiaoli" to achieve a turnaround.
Ideal one | Ideal official
Li wants to think that this reflects the core essence of the company he runs: "Many times we spend a dollar that we shouldn't spend, and often we need to spend another three dollars to make up for the problems caused by the dollar that shouldn't be spent."
It is precisely because of the standard assisted driving ability that the ideal is once again different. In the latest update of the "high-speed pilot assisted driving system", other new forces in the industry are tens of thousands of yuan in upgrade costs, but ideally turn it into a standard function. Because the ideal believes that the safety of a family should be standard. Long-distance travel, assisted driving can effectively reduce driving fatigue.
"If Apple, like Nokia, launches hundreds of phones a year, Apple is not making that profit today." Because the cost of relying on this scale is reduced, there will soon be bottlenecks, how can you do your few products to the extreme, generate a cognitive premium for the brand and psychology of users, in fact, can generate profits." Li Xiang said in an interview.
Today's full competition in the automotive industry seems more like a "shotgun model", matching people and markets with different needs. But the ideal "strategic concentration" is more like a sniper mode, with concentrated forces and a high enough hit rate.
Ideal ONE is significantly more prominent for home users in feature development and demand exploration, rather than caring more about the aggressiveness or novelty of the feature.
Ideal's ultimate exploration of "families with children" and a series of product concepts that seem to be "against the trend" have made Ideal win the market in the first stage of the new car-making force, and also won the elderly and children among family users.
"Looking ahead, we're only 1% done today." Li wants to move away from "restraint" in his strategy in the next phase.
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