Written by | Cold Zelin
Edit | Wang Pan
The bell of 2022 is about to ring, looking back at the new energy market in the previous year is much more lively than the cold winter of previous years, there are bankruptcies, rebirths, independence, only entered the game, of course, there are also tens of thousands. Among them, November is a watershed, and the three companies that grasped the tail of the ugly year broke through 10,000 for the first time.
Although they are all broken, the gold content is not the same. Weilai and Xiaopeng have three models on sale, so the single model of ideal car is particularly "eye-catching". From being questioned to proving itself, the ideal car can indeed be a little proud.
A few days ago, Ideal Auto CEO Li Xiang shared a picture on Weibo with the caption "Thank you for the encouragement, continue to work hard".
Under this uncomplicated chart, there is also a story of "brave dragon slaying".
The ideal ONE began deliveries at the end of 2019, when sales were only one-thirteenth of Volkswagen's model in the same class, and even though sales rose threefold in September of the following year, they were still very different from Volkswagen. At the same time, the extended range technology used by Ideal ONE was also criticized by Volkswagen China CEO Feng Sihan as the "worst solution".
However, as the saying goes, "Don't deceive the poor of young people".
Time came to this year, Hedong and Hexi positions reversed, after the new ideal ONE was launched in May, the ideal car delivery volume climbed several steps in succession, and in November, it actually crushed the sales volume of large and medium-sized SUVs of the Volkswagen brand with 13,438 terminals.
Ideal ONE deliveries are expected to approach 90,000 units this year, up nearly 280% year-on-year from 32,000 units delivered last year. On the other hand, Feng Sihan, who shelled the expansion of the range last year, is about to leave China under the condition that the sales of new energy in the north and south are not good.
The popularity of the ideal ONE has to make people re-examine the century-old technology of "extended range", and range extender models such as Landu FREE, Xilis SF5, and AITO Inquisition M5 have also begun to compete. I don't know if this counts as a "renaissance" of new energy.
Interestingly, looking back at the ideal development process, it seems that he has not only gathered some electric vehicle users, but also taken away a number of fuel vehicle users.
Tap into new user groups
Speaking of Xiaopeng P7 or NIO ES6, it is easy to find a bunch of their competitors in new energy models, such as BYD Han, Model 3/Y and so on. But when it comes to the ideal ONE, most people have put it in the first choice for all medium and large 6-seat SUVs, competing with traditional fuel vehicles such as highlanders and Tuons.
At present, a total of 8 cities in China have adopted purchase restriction measures for automobile sales, and if you want to buy a second or third car, you can often only get fuel license plates through lottery or bidding. In recent years, the remaining first- and second-tier cities have also been guiding consumers to purchase new energy models through purchase tax exemptions, subsidies and unlimited numbers.
For people who test drive electric vehicles, most of them already know that they will buy an electric car before buying a car, but it is a question of which brand and which model to choose. Tesla, Xiaopeng, Weilai and other brands of store sales have told us that the vast majority of test drive customers have also test drive other electric vehicles.
This means that Tesla, Weilai, Xiaopeng and other brands face the same target user group, but the problem of how much they have taken, and the number of this user group is also expanding.
The ideal is very different, it has discovered a new user pool outside the target user groups of brands such as Tesla, Weilai and Xiaopeng, the biggest difference is to grab orders directly from the hands of fuel vehicles.
An ideal car salesman told Photon Planet that most of the ideal ONE car owners have test-driven fuel models such as Highlander and Tuon. That is to say, although some of the owners who bought the ideal ONE also test-drove Weilai, Tesla, etc., a considerable number of people have test-driven fuel vehicles of the same level.
In addition, according to the cumulative data from August to December 2021, among the top ten used car brands that have replaced and purchased the ideal ONE, the luxury brand share reached 30%. The ideal ONE replacement brand TOP 3 is BMW (7.7%), Mercedes-Benz (7.6%) and Audi (6.7%). The ideal ONE replacement series with the most are the BMW 3 Series and Mercedes-Benz C-Class.
A vote initiated by a car big V
On the web, the ideal ONE can also be seen everywhere compared with the rest of the fuel models. Did the ideal ONE really seize the fuel vehicle market? Here we can take a look at the sales data of Beijing in November this year:
Left: Beijing's november medium and large SUV sales Right: National November medium and large SUV sales
Among the country's medium and large SUVs, ideal November sales exceeded the second place Tuon by more than 8,000 units, more than the sum of the top five. In Beijing's november sales ranking of medium and large SUVs, ideal ONE is also the first.
You know, Beijing has never been the ideal home, and buying the ideal ONE in Beijing requires the use of fuel vehicle indicators, and it is still limited to the number of vehicles. Without the license plate advantage, the ideal ONE competes with the same standard as the oil car, and its sales volume can better reflect the real competitiveness.
According to the ideal ONE insurance volume in November this year, the five major cities that can enjoy the license policy include Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Tianjin, with a total of 3138 units, accounting for 23.4%, and the total number of cities that cannot enjoy the license policy is 10300 units, accounting for 76.6%. That is to say, the ideal of more than 3/4 of the sales volume is obtained in the same competition with fuel vehicles.
Oil and electricity are not opposed
People who have driven electric vehicles know that their advantages and disadvantages are very obvious, the advantages lie mainly in the driving experience, and the disadvantages are mainly in the lack of endurance. In contrast, the situation of most oil vehicles is the opposite, the vehicle power is relatively poor, but the endurance is stable.
We look at all kinds of new energy user reports, the factors of purchasing new energy vehicles are nothing more than good power /quiet, low cost of use, license-free / unlimited traffic, and the corresponding point of concern can never escape the energy replenishment and endurance.
Although various car companies are also launching models with a range of thousands of kilometers, the larger the battery often means that the price is more expensive, and whether the marginal benefit is more in line with the interests of consumers has yet to be verified.
In addition to its own endurance restrictions, the imperfection of the current energy replenishment system has further aggravated the battery life anxiety of trams.
Recently, CCTV reported the problem of charging difficulties in Beijing in winter. There is a long queue in front of the station that does not charge parking fees, the charging pile is also full, the charging pile parking fee that collects the parking fee is flush with the charging fee, and the cost of the car provokes the owner to "heartache", so some car owners even get up early at 4 a.m., just to compete for "charging priority".
It should be known that this is still in the first-tier cities, and the distribution of charging piles/substations in China generally shows the characteristics of concentrated in the first- and second-tier and southeast coastal cities, and the resources in the western region and lower-tier cities are even more scarce.
If we focus on the city, the charging pile presents a different layout. Due to the uneven development of urban areas in the city, most of the old residential areas do not have the conditions to be equipped with charging piles, and the parking spaces in urban planning are tight, so many charging piles are arranged in suburbs with low population density.
However, this has caused another problem, the number of charging piles in the suburbs is large, but the utilization rate has never been raised, and the charging piles in urban areas are relatively few, but the charging demand is greater. As of September this year, although the national vehicle-to-pile ratio reached 3:1, the average utilization rate of the entire public charging pile was less than 10%. This is the so-called drought death of drought, the death of waterlogging.
On the other hand, with the drop in temperature and the increase in car mileage, electric vehicles also have a natural disadvantage that is battery attenuation.
In the recent winter endurance test of Chedi, the endurance rate of each model is generally around 50%, and the EC6 (2020 NEDC 615km) with the best performance among the nearly 40 models has an actual endurance of only 336.9km.
The ideal choice of range extender precisely neutralizes the advantages and disadvantages of trams and fuel vehicles.
In the previous article we mentioned that the technology of extending the range is not new, many OEMs have also used the extender technology, such as The Chevrolet Volt, BMW i3 have been on the road to the extended range, but the end is also very similar, the sluggish sales forced it to gradually stop production.
There are no successful cases in the market, why should the ideal still insist on the extender? To some extent, the previous use of extenders are all technical, sales are advanced, sales downturn is backward technology, but the ideal use of extenders is the obvious experience, they do not care whether this technology in the eyes of practitioners has become obsolete, only care about whether users really need it.
On the one hand, some people call the ideal ONE "take off the pants and fart", on the other hand, many car owners who communicate with the photonic planet have given different answers, they basically agree with the design of co-oil and electricity, the urban passage uses electricity to use oil to go out of the door, and there is no mileage anxiety while getting the experience of electric vehicles.
So the oil car and the tram are not completely opposites, at least the ideal thinks so. They chose to put the long plate of the oil car and the long board of the tram together, and then made a range extended electric vehicle, which avoided the short board of the oil car and the short board of the tram. As a result, it can compete with the same level of fuel vehicles and electric vehicles.
Untouched long-tail markets
In the medium and long term, the global automotive industry will eventually belong to pure electricity, which I believe everyone will not deny. In the case of the final game has been determined, Tesla, Weilai and Xiaopeng have all chosen to directly do pure electric models, only the ideal insists that the end game may take ten years or more to come, and during this period, the imperfect infrastructure of pure electric mode is bound to affect the energy supplementary experience of some users, but the program increase will not be.
In first- and second-tier cities, everyone's acceptance of pure electric models is significantly higher, which is not only because people's consumption concepts are more advanced, but also because of the level of infrastructure.
However, for third- and fourth-tier cities with imperfect charging facilities and low acceptance of new things, people are more receptive to fuel vehicles. Looking at the small markets of these cities, they cannot stand the large number.
Generally speaking, the new forces of car manufacturing generally adopt the model of self-operation or self-operation + franchise, which has greater pressure on capital pressure and personnel expansion, and the efficiency requirements of offline store site selection are also higher, so car companies generally give priority to first- and second-tier cities and southeast coastal cities, which also leads to a surge in the penetration rate of new energy in this part of the region.
According to the data, the proportion of new energy in November 2021 reached 20%, of which the new energy penetration rates of first-tier cities, new first-tier cities and second-tier cities were 33.9%, 24% and 19.8% respectively above the horizontal line, while the third- and fourth-tier cities and below were basically below 17%, and many cities have not even broken through the single digits.
Just like the average salary that is often complained about by netizens, a small number of people control most of the social wealth, and most people are just the one who is averaged.
How many cities are there in our country? As of September 2020, there are a total of 672, of which 49 are first-tier, new first-tier and second-tier cities, accounting for only 7.4%, which means that there are still a large number of cities that have not been touched by the new energy wave, and this part of the market is the long-tail market that the ideal is touching.
According to the sales situation of Weilai and Ideal in November this year, WEILAI has a high penetration rate in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, half of the top ten cities in the Yangtze River Delta, in addition, the top eight cities account for more than 50% of total sales, and the ideal as a whole is relatively average, there is no particularly high proportion of a certain region, in addition to using the extender can be sold in any region, its product strength can also support its competition with fuel vehicles in Cities that do not enjoy license policies in Beijing.
On the whole, from January to November this year, a total of 77,299 vehicles were sold, and the top 20 cities contributed 70% of sales, and the rest of the cities contributed 70% of sales, although the sales of new energy vehicles were low and the contribution of individual cities was small, but the number of victories was large, and it also contributed 22,973 sales.
In November, ideal ONE became the first model in the new forces to break the 10,000-strong model, and also the first model of the domestic brand to break the 10,000 yuan class, of which the pure electric model has not yet reached the long-tail market has helped a lot.
epilogue
Li xiang's ambition is not big, the customer portrait is clear, the audience group is more concentrated, which is also the origin of the ideal ONE daddy car, family car title, but it is not small, with a single product to occupy a place in the new energy market, and he did it.
It seems that the ideal ONE's range increase has gone to "heresy", but I did not expect it to walk on three legs, and electric vehicles, fuel vehicles and the long-tail market have jointly pushed the ideal to the championship throne.
The success of the ideal ONE also has to cause some reflection, perhaps what method the company achieves in the development process is not important, what is important is the consumer experience, but many people will reverse the logic, such as PPT car companies, always try to show the process to consumers, but ignore the final result. This is also the focus of many car companies.
Consumers don't pay for how you achieve it, only for the final experience.
Li wanted to redefine the position of product manager in the traditional automotive industry, and in the case of serious homogenization of new energy, he explored his ideal own differentiated play.