Last week, Huawei released the first new energy vehicle equipped with the Hongmeng system: The Q&I M5, which is priced in three gears: 250,000 rear-drive, 280,000 four-wheel drive, and 320,000 flagship. Obviously, this pricing is not low, chasing the price of Tesla Model 3 250,000 or so.
Huawei's first car did not adopt the market strategy of making mobile phones that year, starting from low-end prices and slowly extending to the high-end, but directly entering the high-end field and playing high.
It should be known that although the media publicity defines the M5 as "Huawei's first new energy vehicle equipped with the Hongmeng system", in addition to the Hongmeng system built into the car, the hardware of the car is from a third party: Xilis. In its propaganda, Huawei consciously or unconsciously weakened the presence of Xilis.
More car critics pointed out that the so-called Huawei's first new car Q&I M5 is actually a PLUS version of the Cyrus SF5, with few hardware improvements, only on the basis of SF5, equipped with a Hongmeng system, it has become the Q&I M5.
The original SF5 has been on the market for more than a year, and sales have been dismal. As of November 2021, only 6,572 vehicles were sold, and only a dozen were bought in February, the lowest sales volume (of which more than 3,000 were sold from Huawei channels).
Not only can it not catch up with the 200,000 Model 3, but even the domestic "Wei Xiaoli" cannot beat it.
It can be seen from this that the Q&A M5 should be Huawei's test of the water. After all, BYD, Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal all have self-developed in-vehicle systems, and they regard intelligent in-vehicle systems as their core competitiveness and are unlikely to fake hands on others.
As a latecomer in the new energy vehicle market, Cyris urgently needs Huawei's traffic support. In the cooperation between the two sides, Huawei has a large voice, which is an appropriate complement between strength and weakness.
Although, Huawei asked the M5 in the price, benchmarked the Tesla Model 3, but in essence, the two are not a class of cars at all, the target car buying crowd is not the same, the market that wants to eat is also different, and the comparability is not strong.
The hard wound of the M5: there is no automatic driving
Yu Chengdong compares the M5 to the "million-level luxury car standard", but the M5 equipped with the Hongmeng system does not have an automatic driving function!
You know, the mainstream new energy vehicles on the market are equipped with automatic driving without exception - even if they are not so smart, accidents often occur, but automatic driving technology is an important difference between new energy vehicles and traditional oil vehicles, and it is a technology that cannot be stripped away in the concept of smart cars.
Tesla's proud FSD system has raised the level of autonomous driving to level 3, just one step away from a fully driverless level 4.
Musk expects that after 10 years, the FSD system will bring Tesla $100 billion in additional revenue per year. Domestic Xiaopeng and Weilai's autonomous driving has also reached level 2.5 and is moving towards level 3.
Why doesn't Huawei's "Millionaire" have automatic driving?
There is a more credible inference that major car companies do not cooperate.
To establish a complete automatic driving system, a large amount of actual driving data is required. For example, Tesla's FSD uses AI image learning, and millions of Teslas are driving on the street, and the camera is recording various driving scenarios and accumulating learning data.
At present, the domestic driving data is basically in the hands of various car companies, and BYD's car has a "coach mode" that collects road test data and driving habit data. Huawei has no data if it does not build cars, and even if it has technology, it will not fall to the ground.
Google's Waymo autonomous driving has collected 20 million miles of data, and there have been no major accidents, which has been favored by many international car companies.
The suppliers of autonomous driving technology of domestic car companies basically come from three major companies: Sagitar Juchuang, Horizon, and Momen Tower, which have cooperated with various car companies to accumulate data and will soon be put into practical use.
This falls into a paradox: Huawei does not build cars first, there is no data, there is no automatic driving, but automatic driving is the standard of new energy vehicles. A question similar to "chicken or egg first".
In the process of Huawei's promotion of Hongmeng, automatic driving has been repeatedly mentioned by major car companies, and a person involved in the negotiations said: "We communicated with Huawei in 2019, but their automatic driving was worrying, and then it was not resolved." ”
Domestic car companies such as BAIC, SAIC, Changan, Dongfeng, Great Wall, Geely, and Chery have all had "scandals" with Huawei Hongmeng, but none of them have yielded results.
Domestic car companies are afraid that Huawei is too strong, the tail is too big, and it loses its dominance. Therefore, it is also reasonable that Huawei's first car cooperates with the less famous Cyris.
The battle between pure electricity and plug-in
New energy vehicles have a "fatal problem": mileage. There is no doubt that in the competition between new energy vehicles and fuel vehicles, battery life is the biggest disadvantage.
Although major new energy vehicle brands have repeatedly emphasized that their cruising range is constantly improving, charging will become more and more convenient in the future. But consumers buy cars now, not in the future. Why should consumers pay today for tomorrow's improvements?
The mileage of pure electric vehicles is within the range of naked eye visible, and there will be no qualitative leap in the short term. In order to solve the problem of battery life, plug-in technology has become the choice of many brands, and Huawei's M5 is no exception.
The M5 claims to run more than 1,000 kilometers with a single charge of electricity, and the 600 kilometers of Tesla are completely exploded, not because its batteries have revolutionary innovations, but with plug-in technology.
Plug-in technology has two major genres, one is the ideal extender plug-in, and the other is BYD's DMI plug-in. The original plug-in technology had two power sources, which could be refueled or recharged (unlike oil-electric hybrids, hybrids have no charging ports and rely on the engine to charge).
In addition to the ideal range extender plug-in, engine charging is introduced, which greatly improves the pure electric mileage.
BYD's DMI plug-in technology is more mysterious, theoretically assembling three technologies of pure electricity, extended range and hybrid, covering the demand for new energy travel in the whole scene, so BYD Song has been selling well. But maintenance is more difficult, the technology is too complicated.
Huawei's plug-in technology of the Q&A M5 is biased towards the ideal ONE's extended-range plug-in, and the driver can choose to run with pure electricity or oil.
Even if it is charged once, the boundary can only run 100 kilometers, and the follow-up continuous "oil to electricity" can increase the mileage to 1000 kilometers. Even in the environment of minus 20 degrees in the northeast, the battery life is greatly reduced, and it is enough to use oil directly.
Qjie M5 extender charging seems to perfectly solve the endurance problem of new energy vehicles, but it can not escape a problem: pure electric endurance is very limited, if you want to rely on refueling to supplement the endurance, why should I buy an electric vehicle? Isn't it more straightforward to buy a gas car? Maybe it's just to get a good license (green card) in a big city?
Musk slammed the extended range technology as a compromise on the oil car: "Any compromise is a sign of no confidence in the future. ”
He claimed that the advent of range-extended vehicles has slowed down the new energy vehicle revolution: "When people realized that refueling can also be charged, their popularity of charging piles is less urgent. ”
Tesla does not have a single plug-in car, all pure electricity, to show their confidence in the future.
Musk said: "We only have a pure electric technology team, we will remain ahead in pure electric technology, rather than being distracted to plug in, and then focus on pure electricity when the supporting is mature." ”
According to Musk, plug-in cars cannot be called new energy vehicles, because he is the product of compromise and is fundamentally different from Tesla.
Many users who buy huawei M5 do not like new energy, but for the convenience of the license plate, the plug-in is used as a fuel car.
Huawei's ambition: only want to be "Bosch"
For the new energy automobile industry, Huawei has a clear definition of itself: it does not produce complete vehicles, but is the supplier of the first echelon. Solve intelligent problems for car companies.
Like Bosch in Germany, not a single car was produced, but cars all over the world used his brake system, and he was a well-deserved hidden champion of the industry.
New energy vehicles are a high-capital, high-tech industry, the competition is cruel, almost every province in China is cultivating its own new energy vehicle companies, intending to catch up with this wave of huge dividends, can there be a few who can laugh to the end? Handful.
Huawei understands the risks, leverages its strengths and avoids its weaknesses, and abandons hardware to do software, which is not only low cost, but also all car companies in the world will be potential partners. Like Google, it doesn't produce a single phone, but 80% of the world's mobile phones use Android.
The in-vehicle intelligent software market is attractive enough, a Tesla's FSD revenue will not be less than 100 billion US dollars in ten years, not to mention Hongmeng, which has the potential for cooperation between car companies around the world?
This is essentially different from Tesla personally making a car, Tesla is soft and hard hands, earning all the profits of the sales terminal. In other words, all car companies in the world are competitors of Tesla.
Huawei, who eats soft and does not eat hard, meets Tesla, which eats both soft and hard, the track does not coincide, the only thing that is comparable is the on-board intelligent system of the two companies, who does it better? Pure than car performance, there is no need.
Author: Jiang Zuo You'an