Unconsciously, 2021 has begun to gradually come to an end. I believe that many readers have browsed the annual reports of various social platforms or related APPS in recent times. In this regard, Brother Cylinder will next review with you what major events have occurred in the automotive industry in the upcoming year.
Event 1: A number of car companies changed their bids!
On January 1, 2021, just entering the new year, BYD Automobile took the lead in releasing a new brand LOGO. Specifically, the main body of the logo has not changed, but compared with the old logo, the new logo cancels the oval boundary and becomes more open. According to BYD officials, BYD Automobile will face users and partners with a more open attitude and continue to break through boundaries in technological innovation. In addition, bydir's newly replaced logo is not only intuitive and concise, but also has an international element. It should be noted that the new LOGO is only used in the BYD passenger car market, and other businesses still use the original oval wordmark.
In addition to BYD, many car companies, including Geely, Kia, GM, Peugeot, Renault and other car companies, have launched a new brand LOGO. According to relevant people, taking Geely Automobile as an example, the main reason for the release of a new LOGO is that 2021 is the 35th year of Geely Holding Group's entrepreneurship, and the new LOGO means that Geely Holdings is entering a new stage of development and becoming an international car company with a young, intelligent and global corporate strategy.
Brother Tank Comments: The car brand logo represents the brand image of an enterprise, and the change of the standard may be a change made by the car company in line with the development of the times, which has a great role in promoting the inheritance of brand culture and the improvement of marketing methods. However, the point that Brother Cylinder wants to emphasize here is that it is a good thing to innovate, but it is not enough to rely on a logo to change the inherent impression of the brand in the minds of consumers. Therefore, while the brand identity is renewed, car companies need to upgrade and optimize their products to match the new brand identity, so that consumers can truly accept the new brand image.
Incident 2: After the Shanghai Auto Show, Tesla was caught in the "rights protection" storm
April 19, 2021, doesn't seem like a good day for Tesla. A Tesla Model 3 female owner from Henan made a big fuss at the Tesla booth at the Shanghai Auto Show after breaking through layers of security, which attracted the attention of the automotive industry. It is worth mentioning that after the incident, the reputation of the Tesla brand has been pushed to the forefront of public opinion, even if many people are still prejudiced against Tesla.
It should be noted that in the past year, involving Tesla's rights protection incidents, there are more than three only in the news, from the owner's rights protection, to Tesla's lawsuit against the owner to fight back, what we see is that Tesla has always been tough in the face of domestic car owners. Among them, the performance of Tesla's global vice president Tao Lin is the most prominent.
Brother Tank Comments: Any scientific and technological innovation will have defects in the early stage and need to go through a process of trial and error. As an emerging product, pure electric vehicles are naturally inevitable to have such a look, especially when it comes to life safety. Although the dispute between Tesla and the female owner has not yet reached an accurate result, we can be sure that Tesla has encountered problems, perhaps other new force car companies and traditional car companies will encounter in the near future, for example, after Tesla, Weilai Automobile has a "self-driving assistance system" failure. In this regard, the cylinder brother can only say that the problem is not a "problem", but the manufacturer should work with the user to solve it, rather than "hard and hard".
Finally, Brother Cylinder believes that rights protection incidents similar to Tesla may not appear in the future. According to the latest news, future vehicles will be equipped with EDR, which is what we often call the "black box", and this change may be able to fundamentally avoid the recurrence of "Tesla rights protection incidents".
Incident three: new force car companies are on the "hot search" again!
As a key project of China's development - new energy vehicles, in the context of the continuous tilt of policy and market dividends, various industry giants have begun to get involved in the automotive field, including the Internet, consumer electronics, travel and so on. In fact, cross-border car manufacturing is not a new thing, in addition to "Wei Xiaoli", the early cross-border car manufacturing is also Midea, Evergrande, Foxconn and so on.
Combined with the situation in the first three quarters of this year, the leader of the first batch of new car-making forces, "Wei Xiaoli", has successfully gained a foothold in the market, such as Weilai Automobile's delivery volume of 66,395 units in the first three quarters of 2021, Xiaopeng Automobile's delivery volume of 56,404 vehicles in the first three quarters, and the delivery volume of ideal cars in the first three quarters of 55,270 vehicles. Compared with the total sales volume of the whole year of 2020, the sales volume of "Wei Xiaoli" in the first three quarters of this year has achieved 72% growth. While achieving a substantial increase in sales, new power car companies, including "Wei Xiaoli" and WM, are still making continuous efforts, such as WM Motors, which is stepping up the layout of the product matrix of SUVs + cars.
For the first batch of new car-making forces represented by "Wei Xiaoli", although they are the first batch of new car companies to eat "crabs", they are also facing countless challenges. Unlike the first batch of new car-making forces, the second wave of car-making new-force car companies are not inferior to the first batch of "players", for example, lei jun has not lacked news related to xiaomi cars in the automotive industry since the announcement of car manufacturing in March this year. In addition to Xiaomi's car, the appearance of brands such as Binli Automobile, Box Car, Niu Chuangxin Energy, and Avita has forced everyone to start re-examining the new energy automobile industry.
Cylinder Brother Comments: From the overall situation of the new energy vehicle market in 2021, with the continuous improvement of the penetration rate of new energy vehicles, the user's awareness of new brands is also improving, all of which provides more possibilities for new players to enter the new energy vehicle track. Of course, although the previous sacrifice and the only remaining first wave of new car-making forces with a huge cost of trial and error, disguised to inform the latecomers what problems should be paid attention to, to avoid what mistakes to make, coupled with the strength of the new players themselves, in the next road to car building will indeed become much flatter, but the cylinder brother believes that the current time left for runners running into the new track is not much, and the new players need to accelerate the promotion of products to gain market recognition.
Incident four: Didi removed from shelves
In 2021, at noon on June 30, US time, Didi officially landed on the New York Stock Exchange under the trading code "DIDI". Since the submission of the prospectus, Didi has been favored by the capital market, not only successfully obtaining 10 times oversubscription, but also oversubscripting the original plan of US$4 billion ahead of schedule. Just when everyone thought that Didi was about to reach a new peak, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued an announcement on July 2 to conduct a security review of Didi Chuxing in accordance with the National Security Law and the National Cybersecurity Law.
Subsequently, the State Internet Office released a message on July 4, saying: "According to the report, after testing and verification, the 'Didi Chuxing' APP has serious violations of laws and regulations on mobile phone personal information. In accordance with the relevant provisions of the Cybersecurity Law of the People's Republic of China, the Cyberspace Administration of China will notify the app store to remove the 'Didi Chuxing' APP." On December 3, Didi announced that it was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange and switched to Hong Kong stocks.
After the fall of Didi, it was followed by the rise of travel platforms such as T3 Travel and Cao Cao Travel. According to the third quarter report of the mobile Internet data platform Aurora Big Data, Cao Cao Travel's monthly active users rose to 11.015 million and T3 out of 9.867 million, nearly doubling the growth compared with the first quarter of 2021.
Brother Didi comments: Regarding the removal of Didi, I believe many readers know that Brother Cylinder has analyzed the reasons for Didi Chuxing's removal, mainly because Didi Chuxing is suspected of leaking domestic user information to foreign forces, which can be corroborated by a report on the whereabouts of Chinese ministry officials previously released by the Didi California Research Institute. The reason why the relevant departments will attach so much importance to this incident is mainly because once the data in Didi's hands falls into the hands of foreign forces, it is bound to affect our security.
Event 5: "Carbon Neutrality", forcing car companies to electrify!
Whether it's automakers or ordinary people, one of the words we hear the most in 2021 is undoubtedly "carbon neutral.". According to public data, the carbon emissions of the transportation industry have increased year by year in recent years, and due to the increase in automobile travel and automobile transportation, passenger cars and freight carbon emissions account for up to 75% of the overall carbon emissions of the transportation industry. Therefore, the energy structure of the transportation industry needs to be improved urgently. In this context, major car companies are actively taking action, and accelerating "decarbonization" has become the general trend of the automotive industry.
At the same time as mentioning "carbon neutrality", we have to talk about Toyota. As the world's largest automobile manufacturer, Toyota Motor's head Akio Toyoda has repeatedly made public remarks to suppress electric vehicles. However, not long ago, Toyota motor released its future product plan, which includes the launch of fifteen pure electric vehicles in the next few years and the transformation of Lexus into a pure electric vehicle brand.
Brother Cylinder commented: "Carbon neutrality" has brought a broad market space to the automotive industry, especially to promote the development of the electric vehicle market. After reviewing Akio Toyoda's remarks in the past year or so, we found that Akio Toyoda's point of view is not unreasonable, after all, although there is no emission in the process of pure electric vehicles in use, combined with China's current thermal power generation and battery follow-up treatment, the pollution of pure electric vehicles is indeed a problem that cannot be ignored.
Event Six: Huawei really doesn't build cars!
Whether Huawei makes cars or not has always been a concern for the automotive industry. I remember that at this year's Shanghai Auto Show, we saw the HI version of the Polar Fox Alpha S model equipped with Huawei's autonomous driving technology undergoing a public test ride in Shanghai, which attracted the attention of all parties. Subsequently, Huawei and Xiaokang jointly released the Xilis SF5 model and sold it in Huawei's flagship store; subsequently, the first model of aito, a new car brand developed by Xiaokang and Huawei, was unveiled at Huawei's winter new product launch.
At the press conference, Yu Chengdong, managing director of Huawei, CEO of consumer business and CEO of smart car solution BU, said: "We and Xiaokang Xilis released the SF5 car this spring, using some components of Huawei Drive ONE and some of our technology, but the whole vehicle was not designed by us. Therefore, we feel that we can do better, and this time we used the industrial design team, software team, and user experience team of Huawei's consumer business to create this product together. ”
Brother Cylinder Comments: All along, when people from all walks of life ask Huawei "whether Huawei will build cars", Ren Zhengfei's attitude has always been "Huawei will not go down to build cars, but help car companies build good cars." In this regard, combined with the M5 jointly created by Huawei and Xilis, when Huawei goes deep into the design and sales links, what is the difference between it and its own car building? Of course, Brother Cylinder believes that in the future automotive market, we will most likely not see automotive products labeled with Huawei's brand logo, because compared with becoming a supplier of smart electric vehicle parts, the profits brought by the next car are difficult to meet Huawei's "appetite". It is worth mentioning that compared with the next car, although it is more difficult to become a Tier 1 supplier, the competition is relatively small.
Of course, combined with Huawei's smart car solution, we can see that the solution almost includes the core technology of smart electric vehicles, including intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, etc. In the era of software-defined cars, we can boldly speculate that Xilis may become the main deep partner of Huawei's "getting on the car" for a long time in the future, after all, most car companies with the right to speak will not be willing to become a foundry, such as CHEN Hong, chairman of SAIC, once said: "You must master the soul yourself."
Event Seven: Chip Shortage!
Since the outbreak of the "lack of core" problem at the end of 2020, a small chip has almost become a nightmare for global car companies, affecting the normal operation of the auto market in 2021. According to industry experts, in 2021, the global production will most likely be reduced by 7-8 million vehicles, of which the production capacity of automobiles in the Chinese market will be reduced by 2 million. There are many reasons for the shortage of chips, such as the high heat of consumer chips that has caused the tilt of production resources, plus
In the face of the "chip shortage", major car companies can be said to be doing their best, such as General Motors President Mark Reus said that it will work with qualcomm, TSMC, Renesas Electronics, ST Semiconductors, ON Semiconductors, NXP Semiconductors and Infineon Technologies to develop chips. Subsequently, in December, the BMW Group signed an agreement with microchip developer INOVA and semiconductor manufacturer GF to guarantee the supply of millions of chips per year. In addition to related cooperation, there is no shortage of car manufacturers to buy chips at high prices in the electronics market, and some brand dealers use fares to recover used cars and resell them to new users.
Cylinder brother comments: "Chip shortage" exposed is the global automotive industry in the supply chain disadvantages, may affect the sales of major car manufacturers in a short period of time, but from a long-term point of view, this incident made car companies re-examine their own shortcomings, for the follow-up stable production laid a "foundation".
Event 8: Car company marketing "rollover"!
Looking back at the upcoming 2021, with the continuous enrichment of automotive products and the increasingly serious internal involvement of the automotive industry, major car companies are also innovating in marketing in order to attract the attention of consumers. It is undeniable that in 2021, car companies have indeed made great progress in marketing, but there are also many car companies that have "overturned" in the marketing process, such as Ford poster pictures, Rolls-Royce inviting Internet celebrities to shoot promotional videos by netizens Diss, Infiniti spokespersons overturning and so on.
Brother Tank Comments: Combined with the marketing activities of car companies in 2021 and other aspects, whether it is inviting Internet celebrities to promote or the "user co-creation" that everyone often mentions, it is a plan made by car companies to seek resonance with consumers. However, the suggestion that Brother Cylinder has to make here is that although the network can bring more exposure to the brand, it will also make the mistakes of car companies be magnified in the public eye. Therefore, in addition to the need to control each link in terms of marketing, car companies must also grasp the direction of good public opinion.
summary
2021 is coming to an end, and in this year, we have seen the rise of new stars and the decline of "superstars". However, all this is beneficial for us consumers, after all, under the mechanism of survival of the fittest in the market, the product will be fully improved and optimized, and we can enjoy the product better. Finally, Brother Cylinder would like to thank all readers for their continued attention in the past year, and hope to continue to interact with you in the new year!