Under the lens of the time magazine photographer, musk's face as a "cosmic Internet celebrity" was constantly enlarged.
This is perhaps the most memorable day in the new energy automobile circle, and the Time Magazine Annual Person of the Year, which has lasted for nearly a century, has focused on Musk. Just last year, U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris were elected.
2021 undoubtedly belongs to Musk, "his finger will cause the stock price to soar or plummet." His every sentence has been taken as a guideline by a large group of fans"; in 2021, it undoubtedly belongs to China's new energy vehicles.
This year, it experienced 1 million sales that continued to lie flat. In 2021, this figure suddenly soared to 3 million vehicles. Consumers who once cast a skeptical eye on new energy vehicles began to vote with their feet. The data shows that the purchase intention of new energy vehicles in 2021 is approaching 50%.
This year, Wei Xiaoli's "three fools of electric vehicles" finally met on the NASDAQ. The latest financial report shows that the era of "reducing food and clothing" has passed, and they are sitting on more than 45 billion yuan of cash flow.
This year, the traditional forces are not to be outdone. Car companies such as BYD, Wuling and BBA are full of energy to transform. The anxiety of the "old auto people" is self-evident, the new forces frequently shout, Weilai founder Li Bin bluntly said that the traditional forces are too "nostalgic", "I simply do not understand at all, why do you still buy oil trucks now, this is more nostalgic to buy oil trucks."
Heat, anxiety and the alternation of old and new, this emotion is intertwined around the new energy vehicles in 2021, but a more appropriate word may be differentiation.
Discarding the prejudiced "old autobots"
After more than 5 months, the Weibo of ideal founder Li Xiang finally ushered in an update. Since December, he has been using social media to preview the ideal year-end report card, not only about sales, but also about the inexplicable "gunpowder smell" with traditional car companies. Under a chart titled "Ideal ONE 24-month Challenge for Medium and Large SUV Sales Champions," the "product tyrant" responded with high-profile figures to Volkswagen China CEO Feng Sihan's negative evaluation of the "extended range" technology solution.
"The Worst Solution for Extended Range". A few months ago, Feng Sihan said this.
"Thanks for the encouragement, keep up the good work." A few months later, Li xiang paired it with an "arched hand" expression and a "12445:13438" columnar data comparison chart.
Image source: Li Xiang Weibo
5:1 – A victory with less wins more.
The ideal of successfully "revenge" the public with sales is only one of the footnotes to the high penetration of new energy vehicles in less than a year.
Growth is not linear, but exponential. In the four years from 2016 to 2020, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles in China increased from 1% to 5.8%. In less than a year since last year, that number has risen to 12.7 percent. (Cumulative sales penetration rate in the first 11 months).
A consensus is that under the soaring penetration rate, all the defenses of traditional car companies are very pale. Despite a century of glorious car manufacturing history, under the outlet of energy substitution, electrification is a real trend. Li Bin directly used mechanical watches and electronic watches to compare electric vehicles and fuel vehicles. Shen Hui, the founder of Weima, responded with Li Bin in the air: "Just like the car replacing the horse-drawn carriage, the historical trend is irreversible, and the automobile has entered the next era." ”
The tide is irreversible. But just a few years ago, traditional car companies still held a prejudice against electrification, and most of the transformations were only "thunder and rain" - such as testing the market with several electric vehicle products, and always being cautious about full electrification at the strategic level. At the year-end press conference of the Japan Association of Automobile Manufacturers at the end of last year, as the world's largest traditional car company, Toyota head Akio Toyoda even directly opened the spit, "Electric vehicles have been over-hyped." ”
But just this year, the electrification revolution has begun to spread within traditional car companies. When fuel hits an electric, it turns out that for traditional car companies, it is like tossing a coin, and it seems that it is only a matter of time before all In electrification is chosen.
For example, Toyota Motor Corporation announced that it will electrify two-thirds of the world's products by 2030, and Nissan Motor motor also announced that it will electrify major new models by the beginning of this year. In the BBA, Mercedes-Benz is more aggressive. In July, a historic decision was issued from the desk of Mercedes-Benz board chairman Conlinson, and the 135-year-old German luxury car manufacturer officially announced its "full electrification" strategy.
Traditional car companies have decided to give the bigger stage to electric vehicles. At the beginning of this year, a more interesting detail is that on the huge booth in the auto show, the C position is no longer a fuel car, but a unique electric vehicle. For example, this year's "pin crown" Hongguang MINIEV and BYD Dynasty series, which have dominated the list for several consecutive months. When traditional car companies begin to use Internet thinking to make products, do well and do poorly, there is often a huge gap between them.
It seems that with some determination to break with tradition, in the past year, if you pull out the long list of independent brands of new energy vehicles of traditional car companies (Extreme Kr (Geely), Sharon (Great Wall), Avita (Chang'an, etc.), Lantu (Dongfeng Motor), Zhiji (SAIC, etc.), Jihu (BAIC)). From the name, they seem to have faded the "industrial flavor" brought by a century-old history.
But if you look closely, only a few products have broken through the siege of Tesla and the "three fools" and become a veritable hit. This is a kind of innate helplessness. The story of technology and technology has long been told by new forces. In the new track, in incremental areas such as automatic driving, which has attracted much attention, traditional car companies rarely set off new waves.
After letting go of prejudice, we must face reality. "Follow the strategy" doesn't work. For traditional car companies, the journey of electrification has just begun. In the words of Wei Jianjun, chairman of Great Wall Motor, "old guns" may need more courage: "We must carry out a 'rebirth'-style change, only by completely self-revolution, there are more possibilities to go further in the future." ”
Be back to your own electric car "three fools"
The main lighting of the stage still belongs to the new forces of car-making. Almost everyone has to admit this.
In a recent media interview, Weilai founder Li Bin summed up the "years" of the new forces drama in one paragraph:
"2019 is almost hanging up, 2020 is a little slower, and even some drama (drama). At the beginning of this year, I had the opportunity to really be myself again. One of the most common things I said within the company last year was to prevent post-traumatic after-effects (PTSD). ”
Li Bin's "really being back to yourself" is the core main line of the new forces this year.
Only a little more than a year ago, the "three fools" were still struggling to cross the line of life and death. He Xiaopeng distributed a circle of friends at 21:48 on June 6, 2020 to record the "darkest moment" of the new car-making forces:
"Three bitter X's, thinking about change."
Image source: XP-He Xiaopeng Weibo
The cash flow pool without money, the frequent natural accidents, and the "problem" of mass production under the cold eyes of capital... This kind of scene is easily reminiscent of the former Musk. All the suffering experienced by the "Iron Man of Silicon Valley" seems to be repeated on the other side of the ocean.
As 2007 moves toward 2008, Tesla's Roadster squeezes musk's money and he has to start selling his sports car for more money.
But for the "three fools", through 2020, everything is picking up. If the former "three fools" are still seeking the greatest common divisor of survival to some extent, in 2021, they are digging into their true selves.
In the secondary market, there is a view that investors believe that the three companies of "Wei Xiaoli" can actually be regarded as the same type of target, and that they are not substantially different in nature.
This view, perhaps after 2021, needs to be overturned or re-validated.
The latest Q3 financial report has shown this differentiation - In terms of delivery volume and research and development expenses, Xiaopeng leads; in terms of revenue and market value, WEI is dominant; profit and cash flow, the ideal situation is better.
He Xiaopeng recently personally labeled the "three fools": "Weilai is high-end plus power exchange", the ideal car uses the extended range to achieve the mutual benefits of electric vehicles and fuel vehicles, and Xiaopeng Automobile is intelligent and handsome. ”
Among the "three fools", Xiao Peng's geek gene is heavier. To some extent, it is more like Tesla, known for its "high research and development and high investment" style of play. On the one hand, this may be related to the personality of He Xiaopeng himself. In public, He Xiaopeng is the most talkative person in the "three fools"; on the other hand, it is related to the hottest autonomous driving technology at present. According to He Xiaopeng, the penetration rate of assisted driving of Xiaopeng P7 is more than 50%. In the future, with the iterative upgrade of software, He Xiaopeng estimates that in Xiaopeng's third model, this number will rise to 80%.
He Xiaopeng is still paying attention to flying cars, and in an interview with Late Post, the investment in this track was directly taken to benchmark with "SpaceX and Musk", and He Xiaopeng's rebuttal was "I want to make a different traffic combination". Not long ago, his Xiaopeng Huitian announced the completion of more than $500 million A round of financing, with a pre-investment valuation of more than $1 billion.
This is Xiaopeng's unique sense of rhythm, when the end of the smart car is undecided, when the autonomous driving technology is still in the limelight, it has begun to study "air traffic".
The ideal delivery volume on the other side is not ideal. Although the first November was at the bottom of the delivery volume, the advantages of the ideal segmentation scenario gradually became prominent. In "Three Fools", Ideal is more like a cautious productist. Regarding the relationship between product, technology and business, Li wants to have a priority order: "Products pull technology, and they pull business. ”
The smoke of "burning money" has not yet dissipated, and Li wants to pay more attention to how to create a more effective product under the existing competitive model. This explains why the ideal bet is on the "extended range electric vehicle" that is regarded as a transitional route in the industry, and at present, the ideal has only one model (the ideal ONE) to play the world.
Although "Extended Journey" was once packaged as a warm story of pulse. The user base that Li wants to choose is the family, so "extended range" is the best way to alleviate the mileage anxiety when traveling with families. After all, unlike pure electric vehicles, the ideal ONE also has a generator and fuel tank. "You drive out alone, look for a charging pile, find a charging pile, queue up, take your parents, and queue up when you go out with your children, it's not a concept at all." Li wanted to explain his obsession with "increasing the range" in this way.
But stories are always stories. What really cuts to the ideal is actually the "mileage anxiety" of the "electric dads". The "extended range" of taking the middle route has the advantages of both fuel vehicles and pure trams, which is the most compromise and the most in line with the needs of the solution, and also the most economical solution. The financial report shows that in terms of cash reserves, ideal automobile in the "three fools" ranked first with 48.83 billion yuan, and had the lowest loss and the highest gross profit margin.
This is very much in line with Li Xiang's product thinking. After all, there are money-making technologies to have profitable products, and products that can make money are really good products.
Compared with the ideal productism and Xiaopeng's technicalism, Weilai is a typical user experience first. From the very beginning, this close relationship has permeated NIO's corporate culture. Such a culture has been amplified by a series of public opinion events this year. For example, the death of the Weilai ES8 car accident in August this year caused people to question Weilai's "rice circle culture", and the public's attention was originally on the Weilai ES8 automatic driving, but because 500 car owners jointly signed to support Weilai, the focus of public opinion shifted again.
In fact, the emphasis on users is in line with NIO's high-end strategy. From the price range, WEILAI currently launched a number of models, the price is more than 300,000 yuan, adhering to the product strategy of holding high, Weilai is aiming at opponents not only Tesla, but also the traditional aristocratic BBA.
Li Bin himself often hangs on the BBA: "The goal is to turn 'BBA' into 'NBA'" In other words, whether he is an electric car or a fuel vehicle, what Weilai wants is the high-end market.
Of course, in addition to the division, if you have to find common ground, in addition to the bumpy entrepreneurial story in the early years, "Wei Xiaoli" represents a history that truly belongs to Chinese car brands, after all, the history writers in this field were once German and Japanese companies. In the article "New Cars Crossing the Line of Life and Death", there is a more appropriate assessment: "These three people all know the flow of the long river of human technology, because they are the river itself." ”
In the year of 2021, while becoming a river, they also firmly found themselves.
The tides are rising, and they are galloping
It's hard to be a river, but if you widen your horizons, the river is just a wave in the vast sea.
Undoubtedly, 2021 is a surging year of new energy waves, but compared with the sudden emergence and sudden disappearance of the wind outlet in this year, the industry as a whole still seems to be somewhat calm.
Compared with the dreams and passions at the press conference, the production capacity dilemma at the delivery end has become a dark cloud that lingers over the heads of countless new energy brands in this year. In the auto-related news, the shortage of key components such as chips and radars has gradually become a norm, and behind the global production cuts, the traditional fuel vehicle giants have suffered heavy losses, and new energy vehicle manufacturers have not been spared.
This was particularly evident in the fourth quarter. According to the latest data from AutoForecast Solutions, as of November 21, the cumulative production reduction in the global automotive market this year due to chip shortages was 10.12 million units. Among them, the cumulative production reduction in China's automobile market has reached 1.981 million units, accounting for 19.6% of the total production reduction.
Affected by this, many car companies are actively "reducing" on the product side, and even hand over "semi-finished products", in the Xiaopeng P5 and the ideal ONE, these two hot-selling models, if consumers want to pick up the car as soon as possible, they can choose the delivery plan of the reduced radar, and then reload it after the radar supply is sufficient.
Some time ago, He Xiaopeng, a guest of CCTV Finance's "Dialogue Challenger" program, shouted bluntly in front of the camera: "Whoever can give me a chip, I will invite him to drink more." ”
The downturn in the overall production capacity of the industry is an important reason for the obstruction of the new round of expansion of the new energy industry, macro point of view, it gives all brands a fair "protection period", when the market has initially dispelled the purchase concerns of new energy vehicles, it has postponed the possible delivery of the "watershed", but also extended the opening hours of the new energy entry channel in disguise.
There is no indication that the shortage of chip capacity will ease in the upcoming 2022. This also means that consumers are likely to continue to witness the entry of a series of new brands next year, and in the time when the first mover cannot expand and consolidate its advantages with delivery, the new energy game is still full of changes.
Although various charging and power replacement technologies have made great breakthroughs, and the pilot's "Wei Xiaoli" has also appeared a series of strategic differentiation from the user, technology and cost side, however, in terms of the price range of the product, the domestic new energy brands that are fighting in the melee are still generally piled up in the high-end range of 200,000 yuan to 400,000 yuan where the "concept" prevails.
In the more expensive luxury zone and the more affordable compact (A-class car) zone, the penetration of new car-making forces is still difficult.
In other words, so far, among the new car-making forces, there is still no luxury brand that can really benchmark or even surpass the BBA, nor has there been a national car and a family sedan with universal significance.
Compared with the "comfort zone" of the new forces of car manufacturing, the luxury range does not have such high requirements for the product strength of a single car, but pays more attention to the influence of the brand and the differentiation of marketing, and the development of the automobile market for hundreds of years has made the "luxury" evaluation criteria deeply rooted in the hearts of the people - wheelbase, facilities, leather seats. Even if you use the "futuristic" and technical concepts to frantically package your own High-Company car, you have to honestly add luxury labels such as "car refrigerator, British treasure audio" in the promotional copy.
In contrast, how to implant elements of new energy vehicles in this discourse system will also become the goal of many brands in 2022.
In another vast market, the A-class car, the challenges faced by the new car-making forces are equally severe.
Among the many models, the A-class car, as the closest product to consumers, brings together the essence of the brand's industrial strength and business ability. A qualified A-class car, the configuration can not be too low, the price can not be too high, the design should be decent, the cost control is extremely strict, which means that the production of car companies not only need to have the strength of the industrial end of the full link coverage, but also have an excellent operating standard.
Despite the strict requirements, A-class cars are still the focus of many brands' pursuit, and the key lies in the huge consumer group symbolized behind them, in the field of traditional fuel vehicles, A-class users account for almost half of the overall market.
In the top 15 car sales charts in November, A-class cars occupied nine seats. However, in the new energy vehicle market, A-class vehicles accounted for only 25% of overall sales, unchanged from the same period last year.
This may also be why Li Jinyong, president of the New Energy Branch of the Automobile Dealers Chamber of Commerce of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, said in the latest issue of "Car Talks": "Chinese enterprises can only become leaders in the global automotive industry if they create a real national car and scooter." ”
From a macro point of view, this differentiation in product structure may be the key to determining the future market impression of new energy vehicles after the differentiation of concepts and strategies.
In the past 2021, after witnessing the melting of glaciers of traditional forces and the convergence of streams of new forces into water systems, the surging tide of new energy is crossing the watershed and transforming into a new "big river".
The upcoming 2022, the foreseeable differentiation, may continue. However, in addition to the land that the tide has rolled over, in addition to the difficult growth of the past stream, whether it is a manager or a practitioner, perhaps it should not be forgotten that in the market far from the concept and the outlet, there is still a vast land, looking forward to the moisture of the water.
END
Author 丨 Sesame paste No rust bowl
Source | Finances are not taboo
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