Listed for 8 months and with an average monthly sales of less than 1,000 vehicles, the first model SF5 cooperated by Huawei and Xilis, a new energy vehicle brand under Xiaokang Co., Ltd., has quietly withdrawn from some Huawei stores. Instead, Huawei's second model, the AITO M5, has partnered with Cilis.
The release of the new car has attracted a lot of attention, but the sudden withdrawal of the Cyrus SF5 has caused some car owners to question and dissatisfaction. In the past few days, the rumor of "Cyrus SF5 suspension" has continued to ferment. Some car owners said that they bought the old "discontinued model" on the eve of the release of the new car, infringing on their rights and interests. In addition, when the owner bought the SF5, he went to the name of "Huawei Smart Choice", and this model was suddenly marginalized by both sides, which was also a kind of harm to the owner.
(The M5 on display in the Huawei Experience Store in Beijing R&F Plaza, filmed by the city boundary)
A Huawei salesperson also revealed to the city that the follow-up stores will sell the new M5 and no longer sell the Xilis SF5, which has been discontinued.
As the second model of Huawei's cooperation with Xilix, the "first Hongmeng Automobile" AITO brand Q&E M5 was publicly unveiled at Huawei's winter flagship conference held on December 23, 2021. At this conference, Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei's intelligent car solution BU, did not hide his preference for this "new species", he spent more than 60 minutes to solemnly promote the M5, and repeatedly mentioned that it was "Huawei participated in the design of the new car" and that it was "equipped with the latest Hongmeng ecological cockpit".
Due to the dual aura of "Huawei" and "Hongmeng", the various comments triggered by the appearance of the M5 are still constantly being refreshed. In these public opinions, there are rumors that the Sales of the Xilis SF5 is not good and will be discontinued, and there are also doubts among consumers: Why does the Cialis SF5 supported by Huawei not sell well? AITO asked if the M5 would be the next Cyrus SF5?
The Cyrus SF5 was unsuccessful
On April 19, 2021, the Xilix SF5 (Huawei Smart Selection) was officially released. As a range extender SUV, the model was upgraded from the old Cyrus SF5 (the "Cyrus SF5" in the following article is a model in cooperation with Huawei).
As the first intelligent car jointly bred by Huawei and Xiaokang, the Xilix SF5 has invested great efforts in both parties from product function definition to quality control and consistency experience. In Yu Chengdong's words, this model is equipped with Huawei's DriveOne electric drive system, HUAWEI SOUND car music system, and is also equipped with a HiCar solution, which can theoretically perfectly copy Huawei's mobile application ecology to the car machine.
Under the circumstances of Huawei's high-level platform publicity and Huawei's intelligent vehicle technology, the Xilix SF5 was warmly sought after by the market as soon as it was launched, and more than 6,000 orders were won within a week after its release. At the beginning of the release of the Xilis SF5, Huawei had a grand vision of selling 5 million vehicles.
However, there is a huge reality gap between orders and actual sales. According to the data released by the National Passenger Association, in the eight months from April to November 2021, the sales of the SF5 of Cyrus were 129, 204, 1097, 507, 715, 1117, 2205 and 1446 respectively, with cumulative sales of only more than 7000 vehicles and an average monthly sales of less than 1000 vehicles.
In contrast, in the same period, the monthly sales of single models of friendly businesses such as Weilai Automobile and Xiaopeng Automobile were in the order of thousands of units. In the face of such a dilemma, the explanation made by Xilis's parent company Xiaokang on the "Shanghai e-Interactive" platform was that "the epidemic, the tight supply of chips and batteries, and the company's optimization and adjustment of the supply chain have affected the production rhythm". But these big and big reasons are hard to convince investors.
Objectively speaking, although sales have lagged significantly behind major competitors in the same period, the market performance of the Cyrus SF5 has indeed improved since the cooperation with Huawei, and the sales volume has increased significantly compared with before the cooperation with Huawei. However, this does not fundamentally solve the problem of sluggish sales of the Cyrus SF5.
An industry insider told the market that the lack of brand influence, general product competitiveness, and limited sales channels are the three important reasons for the market quagmire of Cyrus SF5. "These three key positions have been lost, what story is left?"
Ji Xuehong, director of the Automotive Industry Innovation Center of North China University of Technology, analyzed during the exchange with the city boundary that although the SF5 of Xilix has gained a certain degree of popularity with the help of Huawei, there are still obvious disadvantages in core competitiveness such as brand power and product strength.
He believes that "the passenger car business of Xilis parent company Xiaokang Co., Ltd. is small, and it does not have an advantage in the field of commercial vehicles in the face of competition from brands such as Wuling, resulting in its low brand recognition and difficulty in attracting passenger car consumers." ”
According to the production and sales data released by Xiaokang Shares, from July to December 2021, the company's new energy vehicle sales were 3189 vehicles, 3565 vehicles, 3987 vehicles, 4976 vehicles, 4591 vehicles and 6150 vehicles, respectively, and the overall sales volume increased. It should be pointed out that these data include the sales of new energy vehicle products of Dongfeng Fengguang, Dongfeng Xiaokang, Jinkang Automobile and other subsidiaries of Xiaokang Co., Ltd. In contrast, Geely Automobile and Great Wall Motor's sales of new energy vehicles in November 2021 reached 16,162 and 16,633 vehicles.
According to the official website, Xilis has about 15 experience centers across the country, and one of the competitors, Xiaopeng Automobile, has more than 100 stores in the country.
The general manager of a well-known car company 4S store in Beijing believes that the small number of Cyrus's own brand stores and excessive dependence on Huawei stores as sales channels have largely tied up Cyrus's brand expansion.
The products of the SF5 itself also have many defects. A number of car owners broke the news on the forum that the on-board Wi-Fi, OTA upgrade, car home interconnection and other functions mentioned in the promotional materials of the model have no shadow, and the mileage is far lower than the "1000+ kilometers" officially advertised.
More car owners said that the car company did not inform the Cyris SF5 in advance of the discontinuation of the trend, resulting in their own on the eve of the release of the new car to buy the old model. "When the new car arrives, it will become a discontinued model, and who should solve the problem of vehicle maintenance and upgrade and vehicle value preservation?"
When we visited the Huawei Experience Store in Beijing R&F Plaza at the end of December 2021, we confirmed that the Cyrus SF5 at the store had been withdrawn.
On January 5, Xilis responded to the city boundary that Xilis SF5 has no suspension plan, will continue to accept user orders and arrange for commissioners to deliver; and will provide the first owner of Xilis SF5 with a lifetime warranty of the whole vehicle and range extender; if the first owner buys other models of the company within four years, he can get an additional subsidy of 10,000 yuan.
However, we found that the "OK" option in the booking interface of the SF5 booking interface of the Cyris official website has been grayed out and cannot be booked.
Question M5 is born of sorrow
The rumors of the discontinuation of the Cyrus SF5 do not seem to have brought obvious distress to the booking of the new car World M5. A sales staff member of Huawei revealed that although the M5 is still only on display and has not yet officially entered Huawei stores, the number of orders for the car nationwide has exceeded 6,000 units.
However, many people have exchanged on social platforms that the Cyrus SF5 and the Q&I M5 are both designed by Huawei and manufactured by Jinkang Cyrus, a subsidiary of Xiaokang Shares, and it is difficult to say that there is a substantial difference between the two.
Perhaps stimulated and inspired by the Euler good cat "core changing door" incident, the "geek molecules" among consumers dissected the M5 from a technical level. They believe that in addition to the Harmony OS smart cockpit, the range extender power scheme, battery and range, electric drive system, in-car music system, and body size of the M5 are no different from the Xilix SF5. "The M5 is actually an iterative model of the Sf5, which is more like the same car in essence."
Ji Xuehong also believes that the two models of the M5 and the SF5 of the Celeste are relatively similar in terms of technical routes, vehicle parameters and appearance, and can essentially be regarded as iterative products of the same model.
At the market sales level, the Q&I M5 equipped with Huawei's Harmony OS smart cockpit has opened up a significant price difference with the Xilix SF5 before the "upgrade". According to the data released by the official website of Xilis, the same four-wheel drive version, the manufacturer guidance price of Xilisi SF5 is 246,800 yuan, while the manufacturer guidance price of The Qijie M5 is 280,000-320,000 yuan, and the highest difference between the two is more than 70,000 yuan.
On the interactive platform, there are not a few consumers who do not recognize the guidance price of the Q&I M5. Onlookers believe that despite Huawei's intelligent technology, it is difficult for this "immature" new car to support the price of 300,000 yuan. A Huawei store sales staff interviewed also admitted that an important reason why the Xilis SF5 is not selling well is that it is "really expensive" and "there is no price advantage".
A senior industry researcher at Beijing Panjincai Data Believes that Huawei positions the two smart cars it participates in in the design and empowerment of in a higher price range, which should be related to its strategy of laying out the high-end intelligent car market, and the pricing level itself is beyond reproach, but if the cooperation between Huawei and car companies is limited to the implantation of "hard core", it is difficult to judge how much such cooperation has an impact on the short-term sales and market share of car companies and the improvement of model brand value. "In the short term, the difficulties faced by the Q&A M5 may not be as small as the Lance SF5."
Since the release of Q&C M5, the stock price of Xilis parent company Xiaokang shares has continued to decline, from the price of about 76 yuan / share before the press conference to 55.10 yuan / share on January 6, a decline of more than 27%.
Huawei's virtual chessboard for cars
Before Huawei entered the smart car industry chain, there were many speculations about Huawei's car-making path. In the past year, although Huawei has successively bred new models of Xilis and Jihu with Xiaokang Shares and Beiqi Blue Valley in different forms, from the beginning to the present, Huawei has claimed that it will not build cars, but only focuses on ICT (information and communication technology) technology, and is committed to helping car companies build good cars.
An auto industry expert at Beijing Institute of Technology believes that through Huawei's three organizational changes to the automotive division in the past six months, the smart car business has in fact become the key development direction of Huawei's bet. In his view, unlike xiaomi, Baidu and other technology companies that directly enter the car manufacturing, Huawei has entered the game with a "non-competitive" role, trying to gradually cut into the automotive intelligent manufacturing chain by acting as a strategic partner of car companies.
According to the expert's analysis, there are two main modes of cooperation between Huawei and car companies: either jointly establish sub-brands with GAC, BAIC (including Jihu) and Changan to provide them with Huawei Insider (HI) full-stack solutions; or provide MDC intelligent driving computing platform for car companies.
At the press conference held on December 23, 2021, Yu Chengdong said that in the past year, Huawei intelligent vehicles have developed more than 300 upstream and downstream partners in the industrial chain.
In fact, by providing car companies with parts, underlying technology to obtain higher profits model is not uncommon in the domestic and foreign automotive industry, the world's largest automotive technology supplier Germany Bosch is taking this "with their own strengths, make up for the shortcomings of others" business routine. Under the trend that "intelligence" is rapidly becoming a new standard for the transformation of the global automotive industry, it is also reasonable for Huawei, which has obvious technological advantages, to enter the road of empowering car companies.
However, with the deep participation in the design of the Q&I M5, Huawei's further involvement in the production of intelligent vehicles is accelerating.
An industry insider said in an exchange with the city that if the "Xilis SF5 Huawei Smart Selection" is just a simple upgrade of Huawei's original products, then the M5 can basically be regarded as a model designed and produced by Huawei. He believes that "Huawei has not built a complete vehicle on the surface, but in fact, all the car research and development and production links are step by step." ”
According to industry insiders, unlike the strength of BAIC, GAC and Changan, in the process of cooperation with Huawei, Xilis has been in a relatively weak position, from research and development design to supply chain management, from market sales to internal management, basically all aspects of Huawei have formulated "standards" for Xilis.
Most mainstream car companies maintain a friendly and enemy position on Huawei's entry into the "empowerment". Chen Hong, chairman of SAIC Motor, has bluntly said in public that if you accept the overall solution of intelligent cars provided by third-party companies such as Huawei, it is equivalent to car companies becoming soulless bodies, so "SAIC is unacceptable and must take the soul into its own hands."
Car companies that hold similar views are not uncommon, and major car companies are already taking active actions. Recently, Toyota Motor Corporation announced plans to develop its own automotive software platform Arene by 2025, Volkswagen's "VW. The OS operating system software and Daimler's Mercedes-Benz operating system are also being built in an orderly manner.
In the view of Zhang Xiang, a researcher at the Automotive Industry Innovation Research Center of North China University of Technology, in the cooperation between car companies such as Xilis and Huawei, car companies play the role of Huawei's foundry. Consumers are more likely to recognize the Huawei brand. The popularity and technology obtained by car companies with the help of Huawei in the short term will also become an invisible shackle for the independent development of car companies in the future, and car companies may eventually lose the self-research ability of core technologies and completely become foundries.
For such suspicions and concerns, Xilis said in response to the city boundary that Huawei is a long-term partner of Xilis, and the two sides are equal cooperative partners. In addition, Xilis plans to launch the first medium-sized SUV with Huawei in 2022.
In fact, unlike the developed smartphone market of foundries, most traditional car companies are not ready to transform into foundries.
Compared with traditional cars, the technical threshold of electric vehicles is lower, and more importantly, the ecology, which is what mobile phone manufacturers are good at, and it is also an important factor to promote their cross-border; but electric vehicles are a new beginning after all, and now they can stand up to new car-making forces such as Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal. Huawei through the Hongmeng system, Xiaomi through the vehicle and other angles to cut in, whether it can succeed is still full of huge unknowns.
Judging from the high-open and low-going Xilix SF5, it is not easy for mobile phone manufacturers to cross borders.
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