On the last day of 2021, I was getting together with a group of friends from the internet industry. More than half of the 12 people present had cars, including four people with pure electric cars, namely two Weilai, a Tesla, and a Xiaopeng. Even considering the internet industry's high acceptance of new products, the power content in this small sample is also very high.
According to the forecast of the Automobile Market Research Branch of the China Automobile Dealers Association (also known as the China Automobile Dealers Association), the retail sales of passenger cars in Chinese mainland in 2021 will be 20.09 million units, of which 3.4 million are new energy vehicles.
The proportion of new energy vehicle (NEV) sales was the lowest in January (8.1%), and the highest in August (20.1%):
Pure electric vehicles (BEVs) account for more than 80% of the sales of new energy passenger cars. The PHEV in the figure contains range-extended electric vehicles, such as the ideal one.
Therefore, pure electric cars, known as "electric daddies", accounted for more than 16% of the sales volume of passenger cars last year.
Some people can't wait to apply Rogers' innovative diffusion model, pointing out that the inflection point of pure trams has arrived, and it has begun to move from "early adopters" to "early volkswagen" groups.
But between these two groups, there is also a so-called chasm in Jeffrey Moore's theory of "crossing the chasm", which can fall if you are not careful.
The theory is too boring, let's still talk about the challenges that the electric dad is encountering and will encounter from the perspective of the owner, and why it may fall into the pit.
First, let's talk about where the product strength of a car is reflected.
Product force is the ability of the product to meet the needs of users. The core product force of the automobile is safety, reliability and comfort. This is determined by the nature of the car as a means of transportation, the car is to ensure the safety of the driver and occupants, reliably send people to the destination, and the driving process is as comfortable as possible.
As a means of transportation, safety must be the first, and the design of automotive products that do not premise on safety must be playing hooligans, including but not limited to Tesla's single pedal (kinetic energy recovery forced on) mode.
Due to the change of energy storage form, pure trams have different requirements for active and passive safety design than fuel vehicles. The engineering experience accumulated by manufacturers and suppliers in this area depends on the feedback and iteration of product use.
To put it bluntly, the product history of which depot is piled up by human life. As long as the product form and use scenario of the car are not essentially changed, the more established manufacturers, the more experience and technology in safety have advantages.
On the basis of safety, the mission of the car is to use reliability. I'll give you a few random examples, such as failure rates and maintenance costs, such as the convenience of energy replenishment, such as compatibility in different climates and road conditions.
Under the premise of safety and reliability, the car needs to provide the most comfortable driving experience possible, such as reasonable space design, comfortable sitting, and worry-free driving. It should be noted that the "intelligence" (intelligent cockpit + auxiliary driving) to improve comfort is not necessarily related to "electrification" and is not a patent for new energy vehicles.
Pure trams do have natural advantages in terms of handling and NVH, such as more reasonable weight distribution and quieter, more responsive motor drives. However, at present, there are still many problems that are difficult to solve in terms of safety and reliability.
For example, the oil truck is neglected to maintain, the engine and circuit aging, there is the same risk of spontaneous combustion, but the spontaneous combustion of the oil truck and the spontaneous combustion of the tram, the safety threat to the occupants is obviously not at a level. The former has the opportunity to find a fire extinguisher to save after spontaneous combustion, and the latter is fortunate to escape in a golden time of one minute, and the only thing he can do is probably to hold up his mobile phone to send a circle of friends or shoot vibrato.
In terms of reliability and comfort, the battery's battery-borne endurance anxiety, inconvenient energy replenishment, low energy efficiency, and low temperature power loss are all old topics, zero hundred acceleration seconds and seconds, zero endurance crying sky and earth. The boss of a tram brand said that the gasoline car could not go back to the electric car, and many car owners bought an electric father to understand that the high-speed charge could not be charged or at low temperatures, and the home really could not go back.
Considering the cost and volume of the battery, the endurance of pure trams cannot be increased indefinitely, and the biggest bottleneck at present is the convenience and efficiency of charging. At this time last year, I took a photo of a Tesla charging station in Beijing:
Buy a car of two or three hundred thousand, minus five or six degrees, do not turn on the air conditioner, eat takeaway queues to charge, this kind of undignified car experience, it is indeed speechless. Electric vehicles have no reliable and convenient charging conditions, and the user experience is completely the difference between heaven and hell. In order to prevent bars, I certainly know that private parking spaces and charging piles are good things, and I also know that private villas and private drivers are even better.
In short, such a product can eliminate gasoline vehicles, I do not dare to believe.
Speaking of which, I don't really hate electric cars, after all, urban commuting is not a big problem at the moment. What I hate is electric blowing, they ignore the defects of the current pure electric car, and these defects will be difficult to solve in the future, and it is stupid to compare Nokia and mechanical watches to gasoline cars. Under the product scenario of mobile phones and mechanical watches, the core product force has been migrated, and the product scenario of following the car is completely incomparable.
The development of mobile phones from functional machines to smart machines, the focus of user care is no longer the signal, standby (of course, can not be too bad), but the application ecology and stability. However, after the evolution of the car's power system, the product form and core product force have not changed.
As for the mechanical watch, the accuracy of the timing is not as good as the Yiwu electronic watch of ten dollars, and the richness of the function is completely incomparable with the smart watch such as the Apple Watch. The core product force of the "timing" of mechanical watches has long been migrated into "jewelry" and "luxury goods".
The essence of pure trams is still a means of transportation, compared to gasoline vehicles, the core product strength of pure trams is defective, and this defect, in the short term, technological development can not make up, and the purchased car users can not enjoy this technological progress.
The energy storage form of pure electric vehicles is batteries, and the biggest problem with this thing is energy density and cost.
Energy density represents the energy storage capacity per unit weight and volume. Regardless of the SOC status of the battery, it occupies the car's own weight, which in turn affects the mileage.
Even if the solid-state battery is successfully developed after five years, it cannot bring an order of magnitude increase to the energy density, and in the case of close actual endurance, the weight of the three-electric system will still be higher than that of the engine + gearbox + cooling / exhaust system + fuel tank.
As for the cost, lithium reserves on the earth are not abundant, and the distribution of recoverable reserves is uneven and particularly expensive. Some people will mention sodium batteries, the engineering application of this thing is still early, even less than solid-state batteries can be expected, and it also cannot solve the problem of energy storage density.
The above two defects lead to pure electric vehicles most likely to be just a transitional product form.
In the next five years, the visible means to enhance the strength of pure tram products are probably only to improve the convenience and efficiency of charging.
Domestic and foreign car companies are laying out 800 volts plus 240 kilowatts ~ 480 kilowatts of high-voltage charging devices, which can achieve "five minutes to supplement 200 kilometers of endurance", which is very close to the charging efficiency of gasoline vehicles. However, the popularity of high-voltage fast charging has also brought greater pressure on the infrastructure of the power grid and the cost of the car end. A few charging piles are equivalent to the power load of several residential buildings, and I don't know how the State Grid and the Southern Power Grid feel.
On the vehicle side, the requirements for the charging chip for high-voltage charging are from IGBT (insulated gate bipolar transistor) to SiC (silicon carbide). IGBT accounts for about 8%-10% of the total vehicle cost, which is the second highest-cost original in addition to the car power battery. At present, the cost of the same level of SiC MOSFETs is about 8-12 times that of IGBTs, and the loss is greater than that of IGBTs, not to mention the other electrical devices and connectors on the car, which must be re-selected and replaced with a version that supports high voltage.
What is more fatal is that the battery, which occupies about 40% of the cost of pure trams, the core raw material lithium, is facing a situation of high external dependence and tight supply, and the price has been rising continuously for nearly a year. This has led to the future price reduction into the 100,000-200,000 level of pure trams, raw material costs and supply, are facing great pressure.
In contrast, the decline of new energy subsidies and the rise in premiums brought by new energy insurance are not a matter of fact.
Speaking of money, the lower cost of pure trams when using cars is also what car owners talk about. Although the cost of using a car should look at the comprehensive cost, rather than just looking at the cost of charging and maintaining, considering that many car owners have not experienced a complete cycle from buying to selling, the cognition of the vehicle retention rate is not intuitive, but there is nothing wrong with it. After all, people feel more strongly about daily and high-frequency stimulation, and the damage when selling cars is usually not expected.
At present, pure trams are in the second-hand car market, especially in the used car market in the north, and the pricing and circulation are not very smooth. Second-hand car dealers have no reliable means of identification of the three-electric system, especially the battery, and many rights and interests are only given to the first car owner, so some head tram manufacturers implement official second-hand cars to maintain the price system and user experience.
The automotive market has always been policy-driven, not simply consumption-driven. New energy vehicles are the trend of the times in the world, while traditional fuel vehicles are heavily restricted in terms of displacement, emissions, taxes, car purchase indicators and other links.
Even so, gasoline cars bundle hands and feet, sales still account for the majority, one hit five, Bruce Lee and Ip Man are directly called insiders. To replace fuel vehicles, new energy vehicles, in the long run, still rely on their own product strength to improve. In the foreseeable future, it is not yet possible to see pure electric vehicles alone to take on the heavy responsibility of replacing fuel vehicles. The inflection point of the pure tram may be coming, but this bend is not easy to turn over, and it is currently a bit stuck, and the owner and the enterprise are very uncomfortable.
When we talk about the advantages of pure trams, in many cases, we are actually talking about the advantages of "electric drive cars". The front-end energy supply form is diversified, hybrid, increased range, hydrogen energy can also become the choice of the owner, and even the pattern is opened, the future to get a controllable nuclear fusion, once and for all, lifelong no need to charge, this is the inflection point I really hope to see.