Li Bin leaned in the corner of the sofa and answered a question about the comparison between new energy vehicles and fuel vehicles.
"I don't understand at all, why do people still buy gas trucks now?" How nostalgic is this to buy a gas car, what is the good of the oil car except to smell a little gasoline? He said.
The speech came from a communication session after NIO Day meeting at the end of last year. After the speech was posted online, Li Bin was quickly named "the most floating person in 2021" by the media.
At this NIO Day conference, Weilai also announced the new car ET5 - in the case of using rental batteries, its price is about 250,000 yuan. This is Weilai for the luxury car market, the cheapest price of a car, but also Weilai's sinking work.
In the new energy car market, Weilai needs to sink too much.
"Wei Xiaoli" three, Xiaopeng has a starting price of 150,000 G3, the ideal has an ideal ONE of 300,000 ranges, these models have performed well in sales performance, and the domestic new energy vehicle sales "hegemonic" company, not Tesla, nor "Wei Xiaoli", is never high-end Wuling - dominating the "really cheap" sinking market.
But Weilai was marked with a high-end label as soon as it was born, either against the BBA (Mercedes-Benz BMW Audi) or Tesla high-end model, in the low-end market, Weilai is absent.
In 2019, Li Bin once made a bold statement: buying Weilai is choosing a middle-class lifestyle.
Previously, the three models of the ES series sold by Weilai were priced in the range of 300,000 to 600,000, and the ET7 released at the beginning of last year also positioned the luxury car market, with a starting price of more than 400,000. The owners of the luxury electric vehicles on Weilai are therefore forced to be full.
However, the high-end Weilai, sales have not only fallen behind for a time, but the brand image has also been sinking in various accidents.
In the past year, Weilai has had frequent accidents, a surge in complaints, questions about the power exchange model, and stagnation in the sale of new products – and its market value has also wavered in the wind and rain of the company.
According to data, the market value of WEILAI has evaporated by more than 40% in the past year, and the current market value is 45.983 billion US dollars.
It seems that Weilai has not delivered a new car for a year. It is too much in need of a new product to tell a new story, and the ET5 that will be delivered this year may be able to "salvage" the sinking Weilai, and it may lose the future.
Tough sinking ET5
After the unveiling of the 250,000 yuan Weilai ET5, Weilai's Baidu Tieba began to discuss "buy Weilai or buy Tesla?" ”
One view is that the owner of the 250,000 yuan Weilai is not installed this time; some people interpret: the Weilai car that is high above the sky has entered within 300,000 yuan, indicating that the domestic high-end car has begun to fight.
But ET5 is not decisive in the market.
ET5 100kWh version of the price of 386,000, still "high", even the 75kWh version has reached 328,000, beyond the 300,000 subsidized "red line", Weilai's workaround is: battery rental service - battery is divided into two versions of long and short battery life, respectively, 1480 yuan and 980 yuan.
Choose to rent a battery, the price of the whole vehicle will drop to less than 300,000 yuan. At nio nio day in December last year, Li Bin revealed that next year, NIO will build more than 1,300 substations in the domestic market.
However, the battery rental service promoted by Weilai has been controversial, such as many car owners complaining about too few power stations, slow power exchange speed and long queue time.
The cost performance of the rental battery has also been questioned, and some people have calculated an account: 1480 yuan of rental battery costs, if it becomes gasoline money for hybrid vehicles, can run about 2960 kilometers, a year is 35520 kilometers, for ordinary families, running 30,000 kilometers a year is almost impossible.
If you want subsidies, you have to use rental battery packs, but at the same time, the subsidy policy for new energy vehicles has also changed after the release of ET5.
On the last day of last year, the four ministries and commissions jointly issued the "Notice on the Financial Subsidy Policy for the Promotion and Application of New Energy Vehicles in 2022", which clarified that from January 1, 2022, the subsidy standard for new energy vehicles will be reduced by 30% on the basis of 2021.
NIO subsequently announced that users who paid the deposit before December 31, 2021 (inclusive) and successfully picked up the car before March 31, 2022, can enjoy subsidies in accordance with the 2021 national subsidy standards, and the difference will be borne by NIO.
Previously, Tesla has raised the price of the Model 3 by 10,000 yuan according to the policy, which some car friends believe that the price of the Weilai ET5 of the model 3 may change in the future.
The policy is changeable, the power is troublesome, it seems that the sinking of the new car is really not easy - and Weilai itself has a lot of troubles.
5＞3？
ET5 to sink, externally, its opponent is Tesla Model 3; internally, the ideal and Xiaopeng in the new car-making forces are friends and rivals.
Why does WEILAI want to regard Tesla, the boss of electric vehicles, as a competitor?
According to the "2022-2027 China New Energy Automobile Industry Market Panorama Assessment and Investment Direction Research Report" released by the Association of Automobile Manufacturers and the Huajing Industry Research Institute, Tesla ranked second in the market share of new energy vehicles in China with 15%, while Weilai ranked seventh with 4%. Equating yourself with Tesla is one of Weilai's high-end playing styles.
In the context of NIO's propaganda, ET5 is "bigger" than the Model 3.
Before the release of ET5, Ma Lin, senior director of corporate communications at WEILAI Automobile, posted in the circle of friends that "after the release of THE fifth mass production car of WEILAI, the XXXXXX market will change days", while emphasizing that "5 is greater than 3".
In the official data, et5's vehicle size, dual motors and 19 auxiliary driving standards are higher than Tesla Model 3 - and it is also about 300,000 yuan, and Weilai offers more car owners services. However, between January and September 2021, the Model 3 sold a total of 110,000 units, and the overall sales volume, maintenance, accessories and peripheral configurations have been quite mature.
Et5 is still in a state of "only hearing its voice and not seeing its car".
Compared with the ideal of friends and xiaopeng, Weilai's situation is not satisfactory.
For example, on the release of new cars, Xiaopeng Automobile released P7 in 2020 and P5 in 2021, and there are new cars delivered almost every year; and Ideal Car also sold more than 90,000 units last year by relying on the ideal ONE model. Although there are no new models, the sales data is gratifying.
And NIO throughout 2021, the BEGINNING OF ET7 and the END-of-year ET5 are futures products, and the delivery time is this year. This also means that NIO will not have a single new product delivered in 2021.
There is no "new" Weilai, it seems that there is a lot of pressure, after all, the market will let others race against the clock to snatch away.
Therefore, ET5 no longer looks down on customers from above, but chooses "5>3" to look down on opponents in an attempt to regain market recognition.
Sales are stretched thin
After the et5 was announced, Weilai President Qin Lihong excitedly shared such details: pre-sold 100,000 vehicles - which even paralyzed the NIO App for up to 10 minutes on the scheduled day.
Behind this figure, the sales volume of Weilai Automobile has been stretched for several months.
According to the data, since July last year, WEILAI has not won the monthly sales championship of the new forces for many consecutive months, and the sales volume in October last year was only 3667 vehicles, which was less than half of the sales performance of the ideal ONE. Even Nezha Automobile and Weima Automobile, which are regarded as second-tier brands, have surpassed Weilai.
It wasn't until November last year that NIO's sales returned to the 10,000-car club, but after Xiaopeng and Ideal Car, the former champion aura was no longer there.
In the past year, the news about Weilai has also been mostly negative.
In 2021, the number of complaints about WEILAI ES6, ES8, EC6 continues to grow: seat design defects, throttle pedal breaks, collision spontaneous combustion, automatic driving accidents and other issues have caused the WEILAI brand to continue to be damaged - Weilai car owners, who are known for their group, have even begun to establish independent rights protection groups, which has plunged the Weilai brand into a crisis of trust.
A series of accidents have made Weilai be interpreted as a company that relies on marketing momentum rather than technology to develop cars.
Car manufacturers do not sell well, and the capital market responds to Weilai with a declining market value.
Among the three brands of the new car-making force "Wei Xiaoli", the sum of the market value of Xiaopeng and the ideal at the beginning of 2021 is far less than the 60 billion US dollars of Weilai. But by December, the market capitalization of Ideal and Xiaopeng had risen to $31.4 billion and $39.1 billion, respectively, while NIO had fallen to $47.5 billion.
Therefore, the pre-sale of ET5 100,000 vehicles and the 10-minute downtime of the App are the stories that Weilai wants to tell to the capital market.
For the continuous decline in sales and market value, Weilai really needs Li Bin to create a topic such as "who still buys oil cars" to increase the heat; it also needs a car that can both benchmark Tesla and look at "Xiao Li" to boost confidence and save sales.
After all, ET5 can sink, but in the new energy car market, Weilai can no longer sink.
(Source|.) AI Blue Media Collection Author | Black Sheep)