[Pacific Auto Network Industry Channel] 2021 passed really fast, as if it had just learned to write "2021" instead of "2020" from the lower right corner of various test drive agreements, and it was not long before it was changed to "2022".
The car world in 2021 does not have too many earth-shattering big events, the blowout period of the new forces that have to explode every month has passed for three or four years, and now we have become accustomed to electric vehicles, smart cars, and new forces, everyone has gradually accepted these new things, consumption has become more rational, and the operation of car companies that have released satellites has also decreased a lot.
Without further ado, let's review some of the new trends in the automotive industry in 2021. The following views are inconclusive, and everyone will have different ideas from different perspectives, so the following content is not a conclusive conclusion, but a more discussion:
The breakthrough road of luxury brand electric vehicles
Since 2012, the author has written a lot of articles about Tesla, praising their very smart business model, exquisite electronic control system, and also complaining about their unreliable quality control and service, and very unprofessional public relations.
Different consumers have very different evaluations of tesla brands, but one thing is certain: the Tesla brand founded by Elon has made great contributions to the establishment and expansion of China's electric vehicle industry, one is that Tesla has shared some patents and spawned a large number of new forces in Chinese car manufacturing, and second, Tesla has forced The price of China's electric vehicle products to be more affordable after tesla has entered China.
The author test drove the Mercedes-Benz EQS in Sanya last month, and we looked for a place with fewer people to shoot for a few days, but Haitang Bay can always meet passers-by. On the one hand, I prevented them from shooting the biography (confidential, it was not yet listed at that time), on the other hand, I tentatively asked everyone about the psychological price, 80% of the onlookers said "more than 300,000", a sister said: "Tesla does not need thirty now, this one sells more than thirty has been a lot." It can be seen that now Tesla has become the pricing target of the electric vehicle market, and it is difficult for high-end products to make consumers accept high premiums.
I drove the EQS450+ for three days and loved the car so much that it made me no longer wonder if it was a tram or not. The electric drive system is only the way to achieve it, and the purpose of Mercedes-Benz is to make the car better and more quiet, and the materials and processes of the Mercedes-Benz S-class class make the EQS more luxurious than the Taycan.
Therefore, luxury brands in the era of electrification need to meet the premium challenge is very large, I have always believed that e-tron, EQS this type of easy to open, exquisite, reliable luxury cars will have their own market foothold, because this level of car users will not be because the electricity bill is cheaper than the fuel cost and buy trams, they need is more luxurious and more comfortable texture, this is a new round of traditional luxury brands can indeed be provided to high-end users, and the market still needs time to cultivate.
After lamborghini (the first pure electric Lambo after 2025) and Bentley (all pure electricity in 2030) are fully electrified, will anyone think that "electric vehicles" are equivalent to "commuter grocery shopping cars with particularly cheap electricity"?
Joint ventures and imported car companies have increased R&D facilities in China
At present, the major joint ventures have R&D institutions in China, after all, China has become the world's largest automobile producer and sales country for 12 consecutive years (counting 2021, the data has not been released but it is nailed).
Looking at the following table, the author only counted the sales of four German luxury brands in China, and found that China is actually the world's largest single market for four brands at the same time.
1, young: very, very young. The average age of 5 Series Chinese owners is 35 years old, the average age of 718 Chinese car owners is only 32 years old, and the average age of Maserati brand Chinese car owners is 34 years old! Keep in mind that the average age of Maserati's global customers is 50 years old.
2, like the big car: remember ten years ago Yaris still sold 1120,000? Early selling can not move, the car is made fine, it is far less than a rough car to sell, now bmw X1 rear row can hold a calf, who cares if the edge of your plastic piece is a cut hand.
3, like SUVs: China's auto market sales boom in those years, the domestic highway conditions have not kept up, many places the road is not easy to walk, so consumers need a more powerful body through the model, and the whole family often only has one car, when buying a car need to consider versatility.
4, the brand is very important: Chinese like to give people labels, so that you can directly draw the so-called judgment of this person without thinking. We don't like pure brand marketing, but consumers eat this set.
5, pay attention to design: many new consumers are the first people in the family to buy a car, this generation of talents use the car, itself is not a mechanical professional automobile professional, the understanding of automotive products is limited to the surface, the letter half of the advertising said, the letter half of the relatives said, the car was bought.
6, pay attention to intelligence: because the average age of Chinese car consumers is small, everyone has grown up in the era of intelligent interconnection, so there is a high degree of recognition for intelligent configuration.
7, the degree of resistance to electrification is not high: because of the large-scale publicity of ZF and car companies, everyone has labeled the electric model with environmental protection.
8, pay attention to the moral level of car companies: under the framework of Chinese culture, the moral level is a very important superstructure, such as the moral level of the patriarch, officials, and emperors are an important part of the public's sense of identity, an emperor can be lazy, but absolutely can not be filial piety. Therefore, overseas car companies are very concerned about carrying out social welfare charity activities in China, hoping to win the recognition of a wider range of people, so that car buyers and people around car buyers know that this is a good car company with high moral standards.
Endurance Wars
The electric vehicle industry in 2021 is very coiled, under the premise that battery technology has not been broken through the bottleneck, everyone has piled the battery to 130kWh or even higher, 700km if idle, 1000km is not a dream.
Stacking batteries will produce a bigger problem, the larger and heavier the battery pack, it needs to consume more power, because the ultra-long endurance electric vehicle is very environmentally friendly from the beginning of its birth, so when friends around me invite the author to help recommend electric vehicles, I will ask each other in detail about the travel needs, car use scenarios (temperature is very important), charging conditions, and then give recommendations.
Another big thing in the 2021 car industry is that we have launched an endurance standard called CLTC, which only we in China use ourselves.
As can be seen from the above table, between the most stringent EPA and the most relaxed CLTC, there is a difference of 30% of the endurance value, that is, CLTC battery life is almost a 30% discount is EPA endurance, EPA power consumption is almost a 30% discount is CLTC power consumption.
CLTC (China Light-duty Vehicle Test Cycle), the full name of China's light vehicle driving conditions, based on 41 cities in China, 3832 vehicle model samples for calibration. Although clTC and WLTP both took 30 minutes to sample, CLTC did not turn on air conditioning and the maximum speed was only 114km/h, and the sampling mileage was only 14.48km, which translates to an average speed as low as 28.96km/h, which is lower than the 34km/h low speed of NEDC's brush endurance friendly, and far lower than WLTP's 46.5km/h. Without air conditioning, the average speed is still 17.54km/h lower, and it is lonely...
The following figure is a comparison chart of several NEDC (blue line), WLTP (red line), CLTC (green line) working conditions cycle, it can be seen that the average speed of CLTC (green line) is much lower than WLTP (red line), which is very conducive to the endurance of pure electric vehicles.
Why do we need CLTC?
Maybe, I only say maybe Ha, we are in order to better promote pure electric vehicles, to give consumers more consumer confidence, so the same car in the CLTC working cycle under the endurance performance is much higher, but for consumers, when the measurement is not accurate, it will be more confusing and distrustful.
China's territory is vast, is a large country across the temperature band, CLTC will make the northern winter car and the southern summer car users suffer from endurance anxiety, the endurance speed is stronger than the NEDC.
Sensor Wars
In 2021, all car companies are fighting for the number of sensors, but the L3 regulations have not been implemented, and most manufacturers can only continue to draw cakes at this stage, and even paint cakes are rolled up.
Although recently every year car companies said that the year is the first year of autonomous driving, but 2021 is indeed different, SAE L3 level automatic driving key equipment - lidar has entered the game, the entire intelligent automotive industry quickly rolled up. This situation is like a bunch of so-called "electrostatic earplugs" suddenly appearing on the market in recent years, it turned out that a domestic speaker parts manufacturer produced a large number of cheap electrostatic micro-units, so the size of independent brand headphone factories are flocking to purchase, the static market from the blue ocean to the red sea.
Why is the field of autonomous driving and the field of smart cars suddenly entering the state of sensor rolling? Because L3 and above require higher data accuracy, it coincides with a big price reduction in lidar.
Tesla announced from the beginning of the AutoPilot will not use lidar, there was no car specification-level lidar products, and later appeared to be half a Model S price, Musk did not do two without stopping directly abandoned the laser program for pure vision. Tesla is so iron because of the first-mover advantage and scale advantage, you think, the automatic driving company to the car with safety personnel, and the car company sells a smart car is also a kind of test car, saving the safety officer and five insurance and one gold, the data is continuous. So many Teslas on the road collect big data for it, and algorithmic functions such as convolutional neural networks and deep learning must rely on big data.
Later, Tesla put out the FSD, Wei (Lai) Xiao (Peng) Li (want) also launched a high-speed pilot function, and a new round of automatic auxiliary driving rolling began.
Of course, people who buy cars are happy to see that they have fought a price war with the joint venture, and they have hard to get the independent technology, configuration, and workmanship, and the price of the joint venture has been forced down, and the "crusher in developed countries" is not called in vain. Now the lidar is also very internal, Xiaopeng P5, Weilai eT7, Polar Fox Alpha S, Zhiji L7 these are all coming in.
Let me give you a few simple examples:
The Xiaopeng P5 has 32 sensors = 2 lidar + 13 cameras + 5 millimeter-wave radar + 12 ultrasonic radars
Nio eT7 has 29 sensors = 1 lidar + 11 cameras + 5 millimeter wave radar + 12 ultrasonic radars (vehicle-road co-sensing V2X/ enhanced main driver perception ADMS is not counted)
The WM M7 has 31 sensors = 3 lidar + 11 cameras + 5 millimeter wave radar + 12 ultrasonic radars
The BMW iX has 28 sensors = 1 lidar + 10 cameras + 5 mmWave radar + 12 ultrasonic radars
GAC Aehan LX Plus has 33 sensors = 3 lidar + 12 cameras + 6 millimeter wave radar + 12 ultrasonic radars
Auto marketing is getting more and more volumety
Because the Geneva Motor Show was cancelled for three consecutive years (and there will be no 2022), the world's most neutral and bellwether-oriented centennial auto show suddenly disappeared, and the last time it was suspended for a long time was because of World War II...
The epidemic prevention and control capabilities of developed countries in Europe and the United States are stretched, so the four international auto shows in the world are Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu and Guangzhou. The difference is that the auto shows in developed countries in Europe and the United States are the external display platform of car companies, and most of the media people who wear suits on the spot are from all over the world who come to the car world to feast; China's auto show is the exhibition of various dealers, most of the people wearing suits on the spot are sales representatives, and media people like to wear shorts and sneakers to interview the CEO of car companies.
Under the impact of the epidemic, car marketing has become more difficult. Because the car is a more traditional offline experience product, now many times the car company official organization offline tasting meeting can not exceed 15 people a batch, most of the transmission to the online, this year we have opened countless online conferences, the biggest advantage is energy saving and emission reduction without travel without staying up late overtime, the biggest disadvantage is that everyone collects the materials are the same, and finally can only look at the picture to speak to write the article, the whole network content is the same, after all, no one has really touched the real car.
At the dealer level, since most dealers do not have professional horizontal screen long video production capabilities, they began to roll short videos and live broadcasts. Short videos and live broadcasts are not bad things, but now many dealer-level short content are going in the direction of three customs (vulgar, vulgar, kitsch), and short video content platforms especially like to challenge the bottom line of laws and regulations, after all, the three customs for selling cars and short video platforms are traffic passwords, so terminal marketing has become tainted.
In terms of marketing flavor, traditional car companies and new forces are consistent, and traditional car companies are still learning the advantages of new forces, such as starting to shop experience stores in the city center, and car dealers are getting closer and closer to consumers.
To quote Guo Rui, a teacher: "Let users become fans, opening up a new way for car companies to market in the community." The active owner community affects not only the users themselves, but also more potential consumers around them. Reasonable community incentive policies can stimulate user activity, and can also make users more active, while exposing the potential risks of direct rebates. The exclusive community of car companies can also directly face users, conduct professional and efficient Q&A and problem handling, and reduce the public relations crisis caused by poor communication. Even when car companies are facing a public relations crisis, the spontaneous action of loyal fans to maintain the brand image can also help car companies resolve possible serious consequences.
In the era of "product-driven", what car companies produce, users buy. Such a production model tests the insight of the decision-making level of this car company for the future development trend, and once the judgment is wrong, it may bring serious losses that are difficult to recover. In the digital era, car companies can face users directly, and they can more accurately grasp user needs and market trends. At the same time, the development of automobile platforming and flexible production technology of production lines has also helped car companies to make more rapid responses to user needs and market fluctuations. Even, through timely two-way communication, users can participate in the earlier planning and design of the vehicle, so that users can build a possibility.
This also tests the ability of car companies in information technology, big data, cloud computing, etc., digitalization is not only to quickly obtain user feedback and data, but also to open up the database within the enterprise, through more complete data analysis, there is a more macro analysis of user needs, market changes, public opinion trends and competitive product development. Rapid market response and personalized intelligent services will be the key to the success of intelligent car companies in the digital era. ”
Another batch of new forces have died
After the two years of tribulations in 2020/2021, most of the new forces have gone out of business. On the contrary, Weilai, who has been scolded for many years as "about to go out of business", finally survived. Xiaopeng and the ideal have also been questioned for many years, and now Xiaopeng's new products have been continuously issued (G9 can still be expected), and the ideal car can sell more than 10,000 a month (but the follow-up models do not know how); Nezha, Huaren Express, Pole Fox, Reading, Zero Run, etc., which were also not optimistic before, are still alive; Weima, which the author has always thought is promising, is now living as a second-tier new force and cannot go in quantity.
other? Basically all liquidated.
On the one hand, a large number of bankruptcies, on the other hand, there are various consortiums with no experience in car manufacturing announcing the construction of cars, and if we look deeper, we will find that "car building" is actually not the meaning of drunkenness, but the usual means of listing and looting retail money.
I have not always rejected the new forces of car-making, and even recommended friends and relatives who are particularly suitable for the use of bad scenes to buy, but the propaganda momentum of the new forces in the past two years is too strong, and the wind evaluation on many platforms has evolved to the point that not buying new forces is the conservative royalist party, not buying new forces is not supporting Chinese products, not buying new forces is not understanding cars, not buying new forces is not environmental protection and energy saving, not buying new forces is to send money to foreign capitalists.
The question is, which company is not opened to make a profit? You can know that most of the new forces take the stock listing as the biggest milestone of the company (the financial freedom of the founding team is the biggest milestone), and Volkswagen is not, Honda is not, Toyota is not, GM is not...
Looking at GM, half a century ago, a lunar rover was built and supplied to the Apollo program's 15/16/17 spacecraft, allowing humans to land on the moon with a means of transportation.
Look at the ridiculed Honda, which has built more than 100 million super baby motorcycles and provided reliable and cheap transportation for 100 million grassroots people around the world.
So to speak, China's new car-making forces have caused a large wave of national tide, we have found a new national self-confidence in the new direction of electrification and intelligent car-making, let the world know that Chinese can also build cars, and it is not worse than your old industrial powers in Europe and the United States, and some segments have even surpassed you.
On the other hand, the head of the traditional car companies sit on 500-10 million annual sales, the capital chain is not worried at all, the money for research and development of new energy is tens of billions of tens of billions of smashed, the traditional car companies new pure electric platform to create a car in the quality control is more reliable, that is, intelligent above the difference in meaning.
The market is so big, only new forces or traditional car companies can not eat, otherwise the two will coexist for a long time, each with its own advantages. There is no need to scold either side to prove that the other side is smarter, these two camps have companies that build good cars and bad cars.
Chip shortages and fluctuations in the car market
In itself, overseas chip factories and automakers have been affected by the epidemic, the suspension of work, the reduction of production, the low income and little money to buy new cars.
There is a big car producer and consumer country that has contained the epidemic for the first time, and the GDP is the only positive growth among all major economies. As you know, I am talking about the Chinese market, which has topped the global automobile production/sales list for 12 consecutive years.
China's economic engine has not stopped, the internal and external dual cycles complement each other, the industrial added value has steadily increased, the income of most people has been guaranteed, people need to buy new cars and have money to buy new cars, but the car specification chip is not enough to support the demand of the Chinese market.
Next, there are several routines of macroeconomics:
1. Although chip factories have basically formed a monopoly situation in technology and scale, there is still a competition of interests between the "chip + car companies" alliance. When the production capacity is insufficient and the profits are considerable, it will choose to expand the production capacity and make a wave of sales offensive when others have no cores to use and no cars to sell.
2, capital is naturally profit-seeking, profit-seeking capacity expansion scale is bound to be higher than the actual demand. Now the wafer production line is 24-hour three-shift inverted shaft rotation, relying on the exploitation of the young generation how to liver can not get a future, must increase production capacity. The new cycle of chip factories is about 1 and a half years, that is, there will be more obvious overcapacity within two or three years.
3, the new excess capacity will not necessarily be eliminated, the priority is to eliminate the old production line with low efficiency and outdated technology. Some chip factories with low efficiency, outdated technology, and lax interest layers are not tightly bound will face low efficiency or even bankruptcy.
There is no chip, of course, the earth is turning, you are not intelligent people, afraid of a yarn.
This is the problem, the world has this kind of "seemingly hard, seemingly no technology to advance" unique geographical and cultural advantages of the region / country is not much, now too many power chips (power semiconductors) and digital chips (functional semiconductors) are concentrated in a few car-grade chip foundries to build, once there is any moth, such as the black swan new crown epidemic, immediately in short supply. Don't look at the chip brand, in fact, several brands are the same Bay factory in the OEM.
Will Chinese mainland undertake more overseas chip production capacity? High-end production capacity will certainly not be ah. The technological blockade of China's integrated circuit industry by developed countries will certainly continue, and it is not easy for Jesus to persuade them to fight.
We must continue to carry forward the spirit of "shredders in developed countries". Nowadays, China's self-produced and self-sold Beidou positioning chips have greatly reduced the price of GPS positioning chips from a maximum of 1,000 yuan to 6 yuan.
The cost of lidar has been falling, because Chinese companies have joined the warband. What used to be tens of thousands of dollars a piece has now fallen into ten thousand dollars.
If you want to put L4 self-driving cars on the volume, you must rely on Chinese lidar companies to explode production capacity, after all, we are the "developed country profiteering industry shredder" - the world is not difficult to do business, until the massive Chinese influx, it will not take many years to kill you.
Vehicle-grade chips do not need to go to 3nm, now most of the world's chips are above 28nm (now the most lacking production capacity), the next few years will not change much, and we have begun to produce 14nm in China, and will not be completely stuck neck. However, the self-sufficiency rate of China's car specification chip is very low, it is said that it is only 5%, whether this data is true or not is not easy to proofread for the time being, but the low self-sufficiency rate is indeed the consensus of the industry.
Chinese mainland is working hard to increase the development and production of vehicle-grade chips, using Chinese-style inner coils to roll waste these toothpaste factories. Although it takes a long time, the goal can be achieved. In the future, we should not worry about what South Korea's production cuts, Texas Korean tide, Japanese fires, and Malaysia's epidemic directly pushed chip prices.
In order to cope with the safety problems of the energy chain, China has vigorously developed new energy vehicles in the past two decades, and new energy vehicles have to use more high-end vehicle specification-level chips, if the chip is still stuck in the neck, our new energy automobile industry profits will be divided into a big piece, and the core competitiveness is still not in their own hands, which requires China's university scientific research strength, research and development enterprises and manufacturing enterprises to fight a wave with the help of the new national support policies.
At present, the most important direction is not to improve the production capacity of old specifications and low-performance chips, but to develop higher performance, higher integration, lower total cost of the total control chip, and to concentrate the functions of the current large wave of old chips on two or three new chips, which is the way out of China's car standard chip.
The last words of the text
Many car companies like to regard a certain year as the first year of XX, such as 2016/2017/2018/2019/2020 as the "first year of electric vehicles", 2021 began to be defined as "the first year of smart cars", it is estimated that 2022 will also be in the field of smart cars again yuan one yuan.
It does not matter which year is the first year, and even the new forces and traditional car companies who have a larger market share in 20 years are not important, what matters is whether the people have bought more affordable, safer and more convenient car products. Healthy competition is definitely a good thing, and the endurance and the inner volume of the sensor can greatly reduce the terminal price of smart electric vehicles. China introduced Tesla as a wholly-owned enterprise to give them domestic subsidies, hoping that this price-cutting catfish can make China's smart electric vehicle market roll up.
The inner volume is the premise of the technology can not break through the premise of the deep ploughing of the current technology to get everyone tired and tired to eat enough, and the intelligent electric market rolled up later, it is likely that there will be more new technologies to break through the inner volume troubles, bringing vitality to the industry.
(Text: Huang Hengle, Pacific Auto Network)