[News-Oxcart Network]
2021 is undoubtedly a difficult year, but at the same time a year of profound changes, this year is also destined to be an epoch-making year for China's automotive industry.
Sort out the development trajectory of the industry and gain insight into the future trend. Oxcart Network specially launched the "2021 Great Change" special edition, divided into two series, the first and second series, together with readers to "know the past, know the future".
Yesterday we launched the 10 annual hot spots in the domestic automotive industry| the 2021 great changes (part 1), from a macro perspective to sort out the profound changes in 2021, these changes will continue to affect the development of the automotive industry in the next few years; today's article will summarize some "overturning events" that are worth pondering and reflecting on.
1. Tesla owner Shanghai Auto Show rights protection
Tesla, as a traffic harvester, often appeared in the news headlines this year.
At the Shanghai Auto Show on April 19, 2021, Ms. Zhang's "roof rights protection" made Tesla the focus of the auto show. And Tesla vice president Tao Lin's sentence that "Tesla cannot compromise" has pushed Tesla to the cusp of the storm. And Tesla sued the owner for "infringing the right to reputation" and claimed 5 million, which can be described as "anti-general army".
The reason for this incident is that the Tesla Model 3 driven by the woman's father had a rear-end accident, resulting in different degrees of damage to the three cars, and the accident was judged by the traffic police to be the driver's full responsibility.
On April 22, Tesla provided the China Market Supervision Newspaper with some data on the one-minute before the accident, pointing out that Ms. Zhang's father had serious speeding behavior and the braking system of the accident vehicle was working normally.
On April 25, Ms. Zhang claimed through Weibo that "Tesla's private disclosure of data is an invasion of privacy", and questioned whether the EDR data released by Tesla on the 22nd was not the original data, and asked Tesla for complete driving data in the half an hour before the accident.
Since then, the two sides have debated whether the data is complete and whether the data belongs to the consumer or the manufacturer.
Until last month, the trial of the right to reputation related to the Tesla female owner incident continued - the female owner said that her and Tesla's lawsuit had been held, and the latter wanted the two sides to withdraw the lawsuit, but she had rejected it.
From iron fan users to enemies, the road to the protection of Tesla female owners is not easy, from 2021 to 2022, so far there is no victory or defeat.
Xinhua News Agency commented on this matter: There will inevitably be contradictions and disputes between car owners and car companies. In fact, this is not the first time that relevant car companies have encountered "roof rights protection", and this is not the first time that "roof rights protection" has triggered heated public opinion.
Standing on the roof of the car to defend rights is neither safe nor decent, and it is even less beneficial to public order. As far as the Shanghai Auto Show is concerned, when such a thing occurs, the relevant parties should follow the laws and regulations, the investigation of the investigation, and the handling of the handling.
At the same time, on social networks, there are also many public opinions that consumers are concerned about product quality and service, and car companies should be more serious and face the problem. Enterprises respect users in their bones, and users can truly benefit.
However, this does not seem to affect Tesla's sales. In 2021, Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory delivered a total of 484,100 units, an increase of 235% year-on-year. Tesla's stock price also soared in 2021, becoming the world's first car company to break through the trillion-dollar market value.
2, Euler does not understand the woman's "core" overturned
On December 6, 2021, CCTV Finance reported on the "core change" of Euler Automobile, and many car owners questioned the suspected false publicity and misleading consumers in the sales of the Euler Good Cat brand.
The reason for the "chip gate" is that Euler said in the sales promotion that Good Cat will be equipped with Qualcomm's new professional vehicle intelligent service platform with 8 Kryo CPU processing cores. However, after the owner picked up the car, he found that the chip actually equipped by Euler Good Cat was an Intel quad-core CPU.
When the incident first occurred, Euler's handling attitude was very tough, only mentioning the development of CarPlay, HiCar and other mobile phone interconnection functions to compensate the owner, and threatened to call the police to deal with the voice of the user.
It was not until after the CCTV roll call that Euler Automobile issued an apology statement and gave specific compensation measures: the owner of the Euler good cat who was determined before December 31, 2021, was given a package worth 7200 yuan.
On December 9, Euler issued a new statement, emphasizing that in addition to the previously promised 7200 yuan equity package, the first owner of Euler Good Cat can also enjoy a lifetime warranty of the whole vehicle and 10,000 yuan of charging rights (later converted into compensation cash).
However, Euler's owners did not accept Euler's compensation plan.
Recently, a team of lawyers said that they have received more than 30 consumers to sue Great Wall Motors and its sales companies, and the number of commissions is increasing every day. The demand made by many consumers is that Great Wall Motors and its affiliates refund the purchase price and compensate them according to three times the purchase price.
Euler Automobile focuses on the market positioning of women's cars, and brand marketing can be said to be a rare successful case among independent brands. If Euler Good Cat had been the first to come forward and admit that it was due to the shortage of chips that had to be done, rather than sophistry, the situation today might be completely different.
On the surface, this may just be a crisis PUBLIC RELATIONS for Euler. But in fact, this is also the upward pain of some independent brand brands.
Some media comments, from the "chip door" incident of Euler Automobile, it can be seen that the current car consumers' ability to supervise car brands and products has been significantly improved compared with the past decade.
Nowadays, more and more car companies in the name of "user-centric" to promote new products and corporate brands, then in the process of each new product configuration elaboration, how to achieve consumers to understand the "transparent publicity", may become the future of consumers in the car purchase process focus.
From the current point of view, Euler's "core changing door" does not seem to have a substantial market impact, Euler's sales in December exceeded 20,000 vehicles for the first time, an increase of 64.2% year-on-year, and the annual sales of 135028 vehicles, an increase of 140% year-on-year. The good cat, which is deeply involved in the "core changing door", increased by 430% year-on-year in December, and the sales volume reached 10,685 units.
3, Rolls-Royce asked Internet celebrities to endorse and was scolded on the hot search
In 2021, the tall Rolls-Royce also fell a lot in marketing.
Rolls-Royce China invited Internet celebrity couples to create a video in the evening, but it triggered a lot of negative reaction.
Some netizens and car owners clearly pointed out that as a spokesperson, the evening has lowered the style of the product. More netizens pulled out the black history of "not wearing seat belts" on the road in the evening and late Lin Han, and questioned the safety of Rolls-Royce products.
In 2021, there are many cases of celebrities involving endorsement brands due to "human overturning", of which Wu Yifan and Wang Lihong can be said to be the most influential. Wu Yifan is the first Porsche China motorsport spokesperson, but the endorsement period is only 3 months; wang Lihong's endorsement of Infiniti is only 30 hours.
Whether it is a celebrity spokesperson or an Internet celebrity promoter, its own character and reputation are closely related to the endorsement product, and the brand side has the obligation to do a good job of backtracking in the publicity, so as not to overturn the car afterwards and regret the beginning.
An extremely important principle in marketing theory is the ability to perceive risk, as a brand, finding the most suitable marketing method for themselves is the greatest respect and recognition for consumers.
4. Weilai "automatic driving" accident
On August 12, a WEILAI ES8 owner had a traffic accident in the Hanjiang section of the Shenhai Expressway and unfortunately passed away at the age of 31. At the time of the incident, the vehicle NOP (Pilot Assisted Driving System) was in the enabled state, once again pushing the safety performance of the smart car to the cusp of the storm.
According to the official introduction, NIO NOP Pilot Assist, which is a function of deep integration of the navigation system and Pilot automatic assisted driving, was launched in October 2020. This function allows vehicles to automatically cruise according to the navigation planned routes on highways and urban elevated roads covered by HIGH-precision maps.
After the Lin Wenqin accident, Weilai deleted the word "automatic" in the previous publicity, leaving only "advanced assisted driving".
Accidents are not only this one case. Thirteen days before Lin Wenqin's death, in Pudong, Shanghai, less than 1,000 kilometers from the scene of the incident, a Weilai car owner crashed into a stone pier on the road at high speed and unfortunately died.
Further ahead, on a highway in Huzhou, a Weilai car owner rushed into the construction area in the assisted driving mode, hit the road ice cream tube and rear-ended the maintenance car, and the personnel of the two vehicles were injured to varying degrees.
All three accidents were caused by vehicles failing to identify still life objects that hit the side of the road.
For a long time, most new car-making forces like to exaggerate the "assisted driving" function as the "automatic driving assistance" function in order to highlight the intelligent advantages of their own products, so it is easy to mislead consumers.
Affected by the Weilai car owner incident, the industry's discussion on automatic driving has been continuous. Ideal Auto founder Li Xiang, WM Motor founder Shen Hui and others have spoken out, calling on the media and industry organizations to unify the Chinese terminology standards for autonomous driving and avoid misunderstanding of user use caused by exaggerated publicity.
Most people in the industry also agree with the further strengthening of the supervision of autonomous driving. Some people believe that "every step forward of intelligent driving will also amplify the ripple effect several times." The Lin Wenqin incident once again shows that autonomous driving technology is still in the process of research and development. Therefore, our social governance model should enter the refined stage, remind consumers to avoid the 'hype trap', and be vigilant against functional blind spots. ”
Cui Dongshu, secretary general of the Passenger Car Market Information Joint Association, believes that no company has announced that it has achieved automatic driving, and in the case that the company has not confirmed that the automatic driving function completely replaces manual driving, most of the automatic driving problems are still the responsibility of the driver.
"The biggest problem at present is that consumers are not aware of the risks of autonomous driving, and it is risky to over-trust autonomous driving when autonomous driving is not yet fully mature."
5. Didi off the shelf
From its listing in June, to the full takedown of the company's products in July, to the announcement of the delisting of the New York Stock Exchange and its switch to Hong Kong stocks in December, Didi's experience in the second half of the year was like riding a roller coaster.
Regarding Didi's removal, the main reason is that Didi is suspected of leaking user information.
According to the previous Didi prospectus, Didi already has 377 million annual active users in the Chinese market, with an average daily transaction volume of 25 million times in China, and a large amount of travel data.
With the promulgation and formal implementation of the national Data Security Law, the state's efforts to protect data security and privacy data will only become stronger and stronger, and the Didi incident is just the beginning.
After Didi fell, Qunxiong picked up the leak, followed by the rise of online ride-hailing platforms such as Cao Cao Travel, T3 Travel, Xiangdao, and AutoNavi. According to the third quarter report of Aurora Big Data, Cao Cao's monthly active users rose to 11.015 million and T3 out of 9.867 million, nearly doubling the growth compared with the first quarter of 2021.
Although Didi is still ranked first in the online ride-hailing platform at present, more opponents not only provide users with more choices, but also play a role in mutual promotion and balance restriction of the various online ride-hailing platforms, which is conducive to the healthy development of the entire industry.
Write at the end
Although some of these "rollover events" in 2021 may have nothing to do with you and me, no one in the Internet world is an island. Some events also reflect the difficulties and challenges faced by the entire automotive industry in the development process, as well as the pain points that need to be solved in the future. While things have been flat in the end, they are still a warning for the next development of the industry.