Hello everyone, I am the president of the Electric Vehicle Commune.
Some time ago, the "power lock" incident in WM became a hot spot in the industry.
A musician named "Zhou Zhou" is a Weima EX5 owner, who was deeply "persecuted" by this power lock incident, and couldn't bear to write a song "Two Hundred Pieces will Deceive Me" to vent his anger... (That being said, the song is pretty good.)
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The thing is this, at the end of 2021, WM officially held a "New Year user special" activity, randomly selected 18888 lucky users, provided free inspection vehicle services, and gave 200 yuan Jingdong card by the way.
Pie falls from the sky, who doesn't have hungry eyes? The owner of the lottery thought: If there is such a good thing, then go!
As a result, after the "comprehensive vehicle inspection", some Wei ma owners found that something was wrong: "The original Weima EX5 can run 350 kilometers with full power, and now it can only run less than 300 kilometers." ”
After communicating with each other, the owners found that those who had done a "comprehensive vehicle inspection" all had the problem of endurance shrinkage, and they began to question the behavior of Weima.
The owners concluded that the car that had done a "comprehensive vehicle inspection" was suspected of being "locked".
"Locking power", as the name suggests, is to lock the power of the battery, by rewriting the relevant parameters of the BMS (battery management system), thereby limiting the upper limit of the charging capacity of the power battery, output power and other key indicators.
Friends who often drive electric vehicles should know that the charging speed of the vehicle at 0-80% of the power is relatively fast, but the charging speed from 80-100% will become slower, then we need to apply a higher charging voltage to the battery, in order to charge it, the fuller the battery, the higher the voltage required.
This is like twisting a towel, when the towel is just fished out of the water, a light twist can wring out a lot of water, and when it is quickly wrung out, it takes more effort to screw out the water.
Some wei carriage owners said: "In the past, the maximum voltage of the vehicle when charging was 407.5V, and after a 'comprehensive vehicle inspection', the maximum voltage of charging dropped to 396V. ”
Some of the owners of the carriage said: "Originally it could charge 69 kWh of electricity, but now it can only charge 59 kWh of electricity." ”
Weima's suspected behavior of "locking electricity" without permission has aroused the dissatisfaction of many Wei horse-drawn carriage owners, so they organized a group to complain to the car quality network.
In fact, as early as the middle of 2021, some car owners have already reported that the vehicle has a decline in mileage after the upgrade.
01. Why do I "lock the power"?
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Many people have expressed doubts, why should the car at the good end "lock the electricity"?
Some car owners think that , of course , there are "ghosts" in their hearts who will do this.
In October 2020, WM had a number of spontaneous combustion accidents, burning 4 vehicles in a week, when the media called it the "four consecutive burns" incident, and safety problems caused a serious impact on the brand image of WM.
Subsequently, WM officials admitted that the car did have a battery safety hazard, and recalled 1282 vehicles, replaced the battery pack for them free of charge, and said that it would be responsible for the end.
In late December last year, in just four days, WM continuously exploded car spontaneous combustion accidents in Zhengzhou, Sanya and Haikou, and staged "three consecutive burnings", which is simply a copy of the "four consecutive burning" incidents of the previous year.
I have to say that spontaneous combustion is a "roadblock" on the road to the development of new energy vehicles, although the car companies that sell new energy on the market have more or less had spontaneous combustion accidents, but it seems that what happened to Weima in this matter seems to be too frequent.
Weima is also quite unlucky, spontaneous combustion accidents are concentrated in a short period of time, and scattered "bungee bean" compared to the lethality of the brand can be more than a star and a half.
From the perspective of time alone, the recent "three-burn" incident and the "power locking" incident in WM are very likely to be related.
In the final analysis, "locking electricity" is to improve vehicle safety and reduce the probability of spontaneous combustion of vehicles.
In 2 years, the 7 spontaneous combustion accidents in Weima have a common feature, all of which occur in late autumn or winter, but shouldn't it be that the hotter the summer, the more prone to thermal runaway?
In fact, not only the temperature is too high, the temperature is too low will also affect the safety of the power battery.
In middle school physics, it is said that molecules are doing irregular movements endlessly, the higher the temperature, the faster the molecules move, and the lower the temperature, the slower the molecules move.
The charging process of lithium batteries is equivalent to using electricity to transport lithium ions from the positive electrode of the battery along the electrolyte to the graphite negative electrode, and then embedded in the graphite molecular void.
If the temperature is too low, the movement speed of lithium ions will slow down, some lithium ions can not be "squeezed" into the negative electrode, and the lithium ions that cannot be squeezed in will accumulate on the surface of the negative electrode, forming a spike-like metal lithium.
If the lithium metal accumulates too much, it is possible to pierce the diaphragm and cause a short circuit, causing deflagration.
The discharge process of the lithium battery is equivalent to lithium ions drilling out of the gap in the graphite anode and running back to the negative electrode along the electrolyte.
In the process of low-temperature discharge of the battery, especially in the case of deep discharge, the same will be because the lithium ion is "lazy", squeezed in the surface of the positive lattice can not be embedded in it, the accumulation of "dead lithium" will cause the irreversible attenuation of the battery capacity, and the accumulation is also likely to puncture the diaphragm and cause deflagration.
Locking the power can be considered as artificial control of the power battery do not charge too much electricity, and do not discharge too much electricity. To a certain extent, it can reduce the accumulation problem of lithium metal, thereby reducing the incidence of battery explosions.
The same is the continuous burning of the car "aftercare" work, WM's performance this time is completely different from before, did not choose to issue an announcement recall on the surface, and at the same time, according to the general feedback of the owners, it also chose to carry out "black box operation" on the vehicle under the banner of vehicle inspection.
If the "lock point" does exist, then using the "lock electricity" to ensure the safety of users is indeed well-intentioned, and it is better to reduce the endurance than to burn the car. But the denial of the right to know is the main reason why car owners are angry and then turn into large-scale complaints and rights protection.
In the face of a series of problems that have recently exploded, Weima has chosen to be silent, and has not yet made a corresponding response.
02. Why did WM "fall behind"?
On the first day of 2022, the new forces rushed to announce December and annual sales, on the one hand, Wei Xiaoli, who was firmly in the 10,000-car club, proudly showed his "muscles", and on the other hand, Weima "shyly" dragged until almost 9 pm before releasing sales.
5,062 vehicles were delivered in December, and 44,157 vehicles were delivered in January-December, an increase of 96.3% year-on-year, and the string of vehicles announced by WM was not bad at first glance, and the official said that it was "close to the sum of cumulative deliveries in the past three years".
However, throughout the whole of 2021, the penetration rate of new energy has soared from 5.3% in 2020 to 15.7%, and the overall sales volume of new energy has tripled compared with last year.
This means that in fact, the growth rate of WM is much lower than the overall growth rate of the industry, which has "dragged its legs" to the new energy market, which is a very dangerous thing for a new force.
What's more, how many of the more than 40,000 new cars delivered are B-end orders, we still don't know.
The predecessor of WM Motors is a three-electric system research and development enterprise founded by Du Ligang in 2012. In 2015, Shen Hui joined as co-founder, chairman and CEO, and the two jointly established WM Motors.
In the same year, Li Xiang also established Ideal Automobile, and Weilai and Xiaopeng were established a year earlier than the two of them, basically it can be considered that Weilai, Ideal, Xiaopeng and Weima are new forces standing on the same running line.
Some of them do websites and some do browsers, and Weima is the purest of the four new forces to build cars.
As one of the most capable returnees in China, Shen Hui has served as the president of BorgWarner China and vice president of Fiat China, a well-known vehicle drive system supplier.
The most memorable thing is that after Shen Hui joined Li Shufu's team as vice president, he personally handled the famous "snake swallowing elephant" incident in the automotive circle and completed Geely's acquisition of Volvo, and since then he has become famous in the automotive industry.
Therefore, WM is much more comfortable than other new forces in the initial stage, and when others are still busy "painting PPT", WM has already gained a firm position in the automotive industry chain by virtue of Shen Hui's interpersonal relationship. It also took the lead in obtaining car manufacturing qualifications through the acquisition of Huanghai Automobile.
According to statistics, WM has raised 11 rounds of financing, at least 35 billion yuan, which is also supported by Li Ka-shing, the richest man in Hong Kong, and the supply of funds is not worse than Wei Xiaoli.
Different from Wei Xiaoli, WM did not choose to go to the Americans to circle money at that time, but aimed at the science and technology innovation board, if Weima succeeded, it would become the first domestic car company to successfully list on the science and technology innovation board.
2019 can be said to be the most beautiful year in WM, and sales have been at the forefront of new forces for several months.
With the confidence of riding the wind and waves, WM opened the listing counseling in September 2020, but in April 2021, it was exposed that the listing was suspended due to material review problems, and now more than half a year has passed, and WM's listing seems to be still in a "stranded" state.
How did Weima, which can be called the "opening of Tianhu", break this good hand?
In the past two years, the frequent "burning cars" incident has more or less affected Weima, but given that Tesla, Weilai, Xiaopeng, and Ideal have also burned cars, there must be other factors.
At this stage, the lack of product strength is one of the factors that Weima has fallen behind.
As early as 2018, Shen Hui had issued a bold statement, "at least one car will be launched in the next year", but now Shen Hui can only symbolically fulfill this promise.
Since WM delivered the first model of the EX5 compact pure electric SUV in February 2019, it has always relied on it to support sales.
In 2020, WM launched the EX6, the same pure electric SUV, compared to the EX5, the length of the car is 217mm, but the wheelbase is only 12mm longer, the rest of the configuration is basically unchanged, basically can be considered to take the EX5 chassis set a larger shell.
Its sales are also miserable, some media reported that WM EX6 only sold for 5 months in the middle of 2020, on average, only 50 units per month were bought, and then they were not sold.
By 2021, the new Cheweima W6 officially began to be delivered, slightly larger than the EX5, and at first glance it still looks like "changing the soup without changing the medicine".
It is worth mentioning that in terms of automatic driving, WM did not choose self-research like Wei Xiaoli, but chose to deeply bind Baidu Apollo, and the W6 is a model with Baidu Apollo intelligent driving blessing.
You know, the position of autonomous driving engineer is now a very expensive existence in the automotive industry, take Wei Xiaoli's bid, a person's monthly salary is as little as 2.5W, more than 10W, and it is necessary to form a huge team to work. WM's choice of Baidu can indeed save a lot of money.
However, taking "shortcuts" comes at a cost.
According to media reports, when WM signed an autonomous driving cooperation agreement with Baidu Apollo, it was explicitly required not to develop self-developed automatic driving, which the media believes is also the reason why WM can only be led by Baidu's nose.
Now Baidu also has to build its own car, which may put Weima in a very embarrassing situation.
In terms of automatic driving, Weima is actually a section behind Wei Xiaoli, but Weima itself does not feel so, so some car owners believe that Weima is the real "Puxin man".
When Wei Xiaoli has conquered the iconic technology of navigation assisted driving, WM, which has not yet realized this function, is the most publicity in terms of publicity, and it has played the propaganda slogan of "unmanned driving".
But this so-called "driverless" is in a specific scenario, only when automatic parking can be used, but installed a Baidu automatic parking suite. Here Xiaopeng may say that 2 years ago I had already played with automatic parking, and now I have started to play with sky flying.
Basically, it can be considered that the WM W6 is an upgraded version of Ex5 Baidu. Of course, Baidu Apollo's research and layout in this area is indeed quite a lot.
A while ago, WM's first car, the WM M7, also flashed at last year's Guangzhou Auto Show, with 4 NVIDIA Orin-X chips, a computing power of 1016TOPS, and 3 solid-state lidars.
I have to say that this intelligent hardware stack is absolutely fierce enough, but how good the actual experience can be, and when it will be listed, here to draw a question mark.
Not only is it intelligent, but WM is also not able to take advantage of the endurance that electric vehicle users are most concerned about.
In 3 years, WM EX5 as the main model, basically a yearly change, updated 4 generations after the 2022 WM EX5, but the endurance is only 403km!
In contrast, Xiaopeng, the closest to its technical route among the new forces, has a maximum endurance of 700km, not to mention the GAC Aean LX Plus, which has a range of 1,000 kilometers.
In addition to the lack of product strength itself, the marketing idea is too traditional, which is also one of the factors that Weima is behind.
In April 2020, Weima official Xuan Xiao Jingteng was its first spokesperson, and Weima became the first new force to invite celebrity endorsements.
Asking celebrities to endorse this matter is indeed the "old craftsmanship" of traditional car companies, as for the positive effect, there will definitely be some, but there are many uncontrollable factors, and it is not good to have another Wu Yifan, Li Yundi, Wang Lihong and so on.
In contrast, other new forces have chosen to conform to this era of endless Internet celebrities, and strive to shape the founder IP.
Musk, Li Bin, Li Xiang, he Xiaopeng have all followed this trend to establish a persona, and it turns out that this practice not only saves money, but also seems to be better, and can pull into the relationship between the brand and the user to a certain extent.
Shen Hui seemed to be implicit in this regard.
Of course, this kind of "implication" may also be related to Shen Hui's identity in WM, which is actually essentially related to Musk's role in Tesla, Li Bin in Weilai, Li Xiang in the ideal, and He Xiaopeng in Xiaopeng.
In terms of sales channels, WM is also different from Tesla and Weilai, which are fully directly operated.
WM's offline channels are divided into two categories: experience stores and user centers. Among them, the experience store is directly operated, mainly responsible for vehicle display and user test drive, while the user center is mostly an external franchisee, responsible for vehicle delivery and after-sales service.
The key problem is that the experience store and the user center are essentially two groups of people, and there is basically no direct communication at ordinary times, which will inevitably cause the caliber to be inconsistent and the user experience to be fragmented.
WM, which cannot be sold in the private market, can only be forced to switch to the rental and online car operation market. The glory of the new energy B-end market is obviously gone after the era of BAIC BJEV's dominance in 2019, and it has begun to decline all the way.
When Chinese car companies have taken advantage of the wave of electrification to move towards high-end, weima, as a new force, can only further sink its brand image and overdraft itself in advance to maintain its survival, which is really uncomfortable.
03. Write at the end
In this era of "everything makes a car", new energy vehicles are undoubtedly one of the biggest opportunities in the world today.
However, the opportunity does not belong to everyone, otherwise the president will have to follow suit to build a car.
Winning at the starting line does not mean winning the future.
Falling in the middle of the way does not mean that you will lose the game.
For today's Weima, it is most important to set the right attitude and seize the time to spend the money saved on the blade.