Recently, the "German Troika" has successively announced the sales results of China in 2021: BMW delivered 846,200 units, an increase of 8.9% year-on-year; Mercedes-Benz sold 758,800 units, down 2% year-on-year; Audi was 732,000 units, down 3.6% year-on-year. The BBA luxury market share fell to 57.1%, with its first annual market share below 60%. Although the BBA is still the ruler of China's luxury market, its dominance has declined significantly, and it has been overtaken by Tesla.
Tesla sold 320,000 vehicles in China in 2021, an increase of 119% year-on-year and a market share of 8.2%. Sales are some distance from the BBA, but Tesla exported more than 100,000 vehicles overseas last year. In other words, if Tesla does not take care of other countries, sales in China can easily exceed 400,000 vehicles. The most critical thing is that it is still in short supply: Tesla's official website shows that the Model 3 is expected to take about 3 months to deliver. The automotive industry has entered the era of new energy, as the industry leader Tesla, the Annual Sales of the Chinese Market surpass the BBA may only be a matter of time.
So, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi, who is likely to be the first to be "stepped on" by Tesla?
Under the impact of the new energy wave, the BBA has not been able to stand alone. BBA's strength over other brands is the excellent performance and luxury label, but now Tesla has easily broken the threshold. The Model 3 high-performance all-wheel drive version of 339,900 yuan accelerates 3.3 seconds from 100 kilometers, which is the performance of BBA million-level models. Thanks to the electrified body structure, new energy models are more likely to do a good job of luxury comfort, at least NVH performance can almost beat the same level of fuel vehicles.
Of course, the premium barriers shaped by a century of history, Tesla still can not easily break. In terms of brand luxury, Tesla is not as good as BBA. However, no matter how high the brand luxury, the car is an industrial product after all, and the functional attributes are greater than the decorative attributes. Consumers buy and drive or sit, rather than treating it as a Hermès bag that does not contain anything but only saves face. Brands can certainly appeal to consumers, but they can't always pay for a car logo.
The competitive advantage of luxury brands is gradually weakening, and this is not a big problem. The most headache is that they are difficult to keep up with the pace of development of new energy in time.
Under the wave of the new energy era, consumers are no longer obsessed with the pursuit of luxury labels, they are willing to pay for the early label - experience new things, enjoy the ultimate service. In the past, it was still focusing on performance, materials and design, and now it is focusing on battery life, intelligence and OTA, etc., and even offline activities, service projects and mobile apps. The needs of users have changed, and BBA has also changed in time. But if you look back and look closely, the new energy vehicles built by the BBA always have an inexplicable sense of weirdness.
Mercedes-Benz EQ series, BMW iX series and Audi e-tron series, if you do not look at the logo on the front of the car, the whole car is simply unremarkable: the endurance is up to 800km, and the price is also more than one million yuan. Looking at low-cost models, there is no advantage compared with Tesla; intelligence and automatic driving basically belong to the level of talking better than nothing, and cannot be compared with Tesla. As for user operation, Tesla is not outstanding, but at least people will not deliberately increase prices, force decorations and minor diseases and overhauls.
When the elephant turns around, it is the dilemma that the BBA is in.
First, the thinking of managers, it is difficult to achieve self-subversion. The BBA's helmsmen, under the influence of the century-old car-making concept, it is difficult to go out of the comfort zone and create new thinking. The BBA new energy vehicle mentioned above, you can almost see the figure of the corporate family-style car manufacturing concept. Not to say that this is not good, but in the era of new energy, innovation obviously has more development potential than inheritance.
Second, existing organizations do not allow the emergence of Great Leap Forward-style innovation. BBA has a fixed car-making model, once a link breaks through the circle, it is easy to cause a negative impact on the whole body. The simplest example is employee compensation, a fledgling driving software engineer, who tends to be paid more than a mechanical engineer who has been working for more than a decade, do you say the latter will be emotionless?
In summary, the most likely to be pulled down by Tesla is probably Audi.
FAW and SAIC, which cooperate with Audi, are both first-class and first-class factories in China. And BMW and Mercedes-Benz partners, one is on the verge of bankruptcy, one is weak and can't help the wind. In other words, even if the foreign equity ratio has been liberalized, Audi still has no right to speak. Decision-making power is not in their own hands, which can easily lead to R&D and demand cannot be matched and adjusted in time. For example, the foreign party found that a certain function has great potential for development, and the technology can also support it, so it is proposed to add it. China's research on the Chinese market was not very popular, and it rejected the foreign proposal. Coming and going, repeatedly, the power of car products is easy to lag behind the new forces of car manufacturing.
Another point is that Audi is reluctant to choose a radical development route and is still adhering to its brand image. The mileage of the Audi e-tron series does not exceed 600km. High endurance is actually not so difficult, nothing more than to find a head battery manufacturer to customize a high-density power battery. The reason why Audi did not do this is because of the internal rejection of high endurance, because once the battery safety is not guaranteed, it will undoubtedly directly damage the brand image of Audi. It cannot be said that this kind of thinking is wrong, but it will more or less hinder Audi's electrification transformation.
Audi is already implementing its electrification transformation plan, and will release a number of new energy models including Q4 e-tron in 2022. By the end of 2022, the number of electrified models sold in China will reach 9. At the same time, Audi also announced that it will invest about 18 billion euros in electrification and hybridization by 2026. It is good to have a landing plan, but the degree of transformation is the key to determining the future.
So, do you think Audi can successfully transform?