Compared with the people's livelihood news and entertainment industry gossip that has more hot spots and everyone pays more attention to, the automotive industry must not have so many fresh topics.
For the small editor of the automotive media, in addition to reporting new car news and manufacturer conferences, in order to complete the KPI every month, there is also a conventional routine topic: sales inventory.
But I don't know when it started, and the sales that seem to only need to be reported once a month can be divided into N:
On the first day of every month, the major new car manufacturers will eagerly release the data posters delivered last month, telling everyone that their own development is booming, and the new car track is bright.
Often at this time, under the media reports, there will be readers who will jump out and complain: Why is there no Tesla? How come there is no BYD? The new forces will sell more than 10,000 units at most every month, so much publicity, is not it self-high?
To understand the sales volume of the domestic passenger car market every month, we have to wait until the middle of each month to release the data released by the China Passenger Car Market Information Association (ACS).
And the association seems to know very well that information dissemination needs to consider the rhythm, and cannot reveal all the answers in one breath.
Usually, the agency will release the overall market and highlight manufacturer sales data of the previous month on the first day, and the more specific manufacturer and model sales ranking will be published after the next day.
This is not the end, because the data released by the Association of Automobiles is the wholesale volume and retail volume shared by the manufacturers themselves, and these data often have some small deviations from the number of vehicles that are actually delivered to the hands of users and are really insured.
Some media and analysis agencies that are god (yuan) tong (yi) guang (hua) and large (qian) will also conduct a detailed analysis of the actual amount of risk at the end of each month or so.
Therefore, if you really want to be more realistic, figure out the difference between many concepts such as wholesale volume, retail volume, insurance volume, etc., sort out the differences between data, and write articles that are both difficult to understand and not good to see.
This week's supercharging weekly report, or from the sales chat, talk about some trends and thinking behind the data.
The car market picked up
In recent years, the vigorous development of new energy vehicles seems to cover up a fact: since 2017, China's overall automobile sales have experienced a year-on-year decline.
Specifically, in the narrow passenger car (sedan/SUV/MPV) segment, which is most relevant to everyone's daily lives, sales peaked at 23.75 million units in 2017.
In the following three years, China's annual sales of passenger cars entered the downward route, with annual sales of 22.351 million, 20.69 million and 19.288 million in 18/19/20, respectively.
In fact, "the car is not good to sell" is a more common consensus in the automotive industry in recent years. The transformation of the market from an incremental market to a stock market is also a condensed summary of today's Chinese auto market that we often hear.
Things have finally turned around in 2021: full-year passenger car sales reached 20.146 million units, up 4.4% year-on-year in 2020.
With the ebb and flow of overall sales, the outside world has always had a variety of eight immortals across the sea, a variety of interpretations. In addition to being linked to the grand picture of national economic development, there are also many divergent imaginations from the microscopic level.
Many explanations that seem to have some truth can often only be used as a pastimes after everyone's tea and dinner. The explanations that impressed me myself are as follows:
In the past few years, the rise of mobile Internet, especially online car-hailing, has made it more convenient for everyone to travel, and it has also made buying a car seem less rigid. Therefore, "young people no longer love to buy cars" is an explanation for the popularity of the market downturn.
In 2020, the sudden outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic has made home isolation, traffic control and other phenomena a new normal in people's daily lives.
Therefore, many optimists have believed that considering the uncertainty of public transport safety, consumer enthusiasm for private cars will increase, thereby boosting the overall market sales.
But as mentioned earlier, most of these interpretations can only make everyone have fun. The fluctuation of sales volume is related to complex factors such as consumer demand, the pace of new cars of manufacturers, and the status of the supply chain, and it is not a simple phenomenon that can be directly answered.
In any case, judging from the overall sales volume of the passenger car market in 2021, it is not too much to use the word "warming" to describe it. However, after the test of the global economy at the most severe time of the epidemic in 2020, the recovery of today's car market is more like a kind of inevitability.
We must not forget that the epidemic situation is repeated, and supply chain turbulence such as chip shortages continue to affect the development of the industry. We must not forget that the overall sales in 2021 have increased compared to last year, but they are far from the peak of sales in 2017.
As for what the industry has been looking forward to, it is even more unknown when the overall annual sales of Chinese cars will be 30 million and the annual sales of passenger cars will appear.
Substitution effect
"The characteristics of the strong difference between the trend of new energy vehicles and traditional fuel vehicles, and the partial substitution effect on fuel vehicles" is an old saying that does not move in the sales report of each monthly passenger association in 2021.
By the time the overall sales volume is announced in 2021, we can finally know how strong this "substitution effect" is:
In 2021, the cumulative sales of new energy passenger cars reached 2.989 million units, up 169.1% year-on-year, and the overall penetration rate reached 14.8%. In 2020, that number is just 5.8 percent.
Remember the sales volume announced by the new power manufacturers during the New Year's Day? In the chart list, Xiaopeng won the annual sales championship. At the same time, Xiaopeng, Weilai and Ideal are all working hard to impact the annual sales of 100,000 with sales of more than 90,000.
When we look at the above December manufacturer retail rankings, we can still see the gap between new power manufacturers and "traditional" giants - BYD and Tesla China's monthly sales are close to 100,000 units.
Next, let's look at the annual statistics.
In the list, the top three BYD, SAIC-GM-Wuling, Tesla China annual sales data is certainly staggering. What is more worthy of our consideration is that I am afraid that the manufacturers in the list, in addition to the electric upstart represented by Tesla, sales are not only contributed by pure electric vehicles - plug-in hybrid models still occupy a large share.
Taking BYD, which ranks at the top of the list, for example, its DM-i plug-in hybrid model has finally ushered in the spring of 2021. Nearly half of its nearly 600,000 new energy vehicles sold annually are contributed by DM-i models.
At the same time, in the overall sales of BYD passenger cars in 2021, the sales volume of pure electricity + plug-in hybrids accounted for 81.32%.
After BYD, the latest hybrid models of domestic independent brands such as Great Wall and Geely have also been on the string. In 2022, there will be a more important position in the model matrix of these brands.
Plug-in hybrid models are often described as "transition routes" for pure electric vehicles. The reality of the market tells us that at a time when the charging infrastructure is not yet complete and the "endurance anxiety" of electric vehicles still exists, the market demand for plug-in hybrid models with lower costs such as convenient energy replenishment and fuel consumption will exist for a long time.
The first step in the "replacement" of traditional fuel vehicles by new energy vehicles is probably not a pure electric vehicle.
Intelligent imagination: The most valuable thing is time
Is the new energy track a blue ocean or a red ocean?
Placed on each new power manufacturer, it looks like a blue ocean: more and more new cars, sales are gradually rising, and in the process of going from 0 to 1, there are broad prospects for development.
However, from the basic point of view of the entire automobile market, it seems to be a cruel red sea of competition: when the annual sales scale of China's passenger car market is confined to about 20 million units and lack of increment, the sales performance between various manufacturers will certainly be long and long, and the big waves will be sandy, and if they do not advance, they will retreat.
As for the new energy vehicles imagined by the outside world once again staged the subversive effect of the smartphone that has occurred, if it is simply to switch the energy mode, I am afraid it will not be possible.
Where exactly is the opportunity? Probably autonomous driving.
Autonomous driving will turn cars into moving spaces on wheels, a future that all manufacturers are looking forward to today.
This kind of thinking has also attracted internet technology companies to enter the market. As we all know, domestic manufacturers such as Xiaomi and Baidu have officially announced the construction of cars, and on the other side of the ocean, the car planning of Apple, the pioneer of the smart phone era, also affects people's nerves at all times.
This week, in addition to sales, another big news, is that Apple is in contact with South Korean suppliers, hoping to cooperate with SK and LG manufacturers for battery supply.
Previously, according to Bloomberg' report, in Apple's vision, the "Apple car" will be completely different from the traditional vehicle form - there is no steering wheel, pedals and other traditional car parts, based on complete driverless technology, passengers can sit face to face on both sides of the vehicle, the car is arranged as a private theater, office.
Once upon a time, making phone calls and texting were the most basic and arguably the most single function of mobile phones. After the advent of smart phones, based on the mobile Internet, a variety of blossoming APP applications have changed our lives, and also made mobile phones an "external organ" that we cannot do without.
When a variety of touch screens appear in cars, and mobile phones can do everything that cars can do, people will naturally begin to imagine whether this will become the next era-changing super mobile terminal.
But the question is, how much time people spend on the square screen of their phones today, and how much time they actually spend in the car — even if fully autonomous driving technology is really realized, can the time you spend in the car compare to the time you spend on your phone?
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