Weima becomes a "dangerous horse"

Text/Leju Finance Jin Wenyu

Recently, there is a new song on the Internet called "Two Hundred Pieces Will Deceive Me" that is very popular, and the lyrics write:

"New Year's morning customer service called and said, the old owner gave you free testing, he said there are two hundred yuan card to send it, but did not expect two hundred yuan to cheat me, the big New Year's two hundred yuan on the electric lock ..."

The song is directed at the WM EX5. The reason is that WM Automobile Manufacturer borrowed the name of inspecting vehicles, from December 23, 2021 to January 15, 2022, to carry out the "New Year User Premium" activity, and the lucky users who were randomly selected will receive a comprehensive vehicle inspection and a JD card worth 200 yuan. However, in fact, it secretly "locks the electricity" on the owner's vehicle, which greatly reduces the vehicle endurance of the owner and affects the use experience.

The creator of this song, "Zhou Zhou", once claimed to be a big fan of WM Motors, and was also one of the first consumers to buy WM EX5.

As a supporter of WM Motors, he not only produced music songs for WM Motors for free, but also participated in concerts as the "star owner" of WM Motors, and also met Shen Hui, chairman of WM Motors, and individual staff of WM Motors' public relations department.

However, after the "lock the electricity" problem occurred, the WM public relations department did not respond to and did not respond to such a "star car owner" complaint, causing him to write a song in anger and forced to embark on the road of rights protection.

In addition, thousands of car owners also collectively "accused" and showed various evidences, saying that after the "upgrade" of the WM EX5, the battery voltage was reduced from the original 407.5V to 396V. In response to this news, the staff of the WM manufacturer denied it, saying that they "have not learned about this situation for the time being."

Complaints of "power locking" are frequent

What is "locking the power"? Literally, "locking" means locking the power of the battery, but in fact by upgrading and rewriting the BMS (New Energy Vehicle Battery Management System) to achieve the locking of the battery level SOC (System Level Chip) window.

This move redefines the voltage range of the battery to limit the amount of charge and power consumption of the battery, so that it can achieve 100% power output before, and now it can only reach 60%, the battery capacity is reduced, and the mileage will inevitably be greatly reduced.

And WM EX5 has been complained about because of the "lock power" problem, and this is not the first time. As early as July 2021, there were car owners who complained about this problem one after another.

According to the car complaint website Car Quality Network, at that time, there was a complaint from the owner of the Wei carriage that since the battery BMS upgrade of the car machine to the 4S store in mid-2021, the full power mileage of the vehicle has declined significantly. The same road conditions and driving environment, the original can drive 350 kilometers, until now only less than 260 kilometers, after the discovery of the car upgrade in the user's unawares of the limit of the battery charging capacity of about 5 degrees, directly affecting the endurance of more than 80 kilometers, damage to the interests of consumers, after the telephone through the telephone and manufacturers did not give the problem.

For the question of such car owners, WM officials responded at the time, "This situation is the new feedback of individual users, which is an accidental case." Officials attach great importance to this and have jointly investigated the incident with relevant suppliers. ”

Although weima officials responded at the time, the problem was not reasonably resolved, and such things continued to happen later.

The complaint information of the vehicle quality network shows that since July last year, for nearly half a year, consumer complaints about the "power lock" problem of WM Automobile have been appearing, and the reasons for the complaints are basically "WM EX5 system upgrade follow-up mileage drop is serious", "WM EX5 upgrade battery BMS program locking power locking leads to a decrease in battery life", "manufacturers upgrade the system without consumer permission to reduce the follow-up voyage" and so on.

"Spontaneous combustion" crisis

The reason why the WM EX5 will "lock the electricity" may be related to the frequent spontaneous combustion accidents in WM cars in recent years. In the same month that its official "New Year' celebration" was launched, there were three spontaneous combustion incidents in a row on the WM EX5 model.

According to relevant reports, at about 4:30 a.m. on December 20, 2021, most people were still asleep, and a charging station near Changjiang Road in Biyun Road, Zhengzhou City, suddenly caught fire to a new energy vehicle that was charging. The owner of the car said in an interview that the vehicle that caught fire had only been used for about 8 months, and this car was WM EX5.

Two days later, in Sanya City, Hainan Province, a new energy vehicle parked in the middle of the road spontaneously combusted, and the vehicle that spontaneously combusted was put out by the local fire department, without casualties, but the vehicle was burned, and as far as the few logos left, the same as WM EX5.

As everyone knows, another day later in Haikou City, Hainan Province, a new energy vehicle parked under the residential building suddenly caught fire, due to the larger fire, the vehicle parked behind the vehicle and the air conditioning unit on the wall of the residential building were burned to varying degrees. After the accident, according to some netizens on the wheel hub and other details to identify, the accident model is also a WM EX5.

This means that in less than a week, WM EX5 burned one in Zhengzhou, Sanya and Haikou, and for these three accidents, WM official did not make any response, so much so that WM was called "the 'hottest' car company at the end of 2021." ”

This continuous spontaneous combustion accident also occurred in October 2020. At that time, there were also 3 spontaneous combustion incidents in Weima. On October 5, 2020 and October 13, 2020, two operating EX5s in Shaowu City, Fujian Province, spontaneously combusted; and on October 27, a WM EX5 exploded violently at the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and then the relevant units immediately issued a notice prohibiting electric vehicles from entering the basement.

Subsequently, WM officials also issued a statement, saying that due to the problems with the batteries provided by the supplier, the models involved will be recalled to replace the battery packs.

Successive negative events seem to have also made Weima "seriously injured". The essence of "locking electricity" is to change the maximum charging voltage of the battery, which can effectively reduce most of the spontaneous combustion caused by charging. This may have become the fuse for the "locking electricity" behavior of Weima Motors.

Sales are lagging behind

Behind the frequent locking of the power of the WM EX5 may be intended to increase the stability of the battery to improve the safety of the owner's car, but secretly locking the power is also constantly consuming the "brand trust" of the owners.

It is understood that WM implements the two-line layout of "sedan + SUV", has launched three mainstream SUV flagship models of EX5, EX6 and W6, and released the first intelligent pure electric sedan WM7 at the end of October 2021. At the same time, WM also began to launch E5 in the second half of last year, accelerating the layout of the travel market.

WM seems to have a rich product line, but in fact, its main sales are still supported by ex5 models, and its main intelligent EX6, W6 and sedan E5 for the online car market have not contributed much sales.

Today, this main model has disappointed consumers again and again, and if even this last basic disk cannot be saved, WM will face a greater crisis of survival.

Remember that the first "out of the circle" of Weima Automobile was a bet made by the boss Shen Hui and Wang Xing, the founder of the Us group, Wang Xing believed that after a few years, There would only be three new car-making forces left in China, such as Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal, while Shen Hui thought that Weima would definitely enter the top three, and threatened that if Weima entered the top three, he hoped that Wang Xing could personally send him a takeaway.

At that time, Weima, which was gaining momentum, did indeed have the confidence to "shout". However, as the moat of the three major new car-making forces is digging deeper and deeper, other second-line new forces are also constantly exerting their strength, and it is no accident that WM Motors has officially "fallen behind" last year.

According to the official data, in 2021, WM Motors sold 44,157 vehicles for the whole year, close to the sum of the past three years, although the year-on-year increase of 96.3% is very good, but the sales volume is not 20% of its actual production capacity of 250,000 units. At the same time, compared with the "Wei Xiaoli" that doubled sales, the speed of WM Automobile's occupation of the market has lagged behind a long way.