Wen 丨 Intelligent Relativity
Author 丨 Family Chicken
When Tesla owner Xiao Zhang renewed his insurance, he found that his car insurance was actually more expensive than last year, and the new car he had just bought had not been insured, but the price of the follow-up insurance of the rebate had changed from 4,000 yuan for the first time to more than 6,000 yuan, up about 2,000 yuan.
After asking the car friends, I learned that the premium of new energy vehicles was fully increased this year. The previous car insurance was upgraded to a new energy exclusive car insurance, and the liability of the car damage insurance part included not only the body, but also the battery and energy storage system, the motor and drive system, other control systems and all other equipment at the factory.
The rise in premiums is a hidden part of the price increase of new energy vehicles, and the overall price increase of the whole vehicle has aroused a lot of attention before. For example, tesla model 3 has increased prices twice in a row, and the average price has increased from about 230,000 yuan to 260,000 yuan. However, "Intelligent Relativity" also found that new energy vehicle players are constantly improving their own hardware and software value to "hedge" the negative impact of prices.
The consumption of new energy vehicles is moving towards marketization
The rise in the premium of new energy vehicles actually has a greater impact on new cars. According to the comparison table of new and old new energy vehicle premiums summarized by the Old Car Research Institute, taking the Tesla Model 3 high-performance version as an example, the old version of the car insurance premium is 6356, the new version of the premium is 11934 yuan, and the premium increased by 5578 yuan, an increase of 87% year-on-year.
In addition to Tesla, in the car damage insurance part, Xiaopeng Automobile rose by 54.98% at the highest, rose by at least 24.77%, Weilai rose by 39.05%, and the ideal model rose by 11.63% to 38.84%.
(Source: Used Car Research Institute)
The price increase of new energy vehicles has become a fact, the epidemic's restrictions on production capacity, the shortage of global automotive chips, the price of middle and upstream materials in turn, and the price of lithium battery cells have increased, and these changes have finally been reflected in the downstream vehicle prices.
"If you pay the deposit before January 10, you can also enjoy the rights and interests of the national subsidy in 2021." A salesman of Xiaopeng Automobile said that once this point in time has passed, many of Xiaopeng's models on sale will rise by about five or six thousand yuan.
2022 is also the last year of subsidies for new energy vehicles, and the subsidy standards in 2022 will be reduced by 30% on the basis of 2021. In this context, some car companies have chosen to set a transition period for this year's subsidies.
GAC Aeon said that the temporary price will not change, and Weilai Automobile said that users who pay the deposit at the specified time and pick up the car can enjoy the subsidy amount from Wei's pocket. BAIC Jihu also used New Year's Day and Spring Festival to carry out related marketing activities to obtain the last batch of customers through self-subsidies.
Of course, there are also some car companies that have adopted the most direct price increase method, Tesla, Extreme Kr 001 to buy new cars need to be calculated according to the new price. The "old leek" finally saw the total rout of the "waiting party" in.
According to the statistics of the Economic Observation Network, from before 2015 to 2021, the average subsidy that can be obtained per new energy vehicle that passes the audit has dropped from 106,400 to more than 10,000 yuan.
However, Intelligent Relativity understands that in the five years from 2015 to 2020, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles in the mainland increased from 1% to 5.8%. By 2021, that number has soared to 13.4 percent.
Among them, the sales of new energy vehicles in non-restricted cities have grown rapidly, and in the view of Ouyang Minggao, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and vice chairman of the China Electric Vehicle Hundred Association, the consumption of new energy vehicles has completely moved towards marketization.
However, the other side of marketization is that new energy vehicles have divided into three forces. The new car-making forces represented by Tesla, Weilai and Xiaopeng. Technology giants represented by Huawei, Baidu, Xiaomi, and Foxconn. In addition, the industrial capital represented by Volkswagen, BYD and Geely has strong capital strength.
A large number of companies have undergone a major change in their attitude towards electrification, and they have either rapidly improved their product lines or increased cross-border efforts, and the complete vehicle products available for consumers to choose are further enriched.
Heap hardware prepares for advanced autonomous driving
If price increases are inevitable, the second half of commercial competition will only become more intense. How can car companies make users feel that the price increase is worth it?
In addition to the transition at their own expense, the new car-making forces are also accelerating intelligence through software embedding, creating intelligent cockpit differentiation, and enriching operational services to increase brand promotion. Competition in the same industry has intensified, and to a certain extent, it is also forcing them to "bleed" to upgrade to gain the favor of consumers.
Weibo user Uncle Te, dismantling the latest Chinese version of Model Y Performance, found that it and Model S Plaid use the same amD Ryzen quad-core processor. It is equivalent to Tesla delegating the configuration of the PS5 with performance comparable to that of the PS5 to a model below 500,000 yuan.
In fact, all Tesla models, from the lowest end to the highest end, are equipped with the same intelligent driving ability. Because not only sensors, all cars have the same dedicated autopilot chip embedded, and future new models will do the same.
This is just a new round of pre-buried high-end car chips after the embedded automatic driving chip. The purpose is to lay the foundation for software upgrades with hardware redundancy.
In addition to Tesla, car companies represented by new domestic car-making forces have also rushed to install the hardware needed for high-end automatic driving. At present, low-level intelligent driving is widely popular, and almost all of the new product launch plans of Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal have buried chips and radars that can support the computing power requirements required for automatic driving above L4 level.
Xiaopeng, embedded Livox lidar, equipped with NVIDIA Xavier chip and a computing platform large enough to support L4 level autonomous driving. Ideally, to obtain a Grade B map mapping qualification, it will be equipped with NVIDIA's latest Orin chip, which also meets the algorithm requirements.
NIO has 4 NVDIA Drive Orin chips and 8-megapixel cameras, equipped with visual autopilot technology, and equipped with 11 8-megapixel high-definition cameras and a number of perception hardware NIO Aquila supersensitive system.
In the current competitive environment, consumers need technology selling points. Car companies are also increasing the value of hardware configuration, gradually shifting the focus of the intelligent race to high-end automatic driving. Once the policy environment and software solutions mature in the future, they can activate equipment through OTAs to seize the opportunity of high-level automatic driving.
The Smart Cockpit is also rolled in
Tesla, which is forward-looking, has begun a new round of pre-installation of car chips after aiming at automatic driving. This set of intelligent cockpit hardware will also become a vane for domestic new energy vehicles. Looking at the current domestic automobile market, the new forces of domestic car manufacturing are actually very "rolled up" in the smart cockpit.
"Wei Xiaoli" uses Qualcomm chips in the smart cockpit, the difference is in the number of screens, chip computing power and voice interaction logic. At the same level, the basic function has been achieved, people have me, and people without me must also prepare.
Yang Yihong, head of Minieye's cockpit perception business unit, said in an interview with Tiger Sniff that in the second half of 2020, some car manufacturers, especially new car brands, began to put forward some ideas with them that "only you can't think of it, and the brain hole is beyond imagination".
The ideal ONE's central control design consists of four screens. With the exception of shortcut keys on the steering wheel, there are almost no solid keys. Xiaopeng's smart cockpit consists of a conventional central control screen and instrument screen. Ji Yu, vice president of Xiaopeng Automobile, said that the current interaction mode in the car has completed the transition from physical buttons to large screens, and the next trend is voice interaction.
Touch and voice are ideal, the main ways for Roc owners to interact with the vehicle. Ideal ONE 2021, considering that the owner may open the tailgate, window, etc. outside the car voice control, while using the "four-tone zone partition recognition", the microphone is installed on the window, which can realize the owner to wake up the vehicle in the voice outside the window.
Xiaopeng's full voice function covers almost all application ecology and functions in the car. It supports "continuous dialogue" and "semantic interrupt", can receive multiple instructions in a row within 20 seconds, does not need to wake up with "hello little P" every time, and the interaction method is closer to people's daily communication.
NIO realizes three-screen interaction through the central control screen, digital instrumentation and rear HDR multi-function control screen. However, Li Bin has publicly stated that in 2015, Weilai was more resistant to the use of the central control screen. It was only because all aspects were not mature at that time that they were forced to return to the route of the central control screen.
He believes that Weilai will one day have to dry out the screens in the car. Therefore, in the smart cockpit, Weilai introduced the AR/VR concept earlier, and even released AR/VR equipment. In Li Bin's eyes, if the AR and VR experience is good enough, Weilai does not need to make a large horizontal screen at all.
The design of the "Wei Xiaoli" intelligent cockpit, whether it emphasizes voice interaction, touch or AR/VR, its essence is to allow smart cars to carry more functions in the future and have their own highlights. To achieve "big and different" future smart cockpit design will only be more "radical".
Tesla, which likes to cut costs, is willing to spend money on high-end chips for ordinary models, and in the future, in order to enhance the competitiveness of domestic new forces, regardless of high-end models, I am afraid that they will have to gradually complete the decentralization of high-level hardware, and the overall cost of car companies will rise.
New car-making forces lead the way in automobile intelligence
Lei Jun, who was persuaded by He Xiaopeng to build a car, said when sharing his understanding of smart cars, "The car is to install four wheels for a large mobile phone." Smart cars will eventually become traffic portals, and smart cockpits are one of the important sources of traffic. In a way, as many possibilities as it can provide, it is possible to create as much traffic as possible.
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why Tesla took the lead in moving the computing power of desktop PCs into the smart cockpit. Functional diversity is the basis for the transformation of the cockpit from basic functions to entertainment and consumption. After upgrading the hardware level, Tesla can provide users with more innovative services and obtain larger-scale revenue from games, software, and services.
At present, Tesla provides game, Netflix, Youtube video OTA upgrade unlocking functions, including acceleration packages, seat heating, long battery life packages, infotainment system upgrades, etc. Drawing on Tesla's development experience, Xiaopeng, Ideal, and Weilai's automotive intelligent cockpits also provide a series of services.
For example, they generally provide games, karaoke, music, voice interaction, remote control, unlimited traffic and other functions. Even on April 30 last year, Xiaopeng also published a patent for an invention called "a video conferencing method and smart cockpit based on a smart cockpit."
Unlike Tesla, the subscription service of the new domestic car manufacturing forces also includes some traditional forms of car maintenance services, such as door-to-door maintenance, door-to-door delivery of cars, one-click power-on and so on.
The 2021 McKinsey Automotive Consumer Insights Report points out that Chinese consumers are increasingly calling for automotive intelligence and are more willing to pay a premium for novel features. At the same time, consumers' requirements for existing car purchase models and after-sales service have also changed. More than half of consumers prefer innovative service models.
Although the old owners of new energy are laughing at themselves, they are finally not old leeks. In the short term, the price increase of new energy vehicles seems to make consumer wallets "damaged".
However, in January, the latest data feedback, in December 2021, NIO delivered 10,489 new cars, an increase of 49.7% year-on-year. Xiaopeng Automobile delivered 16,000 units, an increase of 181% year-on-year. The ideal ONE delivery reached 14,087 units, another record high in deliveries.
In the long run, "new energy" will not hinder car owners from purchasing new energy vehicles. However, the impact of the "price" element on consumers remains to be verified.
New energy vehicles are developing towards intelligence, and how to make "software-defined cars" is very critical. A wide range of user groups is the foundation for the future development of car companies, and the added value of car companies' products is constantly improving in the fierce competition. Whether these "added values" can hedge the negative impact of price increases, consumers will eventually give their own answers.
*The pictures in this article are from the Internet