GAC Toyota "lock electric door"

Text/Leju Finance Jin Wenyu

In the past 2021, due to multiple factors such as chip shortages, rising raw materials and the spread of the epidemic in the later stage, the domestic automobile industry is facing great pressure. Among the top 10 domestic auto joint ventures in terms of sales, seven companies, including large automobile groups such as FAW and SAIC, have negative growth.

Among the joint venture car companies that achieved positive growth, GAC Toyota can be described as a thriving, with a growth rate of 11%, becoming the only mainstream joint venture car company to achieve double-digit positive growth in 2021. According to the data, since the chip supply eased in the fourth quarter of last year, GAC Toyota has entered a state of rapid growth, and finally ended with 840,000 vehicles for the whole year.

But this year, as an important model of Toyota's new energy layout in China, GAC Toyota iA5 has been complaining continuously. According to the data of the vehicle quality network, from January to December 2021, due to the frequent problems of "locking the power", component cracking, power battery failure, steering noise, etc., GAC Toyota iA5 ranked in the top 10 of the 2021 electric vehicle complaint list.

Private "lock the electricity"

Since July 2021, the iA5 has begun to receive centralized complaints from car owners due to battery life problems, and based on this, the gac Toyota iA5 complaint index has increased sharply.

According to media reports, GAC Toyota iA5 users have sent a letter to the Quality Development Bureau of the State Administration for Market Regulation to defend their rights, saying that GAC Toyota has carried out OTA remote upgrades to a large number of iA5 models produced before June 2021 without informing the owners, artificially reducing the usable capacity of the car's power battery.

Moreover, this "power-locking" behavior of GAC Toyota manufacturers was carried out without obtaining the consent of the customer and informing the customer. For this, the owner is very angry.

It is understood that the integration of new energy pure electric vehicles is higher, and OTA upgrades can not only achieve basic vehicle upgrades, driving assistance and other functions, but also peripheral projects such as batteries, motors, and electronic control management systems can be remotely upgraded through OTAs. As a result, with the wave of new energy, many new car-making forces are vigorously promoting the powerful use scenarios and upgrade benefits of OTAs for electric vehicles.

However, this remote upgrade will also have certain limitations, and even the possibility of "reverse upgrade" will occur. For example, after the vehicle is upgraded to an OTA, it is inevitable that the mileage will be reduced, the charging speed will be slower, and the engine power will be limited.

Some car owners have feedback that the original battery capacity of the GAC Toyota iA5 bought by themselves is 58.78kWh, and after the OTA upgrade, the original battery capacity of the vehicle has been reduced by nearly 10kWh, and the actual cruising range has been reduced by nearly 100 kilometers. In addition, not only is the battery capacity reduced, but the output power of the motor that could have been 100% output is forced to be locked at less than 60%.

In terms of charging speed, the official said that the current of the vehicle at the time of fast charging can reach 240A at the beginning, but the maximum charging current after the upgrade is only 140A. When the vehicle SOC (battery power) is in the 99% state, the BMS feedback that the actual available power of the SOC is only 83.5%.

GAC Toyota iA5 After the OTA upgrade lock incident, the owners spontaneously organized a rights protection group and complained to 12315, the State Administration of Market Regulation and other channels, hoping that the official will respond to this matter, while restoring the performance of the vehicle and the performance of the vehicle during brand promotion, and said that if the vehicle has safety hazards or defects, it should take a unified recall and other means, otherwise it will continue to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests through various voice channels to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the State Administration of Quality Supervision and other functional departments.

The "curse" of batteries

For GAC Toyota, this kind of "power locking" behavior is indeed inappropriate. From the perspective of the real car experience of many car owners, GAC Toyota "locked the electricity" behind its back this time, which not only reduced the mileage of the vehicle, but also increased the charging frequency of the owner, which brought great trouble to the owner's daily use of the car.

It is worth noting that just a month before the outbreak of large-scale "power locking" complaints about GAC New Energy products, a GAC Toyota iA5 charging spontaneous combustion incident occurred in Xiamen, followed by the iA5 owner's car BMS system began to automatically upgrade OTA, which had to make car owners doubt the correlation between the two things.

In the face of successive incidents of smoke and fires of new energy vehicles, "locking electricity" has become the most direct and effective solution for many manufacturers, including GAC Toyota. Therefore, the owner speculated that the reason for GAC Toyota's doing this is likely to be related to the spontaneous combustion accident of the tram, in order to avoid accidents due to battery fires.

It is understood that GAC Toyota iA5 is equipped with the NCM811 ternary lithium battery pack of the Ningde era, the energy density reaches 170Wh/kg, the battery capacity is 58.8kWh, and the NCM 811 battery of the Ningde era is used. 811 batteries refer to ternary lithium batteries with a nickel-cobalt-manganese content ratio of 8:1:1 in cathode materials.

The advantages and disadvantages of this battery coexist. As the battery with the highest nickel content, the 811 battery also has the largest energy density, and the battery per unit weight volume can allow the vehicle to obtain a greater range. However, the greater activity of nickel also makes it more unstable, and the safety of high-nickel batteries requires strong production and application technology to support.

Electric vehicle safety is a systematic design issue, not a single cell problem, which tests the professional performance of each oem. In order to make the cost and parameters better, car companies must want to leave as little electricity as possible and squeeze the potential of the battery as much as possible.

GAC Toyota locks the SOC (capacity) upper limit of the IA5's Cataline Era 811 battery, so that the DOD (discharge depth) of the power battery is limited to less than 90%. Thus, the maximum output power of the motor is also constrained to avoid the heating of the 811 battery due to excessive output power, and to avoid the fire problem caused by thermal runaway during driving.

Monthly sales were as low as 11 units

Toyota's strength in the field of fuel vehicles and hybrids is beyond doubt, but in recent years, regarding new energy, electrification, especially the electric vehicle market, Toyota has been thrown away by new forces such as Tesla, Weilai, and even Volkswagen, and Toyota has not yet had a mass production model under the real pure electric platform.

Gac Toyota iA5 is GAC Toyota's first pure electric vehicle model, but the iA5 is a very embarrassing car product. This car hangs the LOGO of GAC, but it is marked with GAC Toyota on the rear of the car, and its sales channel is also GAC Toyota.

Strictly speaking, although the GAC Toyota iA5 is hung with the GAC logo and developed by the GAC Research Institute, it is a pure "Guangfeng product", which not only means that it is produced by GAC Toyota and sold in the GAC Toyota channel.

In terms of sales, GAC Toyota iA5 did not get good results because of Toyota's "golden signboard". According to incomplete statistics, from January to December 2021, the sales volume of GAC iA5 was 3303 units, down 39.64% year-on-year.

Based on a series of chain reactions triggered by the "power-locking" behavior of GAC Toyota iA5, the sales volume of GAC Toyota iA5 in the second half of the year is even more disastrous, with sales of only 12 vehicles in September 2021 and 11 units in November.

Leju Finance has learned that after entering 2022, complaints about GAC Toyota iA5 have not decreased. In less than a month, there were more than a dozen complaints.

According to the recent complaint information of the car quality network, GAC Toyota's iA5 OTA model that was locked by manufacturers was mainly concentrated in 2019 models, and a small number of 2021 models. The main problems are still focused on the decline in power, the shortening of battery life, the increase in charging time, and the "locking" of electric vehicles.