Author | Pan Tao Edited | Luo Lijuan
"Our business boundary is not to be a C-end brand." Li Peng, founder and CEO of Youpao Technology, told All-Weather Technology.
2021 to 2022 is a big year for electric vehicles, on the one hand, "Wei Xiaoli" impacts the annual delivery of 100,000 vehicles, and on the other hand, new players continue to make high-profile appearances. Last year, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, there were many new heavy players, including Baidu and Xiaomi, and then the self-traveler founded by Li Yinan.
Most of them, like "Wei Xiaoli", are in the business of TO C. In contrast, the positioning of Yo-Yo Technology is a bit special, directly cutting into TO B, saying that it will help car companies build cars.
Even if it is also "not building your own car", its model is significantly different from Huawei's. Yo-Yo provides hardware capabilities based on skateboard chassis, rather than intelligent capabilities such as automatic driving and smart cockpits.
Founded in early 2021, according to the investigation, it has completed a total of 3 rounds of financing so far, and the investment institutions behind it include Matrix Partners China, Zhen Fund and Boyuan Capital under Bosch.
After years in the automotive industry, before founding Youpao Technology, Li Peng's most recent resume was that of the high-end brand SL (Salon Zhixing) project at Great Wall Motors. In addition, he also has an industry background such as Internet and artificial intelligence.
Li Peng called the new round of car-making waves "scene car-making", which is the 2.0 era of intelligent cars.
He believes that in the era of smart cars 2.0, the value of users has shifted. This change is like switching from a mobile phone feature phone to a smart phone, and the degree of "smartness" of the product and the soft power of the hardware will be more and more valued.
With the influx of new players, the future electric vehicle track will become more crowded. In this context, Yo-Yo-Pao tries to help car companies focus more on defining and exploring their own user value by creating a car-making infrastructure, so as to focus on the value that can really bring differentiation in the intelligent era.
In January this year, Yo-Yo-Pao released two of its major products, a "UP Super Chassis" and three "UP SPACE Super Cabins". These two products aim at pain points such as the time cost of car manufacturing and the high technical threshold. According to Youpao Technology, the use of UP super chassis to develop a new model, the cycle can be effectively shortened by 6-12 months.
But reality remains fraught with uncertainty. The situation faced by the UP super chassis launch market is similar to that of electric vehicles in the popularization stage - the penetration rate is not high, and the user education is not enough. This not only involves the rewriting of the rules of industry interests, the change of technology and industrial chain, and may even bring subversion to the logic of industry car manufacturing, and the reversal of concepts is not an easy task.
"Before you jump up the stairs, anything is possible, but nothing happens." Li Peng likened the mental journey in the early stage of entrepreneurship to "jumping off a building", which is both an exciting and frightening experience.
For the current yo-yo, if one end of The Scale is a market waiting to be developed, the other end is the resistance to industry change with the same quality.
How far can you run?
The following is the dialogue between All-Weather Technology and Li Peng, which has been sorted out:
1
"Starting a business is like jumping off a building"
Q: In 2021, new energy vehicles ushered in the second round of outbreaks, and many new players chose to start building cars in this year, including Yo-Yo Technology. How do you think this round of new car construction is different from the previous round?
Li Peng: We ourselves summed up 1.0 and 2.0 of smart cars.
The most important thing in the last round of new car manufacturing forces is to promote new energy and let the automotive industry enter the new energy era from the fuel age, so they pay more attention to the creation of individual models. Many of them are successful entrepreneurs who have entered the automotive industry from their previous industries, based on their previous successes, but in the automotive industry they actually started from scratch.
The new round of car building, we call it "scene car building". Many players in the new round, the company they used to work in or their own work, its natural extension is the car, it is not to put the original thing down to build a car, but to turn the car into a part of the existing business.
We feel that this is a clear difference, so we call the era of scene car building as the era of smart cars 2.0.
Li Peng Source: Yo-Run Technology
Q: What is the current positioning of Yo-Run? Why did you choose the route of helping car companies build cars instead of building their own cars?
Li Peng: Our business boundary is not to do C-end brands.
The reason why there is such a positioning is because our entire team has actually been in the automotive industry, so we feel that today's China, there is no shortage of one or more intelligent electric vehicle companies, but we hope to be able to provide the underlying capabilities of our industry to everyone.
Because the underlying capability of the car is really very important, it represents a very high proportion of the cost of the whole vehicle, represents the safety attributes of the whole vehicle, and is very time-consuming and labor-intensive.
In fact, the differentiation of future cars will be more reflected in the value of cockpit, automatic driving, intelligence, and personalization, which consumers are more looking forward to.
So we think that instead of letting different people in the whole industry keep building wheels, we should say that we are based on the form of skateboarding to provide everyone with a good enough and competitive enough chassis base. Then let more car companies focus on doing more personalized and intelligent vehicles.
Q: Can you share with us the key experiences of the composition of the pre-entrepreneurship founding team and project preparation?
Li Peng: If I were to describe a certain picture now, saying that the picture is particularly interesting, especially for our whole entrepreneurial process, I think it is very difficult, I would rather make an analogy of the whole process.
Before and after the establishment of Yo-Run, there was such a feeling: I felt that starting a business was like jumping off a building. The point of transformation of everything is that you really put yourself in, and before you jump up the stairs, everything is possible, but nothing happens.
After that moment, it seems as if nothing is possible, because you have laid such a set for yourself and dug such a big pit. And then not just yourself, you count your own family, your entrepreneurial partners and the families of your entrepreneurial partners, your employees and their families into this pit.
But as you accumulate, as you make it clear to everyone that you are doing this yourself, more people and more things will make it more likely.
The second meaning I also want to share with you, in the process of starting a business, it is difficult for you to distinguish whether you are falling or flying. Fly, you may fly higher and higher, fall, anyway you just keep going down. The most important thing an entrepreneur needs to avoid is that you fall long enough and you think you are flying.
I think this is also like jumping off a building, either flying up a higher level, or when you fall on the ground, you know what you will look like.
Q: Youtube considered overseas markets at the beginning, is this related to your past professional background?
Li Peng: It is possible that there are, but we mainly consider it from two aspects.
On the one hand, we believe that any product has its own potential market. For example, when you are in France, the red wine you make can make everyone believe that it is a good red wine, and the ramen you make in Lanzhou is particularly good, which is a potential energy market. We look closely, when the car enters the era of intelligent electric vehicles, China's auto people need to have confidence, intelligent electric vehicles China will be the best market in the world.
We constantly emphasize that the greatest wealth of this generation of Chinese automakers is nothing else, but that we consumers, who give these products and technologies the greatest tolerance space, as well as the premium of the brand, and they are willing to try with their own real money.
When the era of smart electric vehicles comes, because we have the most important wealth of Chinese consumers in our hands, we may become such a potential energy market. I think you should cherish this, but it doesn't mean that you just want to operate in this market.
The second is a little bit of sentiment, this generation of Chinese automakers finally found an opportunity, when we can achieve a more advanced experience and product definition, forming some technology accumulation, we should naturally bring it to the world.
2
How to disrupt?
Q: How did Yo-Run upgrade the traditional development of automobiles from "vehicle-in-one" to "upper and lower splits"?
Li Peng: The concept of skateboard chassis was conceived by GM engineers in 2002, that is, 20 years ago, and then it was mainly developed by several new electric vehicle companies in the United States.
In this process, my founding team and I have been exposed to different fields of our own, and we have started from our own different fields and felt that this technology will bring about technological changes, will bring about changes in experience, and will bring about changes in the entire industry value chain and business model.
Probably such a slow fermentation process.
Q: Yo-Yo has redefined the top-level logic, technical form and supply chain of automobile research and development, what changes will this bring?
Li Peng: As a technology, through the development of upper and lower splits, it is possible that we can achieve a better balance between the contradiction that the automotive industry has not been able to solve - the standardization of industry and the differentiation of consumer goods.
Secondly, we have been talking about the model of cooperation between the car factory and our cooperation, what the car factory is. The real core value of the automobile factory today is its own engineering ability, its own intelligent ability. Creating value for consumers is not to define a space for consumers, to integrate a set of software, to create a complete experience and operation system, this is a greater ability, is a consumer is more willing to accept and recognize the ability.
Therefore, we believe that using the "upper and lower split" to reduce the development time, but at the same time the entire dynamic performance and quality can ensure the economy and safety, will not be a change to the industry.
We've always emphasized that this is not just a technological change, it's also a business change.
Q: Using the UP Super Chassis to develop a brand new model, it is said that the cycle time can be shortened by 6-12 months. How?
Li Peng: The time savings of the upper and lower splits of the skateboard chassis mainly come from the following aspects:
The first was when developing the complete vehicle. Modeling always pursues the attributes of space and pursues the ultimate sense of beauty, but any vehicle platform or architecture has fixed-point restrictions on the shape, so there is a process of reciprocating and compounding between the two. Since the skateboard chassis frees up space for styling, there is a very large space on it that allows everyone to define completely freely, so it saves a lot of time.
The second is that the previous vehicle development time was long, because it was necessary to do the durability of the whole vehicle.
After the upper and lower designs are separated, many people feel that the center of mass of your whole vehicle is not the same, so the friction dynamic system is different. It has some differences, but we have so many systems integrated in the chassis, the whole chassis drags hundreds of kilograms of battery, it is actually very heavy, so he put the center of mass of the whole vehicle very low pressure here. Sitting on top of four or five 75-kilogram standard people has an impact on the dynamic performance of the whole vehicle, but it is not so big. So we can further shorten the endurance experiment after the on-board and car body combination.
Finally, after all, a considerable part of the process of the whole vehicle has been verified, so our tooling adjustment, process adjustment, etc., will save a part of the time in the entire production process.
Source: Yo-Run Technology
Q: Yoyo has released three concept cars based on the UP Super Chassis, covering mainstream models such as cars, MPVs and SUVs. In future cooperation with OEMs, will Youtuo also participate in the design of complete vehicles?
Li Peng: As a B-end brand and service provider, first of all, service is an inevitable part of our products, to borrow a phrase from Ma Yun: "In the future, all enterprises must be service enterprises." "So we never think that a piece of hardware is our product, it must be hardware and the services on it packaged, and finally our product."
We will have both product forms. If our customers have very strong design capabilities for the whole vehicle and the upper body, then we can cooperate based on the skateboard chassis, and our team assists them to complete the integration of the whole vehicle.
If there are some customers, their original scene is more important, they do not need to go from design to research and development to verification to manufacturing, the whole industry chain to have such capabilities, we can also help him design this space.
In the mobile phone industry, there are many ODMs that are very famous, and they also provide the whole process from product design, verification to manufacturing.
For example, the function of the previous mobile phone itself is simply to make a phone call, and everyone will regard the integration of the whole industry chain of design and manufacturing as their core capability.
But now that smart devices are at the core of your definition of products, software, and user service capabilities, you're willing to hand these things over to more competitive companies. Once a company serves more enterprises and provides such platform capabilities, it is bound to be more competitive, and the two are complementary.
Three UP SPACE super cabin concept cars Source: Yo-Run Technology
Q: But for partners, if you cooperate with Youyou to build a car, everyone may use the same UP super chassis, in this sense, does it affect their product differentiation, how to balance the relationship between unity and personality?
Li Peng: In fact, we have to look at this problem, and we have to go back to the essence of smart electric vehicles to think about this problem.
When the car enters the era of intelligent electric vehicles, we can see the battery, electric drive these parts, in fact, its main difference comes from the quality of the configuration, which is the value that consumers can experience, not the cost, installation size of these so-called differences. For example, the engine of Porsche is definitely different from the engine of others, and this is the value of the consumer's payment.
I believe that the future differentiated experience will mainly come from two parts. The first is the configuration, such as what materials are in the battery, how many kWh of electricity is put in, and how much battery life is provided, and the experience of the cruising range is different; how many and what kind of motors are placed naturally have an impact on the acceleration of the maximum speed per hour.
Then the second thing I believe is also agreed, that is, in the future, more differentiation comes from soft things, and there are differences in spatial definitions and product definitions. More and more markets need to return from the positioning of a technology company to the positioning of user companies and product companies. The way product companies define their products is the core capability, not the engineering capability, so the configuration itself is the core differentiation.
Soft things, including software development and system integration, as well as user operations, also have enough room for differentiation.
So in general, it is precisely the standardization components that have been brought about by electrification, forming a complete skateboard chassis, doing standardization, reducing costs, improving quality, reducing safety accidents, and then empowering and helping others to provide a more personalized space definition, software development and user operation integration.
3
The question of the "soul"
Q: In the process of transforming to electric vehicles, traditional car companies, because the intelligent technology is relatively weak, need to rely on external companies to a certain extent, and often face the doubt of "losing their soul". How does Yo-Yo View This Problem? And how to deal with cooperation with traditional car companies?
Li Peng: First of all, regarding the soul, different people have different understandings.
My own understanding is like Drucker said, the value of any company is to create its own user value. So I have always felt that any company, your own soul is not defined by yourself, but defined by your users, and the value that your users need most is the soul that this enterprise should focus on.
If the car is still a means of transportation, then to make a product with complete functions and performance that can be benchmarked with others may be everyone's soul, so you have to make efforts in function and performance.
But today's customers want a new definition of space, and what they need is a personalized, even intelligent experience in this space. This part of the ability, we think that the industry is facing the future, the company should really build something.
The resources of any enterprise are limited, and I believe that entrepreneurs will want to do everything themselves and do it to the best of their ability, but when you have limited resources, is it time to focus? Focusing on our true soul, that is, our own user value, is what we hope the entire industry can reach.
We also believe that giving a new solution in this industry requires a little time for more people in the industry to figure out what their own soul is and focus on the value they should create.
We hope that a new understanding will slowly emerge in the industry, and we also need practitioners in the industry to have the courage to make changes, including organizational changes and process changes. These changes themselves are very profound, and even some processes will be very painful, so it is not easy.
Q: So, how long will this process be?
Li Peng: We look at the era of smart phones, the iPhone 1 came out in 2007, the iPhone 4 came out around 2011, and it really changed the world for about 4 years.
After 2011, China's smart phones have reached the transformation from the stock market to the incremental market, which has reached 2015 and 2016, which is almost four or five years.
But the life cycle of mobile phones is different from that of cars. From the emergence of a concept to the formation of a landmark event, about 4-5 product life cycles, then from the product life cycle is established to the trend reaches the peak, it takes another 4-5 product life cycles to complete the switch from incremental to stock.
Looking at whether the product life cycle of the future car is two or three years, we have just used 4-5 product life cycles to multiply 2 or multiply 3, which is a time point where consumers can slowly develop a more stable preference and an evaluation standard through product iteration.
My criteria for judging the incremental market and the stock market are not necessarily the same as all my classmates. I think there is a difference between stock and increment in terms of growth rate, but it is the result of this standard, not the reason in the standard.
The real reason for the increment and stock is that the consumer's standard for product evaluation itself is not perfect, whether it is solidified, and whether it is matured. When a consumer group has a stable and mature evaluation system for a certain type of product, the product life cycle has entered the stock from incremental.
Q: The performance of the chassis and the car, including safety, have a lot to do with each other, and there is no experience in mass production cars before yo-yo. In this context, how to open up the market and dispel the security concerns of partners?
Li Peng: Although the first product of Yo-Pao has not yet landed, we have no experience, but our entire team is from the car, and even I personally have worked in automotive safety supplier Autoliv for 10 years, so we have a strong sense of safety.
At present, our product development actually considers safety, and even provides sufficient safety for our consumers in accordance with the highest industry standards, including NCAP's collision standard.
We believe that in fact, the development standards of skateboard chassis, when we benchmark according to the performance of the world's best, including ABB in Germany, we will provide consumers with a sufficiently safe product in the future.
In the end, we can only say that we can speak with the product.
Q: Yo-Yo plans to achieve mass production in 2023, what work remains to be done before that?
Li Peng: There are too many, a thousand and a thousand threads. Our product strategy has been basically determined, how to work with our business partners to build a valuable and potential market, as well as to meet the market products, to do this, we must have a very good team.
With a good team, they also need good tools, venues, and infrastructures to move their work forward. Finally, we have to have enough financial resources to support these actions.
I am personally a sailor in a sailing boat, and in the process of playing a race, I used to cooperate with a very good Sailing Helmsman in China. I've found that good helmsmen certainly plan, but they don't stick to plans, they don't think they have a way to predict everything, they plan everything from the beginning.
They have a strong strategic ability, and at the same time they will have a strong ability to adapt to change, they always try to find the surrounding environment at that moment to give him the most favorable conditions, and then in the constant small adjustment, to find a correct edge.
Innovation is synonymous with trial and error, not with right. If innovation is understood correctly, then innovation is not called a dime, but is probably the result of ninety-nine dimes.
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