Today is the twenty-eighth year, tomorrow is the Chinese New Year's Eve night, the Year of the Tiger is coming soon, I am here to wish you all good health and career.
It is about to usher in the most festive and longest holiday of the year, and the work things may wish to be put aside first, eating, drinking and having fun is the top priority during the Spring Festival. So I will not talk to you about specific new cars and news today, and briefly share with you some of my insights over the past year.
No matter what city you're in, whether you're interested in cars or not, I believe that whenever you're on the road and you see more and more cars with green and white license plates appearing around you, you'll know something different is happening.
According to the official statistics of the Federation of Passenger Vehicles, the retail sales of new energy passenger vehicles in China will be close to 3 million in 2021, an increase of 169.1% over 2020, that is to say, sales will directly increase by 1.7 times. Perhaps many people do not know that the sales of new energy vehicles in the Chinese market have accounted for 45.22% of global new energy vehicle sales in 2021.
Indeed, the growth rate of new energy vehicles is far faster than we expected.
I would like to ask you and me who do not have a few relatives and friends who open new energy? Coupled with real technological progress, under the influence of the ears, in just one year, more and more people's attitude towards new energy vehicles has changed from the ridicule and resistance to curiosity and acceptance.
Not only that, I found that people's discussion of new energy vehicles is no longer the "black and white" position dispute in the past, more people put the focus back on the objective and rational level of design, performance, use experience and car use scenarios, and the attitude towards various technical routes has become more and more inclusive, and it has become more and more "technical flow".
I believe this is something that everyone loves.
Perhaps it is precisely because everyone has become more rational and pragmatic that the more "pragmatic" range extended electric vehicles and other hybrid models have been accepted by more people. Among them, the most impressive and representative of them are BYD DM-i and the ideal ONE.
Ideal ONE this case is quite interesting. Remember that in the earliest days, the ideal ONE's range-extending route was regarded by many people as a typical example of "taking off your pants and farting". But last year, the delivery of the ideal ONE single model has exceeded 100,000 units, which has surprised countless people.
After the launch of BYD's DM-i hybrid technology, it has also brought earth-shaking changes to it. Several models equipped with DM-i technology quickly became sought-after goods in a short period of time, and even broke the ground-breaking phenomenon of waiting for cars and raising prices, staging a modern version of Cinderella's story.
The success of the ideal ONE has made brands such as Lantu, Xilis/Qingjie, And Ziyoujia firmly confident in continuing to launch range-extended electric vehicles, and the hot sale of BYD DM-i models has also allowed Chinese brands such as Changan, Great Wall, Chery, and Geely to see the hope of hybrid technology.
I dare say that the next two years will be the year of the explosion of hybrid models and the gradual replacement of pure fuel vehicles. Even the most stubborn Japanese brands, such as Toyota and Honda, are speeding up the pace of hybrid models replacing pure fuel models. Like Guangqi Honda's new odyssey, the pure fuel version has completely disappeared.
Perhaps buying a pure fuel vehicle is about to become a "feeling".
In the year that is about to pass, I have a different understanding of the phrase "software-defined cars" than in the past.
"Intelligence" is one of the hottest topics, the "arms race" between new brands once intensified, it seems that the newly released new car without a lidar is embarrassed to talk about intelligence. But looking back now, in fact, only the Xiaopeng P5 has really achieved mass production of lidar, and other new cars that claim to be equipped with lidar will not be officially delivered until at least the second quarter of this year.
But don't forget, even on the Xiaopeng P5 that has been mass-produced and delivered, lidar is still just a "decoration" at present, and it will really come in handy at least until the middle of this year. It is conceivable that other brands of new cars equipped with lidar will have to wait until they can play the role of lidar?
Taking a step back, so far, in addition to Tesla and "Wei Xiaoli", there is no fifth brand that can officially launch the navigation assistance driving function. Even this has not been successfully achieved, how can people be believed that they have enough ability to use lidar?
Obviously, it is not that they do not have the lidar equipment suitable for loading the car, but most car companies do not have the ability to write algorithms and software to make the lidar come alive.
Similar situations are also found in smart cockpits and locomotive systems. To take a very simple example, almost most of the newly released models claim to use the latest Qualcomm 8155 chip to create a smart cockpit, which seems to make people feel that installing this chip is equivalent to achieving intelligence.
Is this really the case? Let's not talk about the 8155, let's say that the Qualcomm 820A chip has been "looked down upon" by most people. There are many models equipped with this 820A chip, such as the Xiaopeng P7 and The Extreme Kr 001 we purchased also use the 820A chip, but it is undeniable that the performance of the two cars is obviously very different in terms of the functionality or stability of the car system.
Using high-performance hardware is equivalent to just giving you some good ingredients, but it does not mean that you will be able to make a delicious dish. Although car companies still have the seemingly universal move of OTA upgrades, OTA is essentially just a technical means that can continuously improve the experience, not a universal aphrodisiac.
Of course, my biggest impression in the past year is that new energy vehicles have not only changed our lives, but also changed the world.
Toyota had to officially announce full electrification, Honda officially announced the abandonment of hydrogen-fueled electric vehicles, the electric vehicles of the Volkswagen MEB platform have just begun mass production in China, and it has been announced that new cars based on the new pure electric platform will be domestically produced in 2026.
Mercedes-Benz's operation is even more "noisy", a few months ago based on the old platform of EQA and EQA on the same time, announced a new generation of EVA platform EQS and EQE will be listed this year. But it didn't take long for the EQXX concept car with the latest technology to stunned us again and announce that it would be mass-produced in 2024.
Is it an experience that the speed of the new platform change is actually faster than the speed of the replacement of new cars in the past? It's so unbelievable, it's really unexpected.
For the upcoming Year of the Tiger, I don't think there is any need to make any more predictions, we just have to believe in Xiaomi Lei Jun's sentence "Always believe that beautiful things are about to happen".
See you in the Year of the Tiger!
222/1/30
New energy for a week
by Wei Xiyu