The past 2021 was the year with the fastest penetration growth since the first plan for the development of the energy-saving and new energy automobile industry was promulgated in 2012, and it increased from the single digit at the beginning of the year to about 20% at the end of the year. Many founders in the front line feel unexpected.
Changes in the market mean that the strategy of car companies needs to be adjusted in a timely manner, in order to increase the delivery volume, the demand for product update speed and differentiation of car companies will become higher and higher.
In the past year, various brands have rapidly iterated a variety of products, such as Xiaopeng P5, Hongguang MINI EV Macaron, BYD Qin PLUS DM-i, Xilis SF5 and other models, both pure electric and hybrid and extended range, both mini cars and cars, SUVs, rich products and a wider price range covering more consumers.
At the same time, we see that the functionality of cars is also changing, and many models have begun to carry assisted driving functions, such as the high-speed pilot function opened by Xiaopeng and Ideal last year; the lidar competition opened by car companies, such as the appearance of the mecha dragon equipped with 4 lidars; voice recognition is further enriched, such as multi-zone speech recognition, controllable range increase and so on.
However, in last year's new energy report card, the contribution of plug-in hybrid and micro-electric vehicles is not small, and some consumers still have certain doubts about pure electric models. Last month's CCTV report on the difficulty of charging in Beijing seems to tell us that new energy is not ready for the outbreak, while the subsidies on the other side are constantly declining, but they are constantly forcing new energy to "wean".
In the past ten years, the mainland new energy market has gone through the stage from the policy-based start-up stage to the industry-based market cultivation stage, can it be asserted that it has entered the user-oriented marketization stage? What visible or invisible changes will take place in 2022?
Sinking and intersecting, high and low are all in volume
When it comes to the new energy pattern, the new forces are always the object of most people's attention, not because of how high their sales are (BYD can be much higher), but because they will always bring some changes and unexpected things to the market that are different from traditional car companies.
When you think that Weilai is not working, its delivery data is slowly rising, when you think that Xiaopeng has broken through ten thousand is already very powerful, it has increased the delivery volume of thousands of dollars, when you think that the ceiling of the ideal car is too low, it has repeatedly broken through your imagination to kill most of the models.
Overall, the gap between the delivery volume of the three new car-making forces in 2021 is not large, and Xiaopeng is currently leading, mainly because the number of products and the time to market occupy a certain advantage. In 2022, WEIO ET7 and ET5 will be released soon, and the next range extender car X01, which is ideally planned, is also on the way.
However, even if the three founders have a good private relationship, they still have to discuss business. We can see that unlike the first few market choices that were intentionally or unintentionally avoided each other, there is now a gradual intersection in price range and model positioning.
For example, the G9 unveiled by Xiaopeng at the Guangzhou Auto Show, although the specific parameters were not announced, from the perspective of appearance and naming rules, the probability and the ideal ONE and Weilai ES6 consumer groups overlapped. At the end of the year, Weilai also released a new car ET5, using the Baas solution to start at 258,000, down to the P7, Model 3 market.
According to previous media reports, some owners who have set up Extreme Kr 001 have switched to Weilai after the release of ET5 in Weilai, and the competition at the same price has quietly begun.
The three began to stand on a stage to compete, but also the epitome of the entire new energy market, each brand of models more and more rich coverage of the user range is also larger and larger, it is difficult to use a few words to frame the users of a car company. As the new forces continue to lose money, coupled with the increasing number of new and powerful brands, if the next increment is a little slower, the competition will become very fierce.
Another surprise last year was that the waist power began to rise, Nezha Automobile achieved delivery of more than 10,000 vehicles for two consecutive months, and the delivery of zero run in December was close to 8,000 vehicles. Both of them are low-cost micro or compact electric vehicles that sell well.
The previous B-end market play has basically been abandoned by most car companies and began to focus on the C-end market, according to the results released by Nezha in November, its individual user proportion has reached 91%. This also means that electric vehicles are moving from the past "rich toys" to public life.
Therefore, in 2022, the low-end market may continue to increase, while the increase in the middle and high-end market is already small, and the delayed competition due to market regulation will become more and more intense. Compared with the traditional fuel vehicle market, the positioning of BBA's luxury brand has always been stable for so many years, while the new energy market is a benchmark high-end brand, and in the last year of subsidies, it may not be easy to stand out.
To paraphrase Li Bin, it is: "We can never say that the most dangerous time has passed." ”
Pure electricity is still unable to meet the demand, and the plug-in and mix market ushered in the spring
Although the main engine factories that survived in the early new energy melee are now beginning to drink wine and eat meat, compared with BYD, it is still a small witch.
BYD sold nearly 600,000 new energy vehicles last year, more than the new car-making forces combined. Of course, this is also due to BYD's origin and earlier layout.
From the perspective of sales distribution, BYD hybrid is indispensable.
Since the release of BYD's new generation of hybrid technology DM-i in early 2021, BYD's sales have begun to grow rapidly, and the backlog of orders for the three DM-i models released less than 3 months after the listing has exceeded 100,000 units, and the production capacity is seriously insufficient, resulting in many car owners waiting for 4 or 5 months to be unable to pick up the car.
The reason is that at present, most families need a car to assume multiple roles, in addition to daily urban traffic, but also consider short-distance self-driving, pick-up and drop-off scenarios. Compared with the uncertainty of pure electrical energy replenishment, plug-in and mixing is obviously a better choice.
Although the general direction is to turn to pure electricity, the process of transformation always takes time. In order to seize this opportunity, last year, many traditional car companies have also launched their own hybrid systems, such as the Great Wall Lemon DHT, Changan Blue Whale iDD, Chery Kunpeng DHT, Geely and other follow-up models have also been listed, and the plug and mix market that is no longer monopolized by "two fields" will once again usher in the spring.
Overall, the plug-in hybrid system launched by the current car company is different from the hybrid launched by the original "cooperation" policy to catch the duck on the shelf, which changes the previous idea of supplementing oil with oil as the main electricity, and changes to the electric drive as the main engine drive as a supplement, and begins to pay attention to the fuel consumption of the feed. It seems that plug-in hybrid models have achieved market-oriented transformation earlier than pure electric models.
On the other hand, with the continuous decline of new energy subsidies, the subsidy standard difference between plug-in hybrid and pure electricity is also gradually narrowing, and the difference between pure electric models with a range of more than 400km and plug-and-mixed models with a range of 50km (pure electricity) this year is only 7800 yuan.
In addition, in terms of licenses, except for Beijing and Shanghai, which is about to stop inserting green cards, the remaining cities have the same policy.
Consumers don't care what your technology route is, they care more about the actual experience. With the improvement of independent brand plug-and-mix models, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the new energy market in 2022.
We look at the changes in pure electricity and plug-in and mixed sales from January to November last year, from a numerical point of view, pure electricity occupies an absolute advantage, but from the perspective of month-on-month growth, especially in the second half of the year, the growth rate of plug-in and mixing is higher than that of pure electricity. At the same time, a large part of the growth in pure electricity sales was contributed by micro-electric vehicles.
SAIC-GM-Wuling alone will sell 450,000 GSEV (Global Small Pure Electric Vehicle Architecture) in 2021, an average of about 37,500 units per month.
Cutting out the sales of mini-cars, most of the time the growth rate of pure electric models is not as good as that of plug-in. The data shows that in 2021, BEV increased by 168.6% year-on-year, and PHEV increased slightly higher year-on-year, at 171.2%.
Small cars have been replaced by pure electricity almost and without a doubt, as evidenced by the hot sales of mini EVs and T03s. And medium and large cars and family cars, plugging in is still a topic that cannot be hidden.
The disadvantages in terms of replenishment are difficult to make up in the short term, and the competitiveness of plug-in models may continue to improve.
In the first year of 800V mass production, fast charging still cannot impact the power exchange
One of the reasons restricting the further penetration of pure electricity is the imperfection of the energy replenishment system, in addition to the slow charging of households, the rapid energy replenishment system is also indispensable. There are three main solutions for rapid energy replenishment, one is the power exchange mode based on Weilai, the second is the Tesla-based high-current fast charging mode, and the third is the Porsche-based high-voltage fast charging mode.
Due to the large initial investment in the power exchange model, the business model is not obvious enough, so fast charging is the means for most car companies to achieve rapid energy replenishment.
Among them, to achieve high-power charging, either increase the voltage or increase the current, but the increase of the current will lead to the heat generation of the electrical system, the heat dissipation requirements are higher, so the high-voltage fast charging method has become the choice of many car companies.
In 2021, OEMs will successively launch 800V platforms, such as Geely Haohan SEA, BYD e3.0, Audi PPE platform, etc. Models developed based on the 800V platform, such as the Xiaopeng G9, BYD ocean-X, and Great Wall Salon Mecha Dragon, will also be unveiled or delivered in 2022.
The high-voltage fast charging on the car end and the pile end have put forward higher requirements, the car end of the high-voltage platform needs to be the vehicle three electric system, air conditioning compressor and a series of components according to the high-voltage platform to develop, involving the willingness of upstream parts suppliers, the transformation is relatively slow; secondly, the safety requirements for the battery system are also higher; finally, the semiconductor devices on the car need to be replaced by Si-based IGBT to SiC MOSFETs, the cost is higher.
However, at present, major suppliers such as Bosch, ROHM Semiconductor, and Sanan Optoelectronics are planning to expand SiC production capacity to cope with the growing demand, which will help further reduce costs.
In terms of pile end, without the super charging pile adaptation, the 800V high-voltage platform cannot achieve high-power charging, and it is easy to meet the high-voltage platform model but cannot find the situation of the high-voltage charging pile. At present, the host manufacturers are also building their own high-voltage supercharged piles, and last year Xiaopeng Technology Day released the first 480kW supercharged piles.
However, at present, the utilization rate of ordinary charging piles is still low, and it will take time for the popularization of high-voltage supercharge piles. The cost constraint also makes the current high-voltage platform mostly used in high-end models, and it is impossible to continue to explore to the lower-end models with more volume.
The high-voltage platform cannot cause an impact on the power exchange mode.
Weilai President Qin Lihong gave the following explanation when answering the question about the conflict between the supercharge and the replacement mode last year, one is that if the supercharge becomes the mainstream, the substation can be transformed into a supercharged pile at any time, and the other is that the supercharge station is difficult to rebuild the substation; the second is that in the urban scene, the parking space is a scarce resource, and the current substation in the single parking space area is more than twice the efficiency of the fastest supercharge station, and with the popularity of high-power charging, the substation can also improve efficiency; the last point, and the most important point, It is the replacement power station that can solve the problem of vehicle battery attenuation.
From a policy point of view, the mainland has also gradually developed from a model of charging as the main power exchange supplement to a parallel route of charging and replacing electricity.
According to founder securities forecast, the power exchange model will achieve rapid penetration, it is expected that the total sales of power exchange models will exceed 3 million in 2025, and the scale of supporting power stations will exceed 28,000 seats. For example, Geely, SAIC and other car companies have also followed up on power replacement technology and power exchange models. Its application in commercial vehicles and operating vehicles, which pay more attention to price and battery attenuation issues, still has a lot of room for growth.
end
Although the new energy situation is very good, it is still not too optimistic. A large part of the growth of new energy penetration rate is driven by plug-in hybrid and micro-electric vehicles, and pure electric models still cannot meet the needs of most people in the use scenario.
The number of car companies that rely solely on pure electric models is large, and most of them have not yet achieved profitability.
Entering 2022, the effect of subsidy decline is the most rapid, and at present, Weilai, Xiaopeng, Tesla, Volkswagen, Aian, Nezha, Zero Run, Geometry and other brands offset the impact by increasing prices or reducing discounts, and the increase ranges range from 2000-20000. Some car companies such as Weilai and Xiaopeng have given buffer time and chosen to pay for subsidies out of their own pockets, but they are currently unable to enjoy the 2021 subsidy policy.
In addition, in the case of increasingly fierce competition, upstream raw materials are also rapidly increasing prices, such as battery separators, anode materials, electrolytes, lithium salts and other materials last year have risen by 10%-170%. Chip shortages are also continuing to affect car companies.
If the car companies bear their own expenses, the gross profit margin is bound to be under pressure, the competition pattern of car companies is increasing, it is the time to spend money, and the choice of price increase seems to be the only way, but it may also affect some sales.
If new energy wants to continue to run wildly, it still needs to meet several basic conditions, one is the stable supply of the upstream industrial chain, and the main engine factory and suppliers develop together; the second is to improve infrastructure construction and solve the problem of energy replenishment; in addition, we must also be vigilant against overcapacity and beware of chicken feathers after blindfolded wild running.
New energy is always handed over to the market, but before fully accepting market verification, it is far from saying that new energy has entered a mature period. For example, the lidar and computing power arms race that began last year may not be a bet on the direction of the current competition.