Since the second half of 2020, I have always emphasized that understanding the future of China's auto market mainly revolves around three lines:
1. The model innovation progress of the new forces in the head, which largely represents the long-term trend. Today, this front is not only Tesla and Wei Xiaoli, Huawei, Xiaomi, and the much-anticipated Apple are all key forces that cannot be ignored. In fact, the influence of the Ningde era was soon not limited to batteries.
2. The rapid iteration of several million-level head autonomous car companies in the sports war. In 2021, the Great Wall and Geely will remain strong, and although BYD has not reached one million, its influence in the new energy market cannot be ignored. In addition, Chery is also miraculously close to the million mark.
3. Joint venture brands are helpless in the face of rapid changes in Chinese consumers' product preferences. Yes, almost all joint venture brands are at the top of the mountain today, or have long since left the top of the mountain. In the next 5 to 10 years, they will at least give up 5-10 million vehicles in the domestic market.
The above three are still the main clues for me to observe the trend of the domestic automobile market in the next stage. Of course, behind these three main lines is the unique development process of Chinese automobiles and the more unique stage of development in this process: the huge changes in China's macroeconomic level in the past four decades have led to a rapid increase in wealth accumulation, and the growth of user desire is often faster than the speed of wealth accumulation. As a result, China's auto market has quickly completed the process of popularization and consumption upgrading from scratch, and now it has entered the process of reform to meet the intelligent electric drive. Because users are more eager for change and new species than anywhere else in the world, change is faster and more radical. Undoubtedly, the next few decades will be extremely happy for car companies that can lead the process of innovation, but it will be extremely cruel for car companies that still stay in the old era.
The above trend has been shown very thoroughly in 2021, we have specially counted the sales ranking of new energy models with a price of more than 100,000 yuan, and compared the list of fuel vehicles and bicycles. As a result, the independent brands of the new energy Top 10 models occupy 8 seats, while the list of fuel vehicles is just the opposite. It is conceivable that with the further acceleration of the process of electric drive, at least half of the joint venture car companies will face a life-and-death battle.
▲From So.Car
In the above macro context, what are the latest trends in product definitions in 2022? I'll try to put together a few for your reference:
1. EV will emphasize the uniqueness brought by electrification in product concept and styling design.
Due to the differences in powertrain, transmission scheme and counterweight scheme, EVs need to form obvious differences with fuel vehicles in terms of product concept if they want to fully release their potential. However, the first generation of electric vehicles either came from oil to electricity, or out of "awe" of the user's aesthetic cognitive inertia, most of the mass-produced models and out of too radical changes. Next, with the full establishment of the inflection point of the electric vehicle market, users are also looking forward to electric vehicles with more distinctive characteristics in product concept and design language. Of course, this feature needs to conform to the basic logic of electric vehicles, that is, to release the benefits brought by electrification. In fact, from the original FF91, to the later NIO EVE concept, and then to today's Gaohe hiphi, it is a typical representative of this exploration.
2, the screen layout scheme of the intelligent cockpit will tend to converge.
It can be said that the interior design of automobiles in the past decade has been evolving around the screen, because the screen is the center of the entire interaction. In previous years, as physical buttons were replaced by screens on a larger scale, coupled with a strong preference for screen size and quantity, at least at the level of verbal expression, the previous generation of products tried almost all possible options within the existing technology and cost acceptable range on cockpit solutions. Of course, this also brings various problems to the car companies' own HMI design and user experience management. Of course, it is precisely because of the last round of attempts that everyone's understanding of the direction of screen interaction and value creation has gradually found more consensus. For example, since the previous year, the separate air conditioning control screen has basically been cancelled by the new car, and since last year, the solution similar to the Tesla Model 3+ meter or HUD has gradually become the new mainstream. For example, the extreme krypton 001 is the maximum reproduction of Tesla's central control layout.
3. Hardware embedding has increasingly become a consensus, but the key is how to embed and where to do "over-design"?
"Software-defined cars" have been shouted by everyone for many years, and if you want to software-defined cars, you need to create more possibilities for software to play value. This requires treating hardware as a resource for software. I have written a lot of articles in this area in the past few years, and interested students can go back and read them.
Of course, if you want the software to have enough room to develop, it is unlikely that there is not enough hardware pre-embedding. For example, today's smart electric vehicles at least the seats can be electric, all of them are electrified, which has those actions such as greeting and sending guests. But that's not enough. Next, a huge challenge that car companies will face is to sort out the logic system of hardware embedding, how to switch from the old configuration thinking to functional and experiential thinking, and how to deconstruct the hardware into a number of standardized atomic-level functions/services, and then find the most efficient hardware structure.
4. The third space scene will still be further expanded and excavated.
If you look at electric vehicles and fuel vehicles from the perspective of use scenarios, the biggest difference between the two is that electric vehicles have unimaginable playability in the third space scene. Because all the functional appliances on the vehicle can operate normally in the stationary state of the electric vehicle, there is no risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. Therefore, electric cars can become a nap place for white-collar workers, as well as a camping base, and can also become a video room and game room.
Creating a third-space scene from 2021 has become the consensus of almost all head electric vehicle companies, but we also realize that basically no car has been designed for the third space from the beginning. For example, the seat, basically no car seat can be comfortable enough when reclined, and the interaction design in the car does not consider the operation needs of the user lying there. So these places are opportunities to fully innovate.
5, the extreme pursuit of performance and wind resistance will become meaningless in most models.
From the perspective of practical use, when the acceleration time of 0-100km/h enters the 5-second range, it is no longer of much value to most users. There are basically no barriers for electric vehicles to enter this range. This also means that the next stage of car companies can show off their skills, or the place where there is still value in show off skills will basically not be the acceleration of this track. If you do not pursue the ability to accelerate extremely, the pursuit of the wind resistance coefficient of many products in the past two years is not much meaningful, after all, the cost of obtaining ultra-low wind resistance is not acceptable to most market segment users.
6, with stronger home attributes of scientific and technological fabrics will become the mainstream of the interior, but the key is to create an atmosphere in the car.
Starting with the helicopter-like cockpit of the Model X, the transparency provided by the oversized front windshield and panoramic canopy is a very valuable design direction. Now, with the advent of more technological materials, seat designs that combine a more light and thin, stronger functional value and variability are taking user preferences to another direction that is completely different from traditional luxury: transparent, environmentally friendly, natural, vibrant... These themes are becoming a new direction for creating atmosphere in the car.
7. The "simplification of complexity" of the car use steps will win consensus on a larger scale.
In the first two years, we had two simple and rude criteria for judging whether a car was smart, the first was to see if the car had a unified software version number, and the second was whether the car still had a start button. The former points to the internal management process of car companies, and the latter points to the design concept of electric vehicles.
Users are always "lazy", under the premise of achieving the same goal, the less the user's operation, the easier it is to form new habits of use, no matter how reasonable the old habits are. Just like the start button, even if the traditional car companies have tens of thousands of reasons to keep it, they cannot change the fact that users who are accustomed to Tesla or Wei Xiaoli will forget the fact that they will forget to turn off once they return to these traditional cars. How to simplify the complexity more reasonably will surely become the consensus of more products.
8. The full-scene voice interaction experience is about to hit the bottleneck in the short term.
Voice interaction has indeed made very obvious progress in the past two years, especially Xiaopeng and Ideal, which is definitely a benchmark in this field. But this also means that before there is no more breakthrough in the technical model, the scenes where voice interaction can effectively penetrate are basically covered by these two. From the perspective of the user's long-term user experience, there are not many voice interaction scenarios and functions that can allow users to use it high frequency and eventually form usage habits. So this track will hit a bottleneck at least in the short term. Of course, for other car companies, the voice capabilities of most of the products are still at the bottom of the bottle, and they still need to be seriously improved.
9. The optimization of the owner's APP is about to accelerate.
Instead of defining the innovative functions of the vehicle, it is better to design the owner's APP first. This is a point that I have repeatedly expressed on many occasions over the past two years. There is still great potential for the control of the vehicle from the mobile phone, of course, this requires more scene thinking, otherwise the product designers will come to the scene.
10, autonomous driving is moving from ratings and showmanship to pragmatism.
In the past two years, there have been fewer and fewer L-level products to discuss, and of course, there are fewer and fewer executives standing in front of the car to show off AEB. At the same time, advanced assisted driving is being experienced by more and more ordinary users, such a market environment and continuous user cognition will also promote car companies to turn more and more pragmatic in the direction of automatic driving on the autonomous driving track: ignoring the general concept of level, but emphasizing the scene where automatic driving or assisted driving can play a role, and the core benefits that can be brought to users are the right way.
The above ten are for reference only!