Feifan Automobile was exploded to "privately purchase a car deposit and cancel the user's order without authorization", and the official reply said: The owner of the car involved paid a "deposit" instead of a "deposit", and the deposit will not be returned according to the car purchase agreement.
On February 9, some media reported that a Mr. Wu from Nanchang reported that his purchase of Feifan Car was embezzled by the deposit, and at the same time, the order was cancelled without any notice.
According to Mr. Wu's description, the incident occurred at the Feifan Automobile-Nanchang Chaoyangzhou Tianhong Experience Center. It is reported that the parties spent 5,000 yuan on the APP on December 2 last year to order "Feifan ER6", originally wanted to go to the experience center in January this year to deliver the balance, but did not expect to log on to the APP on January 16 and found that the original order had been deleted. Afterwards, the experience center did not refund the relevant deposit, nor did it give a reasonable statement about the incident.
Caijing Network Auto contacted the relevant person in charge of Feifan Automobile for this reason, and the other party said: "The specific situation is being fully understood by the relevant front-end colleagues, and from the current situation, this user pays a 'deposit' instead of a 'deposit'. This user is not refundable after paying 5,000 yuan of dading in accordance with the car purchase agreement. ”
Positioning high-end electric
Feifan Automobile, which has been established for less than a year, is the "vanguard" of SAIC Motor Group to move towards the mid-to-high-end intelligent electric vehicle market and achieve brand upwards.
The predecessor of Feifan Automobile is the R brand of SAIC Roewe. In May 2020, SAIC Roewe proposed a "double standard strategy" and launched an exclusive brand of high-end new energy - R standard. Different from the Roewe Lion standard, which focuses on mainstream family cars, R standard products carry the layout task of brand upward, electrification and intelligent networking. At that time, the Roewe brand said that the new R standard shows SAIC Roewe's determination to move towards a higher end, hoping that through the R standard, SAIC Roewe can further expand its scientific and technological advantages in the field of new energy and intelligent networking, and undertake the mission of driving SAIC Motor to become a world-class integrated supplier of travel services in the future.
Or under the influence of other car companies to establish independent operating brands (such as Geely Krypton, Dongfeng Lantu), not long after, SAIC's positioning ideas for the R standard series have been adjusted. In order to establish its own brand positioning and image more clearly, in November of the same year, SAIC Motor Passenger Vehicle announced that the R brand was separated from Roewe and operated independently, and its organizational structure was parallel to Roewe and MG MG.
In October 2021, SAIC Motor issued an announcement that it intends to invest in the establishment of Feifan Automobile Technology Co., Ltd., and separate the R brand of SAIC Motor Passenger Car Company, and Carry out market-oriented operation by Feifan Automobile in an asset-light manner. Wu Bing, CEO of SAIC's mobility strategy brand "Xiangdao Travel", will be appointed CEO of Feifan Automobile. The establishment of Feifan Automobile means that the R brand will belong directly to SAIC Motor, on a par with SAIC Passenger Vehicles, and separate from Roewe's organizational structure, management system and channel marketing. However, the production of Feifan Automobile is still manufactured by SAIC Passenger Cars.
In terms of equity structure, Feifan Automobile's registered capital is 7 billion yuan, which is invested by SAIC Motor group of 6.65 billion yuan, accounting for 95% of the shares; the employee shareholding platform subscribes to contribute 350 million yuan, accounting for 5% of the shares.
Feifan Automobile is positioned as a "user-oriented data-driven technology company", with "technology to honor the imagination" as the brand proposition, by improving the "intelligent experience of automobiles and user scene mining capabilities", and exploring the use of innovative company operation methods, business operation models and market-oriented incentive and constraint mechanisms, to achieve independent operation, self-financing, and open up the high-end intelligent electric vehicle market.
In addition to focusing more on smart electric vehicles in products, Feifan Automobile has established a new retail service system that builds online and offline integration and a user operation system that integrates online and offline in the country, forming a channel including experience center, delivery center and service center.
SAIC Motor has high hopes for the independently operated Feifan Automobile, hoping to complete the "breakthrough" in the field of intelligent electric vehicles through the brand. When the predecessor of Feifan Automobile, the R brand, had just become independent from the Roewe system, Yang Xiaodong, vice president of SAIC Group and general manager of SAIC Passenger Vehicles, claimed that what the new brand should do was "what Tesla can't do, and what Apple may want to do." In the future, Feifan Automobile will undertake the heavy responsibility of "brand upward and leapfrog level" together with Zhiji Automobile, a high-end intelligent pure electric brand under SAIC Motor.
At the 2021 Guangzhou Auto Show, Wu Bing, CEO of Feifan Automobile, further explained the core driving force of the brand, that is, data-driven, building a new ecology; hard-core technology, continuous iteration; user-oriented, product customization; direct connection to users, experience new travel. In his view, with the maturity of electrification, intelligent network technology and the improvement of supporting facilities such as charging and refueling, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles continues to increase, and the market structure will also accelerate the transformation from "dumbbell type" to "spindle type". Therefore, for Feifan Automobile, which is laying out the mid-to-high-end electric vehicle market, the opportunities are greater than the challenges.
Sales did not improve
Feifan's first year of performance was not satisfactory. The data shows that the brand's new car deliveries in 2021 will be 18,436 units. This is a large gap from the initial sales target of 30,000 vehicles.
An auto industry analyst told Caijing Auto that the sales of Feifan Automobile did not meet expectations, on the one hand, the product line was thin, and more importantly, the two models of MARVEL R and ER6 currently on sale by the brand were launched under the technical system of SAIC Passenger Cars and Roewe, and the performance of Roewe in the past in the high-end product line has been unsatisfactory, and the market recognition is insufficient. This led to the lack of product strength and brand support in the early stage of Feifan Automobile, and it was difficult to form a differentiated advantage, so the sales performance did not meet expectations.
Recently, due to the decline in new energy subsidies and the rise in parts costs, Feifan Automobile announced that it will adjust the price of some models of its MARVELL R and ER6 car series. Among them, the rest of the marvel R model except for the initial entry-level model rose by 2,000 yuan, while the ER6 model rose by 1,000 yuan for the whole series, and the adjusted price of MARVEL R was 219,800-26.18 million yuan, while the price of the ER6 model became 15.68-20.18 million yuan. The increase in the cost of car purchase by users may make Feifan Automobile, which is already not selling well, face more sales pressure.
However, with the launch of the "R-TECH high-energy smart body" model, the situation of Feifan Automobile is expected to be significantly improved.
With a total investment of 20 billion yuan, the "R-TECH High-energy Intelligent Body" covers intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, three-electric technology and other achievements, claiming that "hardware can be plugged in and replaced, software can be bought and sold and defined, and batteries can be charged and replaced and upgraded." The first Feifan R7 based on R-TECH high-energy intelligent body will be officially launched in the second half of 2022. The new car will be equipped with a high-end intelligent driving solution developed by Feifan Automobile and realize the global integration of "cloud, mobile phone, car and intelligent hardware". In the next two years, Feifan Automobile will also introduce a number of models based on "R-TECH high-energy intelligent body". With the improvement of intelligent and three-electric technology, it may help Feifan Automobile to gradually open up the high-end market, changing the brand's current problems of insufficient product strength and insignificant differentiation.
In addition to whether the "R-TECH high-energy intelligent body" can fulfill expectations, how to deal with the relationship between itself and the high-end brand Zhiji Automobile will be a major challenge facing Feifan Automobile and its parent company SAIC Motor.
An auto industry analyst said that SAIC motor group has created two high-end smart electric vehicle brands at the same time, which is indeed relatively rare in the industry. Although the official said that the main price segments of Zhiji Automobile and Feifan Automobile are different and will not coincide, from the perspective of operation mode and development concept (such as user-oriented and data-driven), the ideas of the two brands are basically the same, and in terms of technology accumulation and manufacturing process, the two brands will also rely heavily on SAIC Motor in the early stage of their founding. That is to say, the brand heritage of Feifan and Zhiji is close. The two brands develop independently, similar to the "horse racing" mechanism of Internet companies, which helps to stimulate the enthusiasm and flexibility of their respective teams; however, the automotive industry with high investment and slow returns is different from the Internet industry, and this kind of decentralized resources and separate battles still has greater risks.