Variable 2022 (top) | height rolled down, the wheel of new energy rolled forward

The wind rises at the end of Qingping.

This year's Spring Festival, Li Jun returned to his hometown in Yanzhou County, Jining, Shandong Province, for the New Year, and he was surprised to find that in this county where "old man Le" dominated, there were actually several Tesla Model 3s, Weilai ES8 and Xiaopeng P7, and all of them were hung with local license plates. His cousin bought a Chery new energy vehicle last year, and there is a Ford Sharp Edge at home. When talking with the owner of the new energy auto trading store, I learned that buying a new energy vehicle for a second car in the local family has become a normal behavior model.

"A very important change last year is that the stage of education in the new energy vehicle market has passed, and there is no basic concern about buying electric vehicles. Tesla, 'Wei Xiaoli' and several others will enter a stage of further high-speed growth. Su Xiao, an executive of a new car-making company in Shanghai, told reporters.

In 2021, new energy vehicles will take off in a way that most people did not expect. Two years ago, He Xiaopeng also lamented on Weibo that China's new energy vehicles are superficial prosperity, and opened the data to see that online ride-hailing accounts for more than 70%. In 2020, although the domestic Tesla Model 3 and Wuling Hongguang MINI EV broke out, the entire market is still dumbbell-shaped, and high-end toys or low-end transportation tools cannot reflect the development trend of the industry.

But in 2021, the situation has changed abruptly. Wang Chuanfu, president of BYD, described that it feels like going back to the era of the blowout of China's car market in 2006, except that 15 years ago the blowout was a fuel vehicle, and this round of blowout was a new energy vehicle.

With the annual sales of Model Y surpassing the Haval H6 to become the sales champion in the SUV market, and the annual sales growth of new energy vehicles by 160% to 3.25 million as milestones, the double watershed of China's new energy vehicles and smart electric vehicles has emerged.

In the feast and carnival, more "laymen" poured into the automobile manufacturing industry, including Li Yinan, founder of Maverick Electric Bicycle, Huang Hongsheng, founder of Skyworth, and Chang Jing, founder of sweeping robot company. Behind the carnival, there are dense thunderstorms of new forces such as Sailin, Byton, and Bo County, the anxiety of the transformation of traditional car companies and the collective loneliness of executive entrepreneurs of traditional car companies.

In the past 30 years, China's auto industry as a whole has shown a relatively stable state, and now under the revolution of intelligent electric vehicles, there has been a scene of spring and autumn warring states and a hundred schools of thought. Behind the appearance of prosperity, the car companies from technology to talent height involution, a number of new force car companies in the senior management told reporters that compared with traditional car companies, the use of new force companies for talent is almost "squeezed", from the front end of product development to the end of the sales of systematic manufacturing urgency and internal volume.

But it is undeniable that this inner roll drives the wheel of new energy to accelerate and roll forward, an old era is ending at a speed visible to the naked eye, and a new era is rising.

Every day in the past is a "history of blood and tears"

Shanghai Hongqiao Business Circle is home to Weima, Nezha and other new car-making companies, Shanghai Hongqiao Business Circle's Longhu Tianjie, which is also a gathering place for new force brand supermarkets. Every noon, the sales consultants of the new power supermarket stores began to take flyers to various restaurants, handing out flyers, leaving business cards and adding WeChat at the entrance of the restaurant. Some persistent sales consultants will chase customers to the restaurant and add WeChat at the table before leaving.

"The new power brand sells cars like the Internet, and we carry heavy KPIs from the store manager to the clerk, and we do everything we can to get clues and deals." He Feng, a brand sales consultant of a new force, told reporters.

He Feng's brand is one of the several that sell more than 10,000 vehicles a month, and compared with the sales consultants of traditional car brands, He Feng's income is at least more than 2 times. But He Feng said that behind the appearance of glamorousness is extreme "squeezing" and inner rolling.

The 4S stores of traditional car brands are generally opened in the suburbs of the city, with complete functions and a large area. They mainly rely on natural stores and sales leads of platforms such as Chedi, Douyin, and Autohome, and make reservations for store reception by phone. Only at fixed time nodes such as auto shows or regional consumer shows, sales consultants will leave the 4S store for outward expansion.

The new power exhibition store opened in the supermarket store naturally obtains the dividend of the high traffic of the supermarket, but the daily work is similar to the expansion. Even if a passing customer is just a look at it, the sales consultant will immediately greet it. By lunch and dinner, only one or two sales consultants will remain at the booth, and the other few will go to restaurants on other floors to hand out flyers and business cards.

"We want to hand out flyers and add WeChat rain or shine, and customers retain capital and add WeChat have KPIs." And internal horizontal competitions, such as how many orders I took this month, how many WeChat I added, how many return visit calls were made, and how long each call was, the company's background will analyze it. If the bottom of the ranking is killed, use new people to make up for it. He Feng said.

Two years ago, Li Qi jumped from a traditional car company to a head new power company, and his biggest feeling was also "inner volume".

"The joint venture brand has introduced overseas verified product definition, channel management and marketing systems, systems and processes into China, creating a 1.0 state of China's automobile industry, which is a relatively mature state and model in which we emphasize the system force, and the business result is the embodiment of the system force." But the new forces do not have very standard processes and systems, and they rely on the execution power to support them with a large amount of data derived from the Internet. Li Qi said.

For example, the new forces will "cut" out the links of sales transactions, from clues to entering the store, test driving and other process indicators, and after the development of various data indicators, targeted measures will be taken. If the amount of clues in a certain period is relatively small, the clerk will have to go on the road to issue leaflets for expansion; if the transaction volume or transaction rate is relatively low, the store manager will have to return with a sales consultant to repeatedly visit or even "force the order".

As a member of the sales department, Li Qi often visits the stores of "friendly businessmen". He once left a phone and WeChat message in a new power brand supermarket store, and the frequency of the initial store clerk's return visit reached once a day, and he would continue to follow up after more than half a year, and would not easily give up any sales lead. He also found that sales consultants would like his circle of friends from time to time, feeling that it was to constantly appear in the line of sight and create a sense of presence.

"In order not to be eliminated, in order to get the order performance, the extreme 4 to 5 months without a break." I don't have to leave work before 10 p.m. myself, and 11 o'clock is also the norm. Li Qi said.

Compared with traditional car companies, the new forces are known for their high salaries. Li Qi believes that behind this high salary is the "squeeze" of the height of employees. He said that although the traditional car companies have relatively low salaries, they have systematic growth and training plans for talents; the new forces use high salaries to attract talents at the same time, but also force a large number of outputs, if they do not reach the expected value, they will immediately let the personnel leave and supplement new people to continue this cycle.

"People leave every month in our company, and it feels like they don't like the automotive industry like never before, it's like overdrawing themselves in an instant." Li Qi said.

Liu Yang, who works at another head car-making new force, also expressed the same view, and the company began to implement the optimization of the personnel system this year, and eliminated the last place month by month. "I've had a terrible day, and every day in the past has been a history of blood and tears." Liu Yang said that when paying wages every month, it is like playing a strong shot, and it is very happy to see the numbers in mobile banking, because traditional car companies cannot issue such high salaries.

Barbaric growth in a state of spawning

There is a story circulating inside Xiaopeng Motors, when the P7 project was established in 2017, coinciding with the outbreak of the THAAD incident, and only LG was able to produce batteries with low center of gravity and low height in line with the low center of gravity of the car - which is why the new car-making forces at that time rushed to build SUVs.

Considering the policy risks of using LG batteries at that time, other executives of the company suggested suspending the P7 project, but He Xiaopeng especially liked the P7 styling plan and insisted on it. Fortunately, after the Ningde era developed a low-altitude battery, Xiaopeng P7 switched to the Ningde era and smoothly rolled off the line.

"In fact, according to the logic of traditional car companies, even if there is no problem of battery adaptation, the P7 car should not be done." Zhao Liu, a management person of Xiaopeng Automobile, said that in the context of that time, Xiaopeng's first car G3 did not sell well, and the price of the entire brand was only more than 100,000 yuan, according to the normal market logic to do product planning, it is necessary to do a mainstream model with profits at the same time. The Xiaopeng P7 is not only a coupe niche model, but also in the price of high-value segmentation, from the experience of the fuel vehicle market, this positioning does not have any successful models that can go.

"Xiaopeng's introduction of P7 can be considered to be a breakthrough product import in the absence of normal market rational research." Zhao Liu said.

Li Qi told reporters that including product definition, channel network layout and even the setting of sales targets, the decision-making process of new forces is often very arbitrary. Traditional car companies will demonstrate the rationality of the goal from all angles, and the decision-making method of the new forces is often a word from the boss, without any analysis and support. People who have jumped from traditional car companies to new forces are often surprised by the arbitrariness of the new forces' goal setting.

However, some people from traditional car companies believe that traditional car companies are responsible for the results precisely because of collective decision-making, and thus lack the real sense of market awareness and responsibility for the results.

In terms of product development, the development process of a new car by traditional foreign-funded car companies is usually about 48 months, and the life cycle after the development of a car is about 6 to 7 years. As independent car companies strengthen their product offensive, the development time of new cars has been compressed, but it is generally about 40 months.

On this basis, the development cycle of many models is only about 20 months, and the development cycle of some products is even only in the early one year. In the eyes of traditional car companies, such a short development cycle is not enough to complete product verification in alpine, high-temperature, plateau, basin, saline and alkali environments.

Therefore, when the first batch of new car-making products were listed in 2016 and 2017, many traditional car companies believed that the new forces companies would introduce models that had not yet developed complete models to the market, allowing users to be guinea pigs. In fact, in the case of small deliveries, the quality problems of new power car companies in the first stage continue to exist. With the improvement of business conditions and the introduction of remodeled models, the quality problems have improved significantly. However, with the rapid rise in delivery volume in 2021, the quality problems of new forces have the hidden danger of further outbreak.

However, under the concept of "small steps, fast running, continuous iteration" of some new forces, quality problems do not seem to be the most concerned problems at present, especially for several unlisted companies, how to quickly expand the scale of sales and continuous financing is the focus of more attention.

The time is pushed to the end of 2021, the final battle of the annual car market, guangzhou auto show, including Xiaopeng, Weima, Weilai, great wall salon, GAC Aian and other new and old car-making forces have launched models equipped with lidar. The cost of vehicle-grade solid-state lidar is usually about thousands of yuan, and the cost of a model equipped with 4 lidars alone exceeds 20,000 yuan.

An engineer in the technology center of a US joint venture company told reporters that due to the lack of algorithms, the lidar on the car is equivalent to "blind lighting in vain wax", and from the location layout of most car companies' lidar, they are mostly arranged on the two corners of the front of the car that are most likely to collide. From the perspective of mass production, this layout scheme is "obviously gimmicky greater than substance".

In January this year, NIO released its second car ET5 at the "NIO DAY" in Chengdu, which is equipped with four NVIDIA ORIN-X chips, and the computing power has reached the unprecedented 1024TOPS of the automotive industry. The stacking and arms race of the head "top-notch" enterprises on hardware has further intensified the industry's internal roll. The old idea of the automotive industry was to meet the needs of users at the right cost, and the new force's approach was to sell futures, although the function was not developed, but the hardware was reserved first.

"In fact, every time you look at Weilai's conference, it is talking about functions, experiences and services, only this time (ET5 conference), Li Bin spends most of his time talking about hardware." Su Xiao, an executive of the new power car company, said.

Compared with traditional car companies, such cases abound. For example, the channel outlets of traditional car companies, whether they are directly operated or franchised 4S stores, are not allowed to swing the car before the store acceptance, and the process from decoration to acceptance is usually more than half a year. The supermarket of the new power brand, from site selection to signing contracts and decoration, can be completed as soon as 3 months. Before the decoration is completed, some brands set up a temporary booth in the mall, and set up a car to start receiving orders.

From product definition to product development, channel construction, and sales management, the new forces have created a sense of tension in the entire system from the front end to the back end. Li Qi, Liu Yang and other interviewees said that when interviewing new power companies, including Tesla, the HR of the other party often asks very directly what they think about high-intensity work and continuous overtime.

Looking at the 30-year timeline, since the 1980s, the joint venture has begun to introduce the mature experience, processes and systems of foreign car companies into China. Great Wall, Geely, Changan and other local car companies in the reference to foreign investment system, system and process on the basis of the creation of their own model, with the head of their own brand sales scale increase and the entry of high-value market, the automobile industry into a seemingly benign balance. The emergence of new forces has disrupted the balance of the traditional automobile industry, and even GM and Volkswagen are anxious.

"On the outside, it seems that the new forces are vigorously developing, but after going in, they find that it is the history of blood and tears in the automotive industry, and the barbaric development of the state of capital spawning." The new forces have brought the entire automotive industry into an unprecedented state of internal rolling in the sluggish environment, and this state is benign or killing chickens and eggs in terms of the development of the industry itself, or it has to be looked at dialectically. Li Qi said.

The wheels of new energy are rolling forward

In March and April 2021, a new power company in Shanghai found that the number of terminal orders was rising steadily, and each month reached a new high, and the monthly sales began to exceed 10,000 units in the second half of the year. At first, the company was a little confused, and the meeting review found that the products were still those products, the outlets were still those outlets, and there was no more investment in marketing. Finally, to sum up, the bigger reason is that the consumption of new energy vehicles has entered a popular period, to some extent, the company is at its meeting, and sales are "rising with the general trend of the industry".

"In fact, the sudden emergence of new energy vehicles in 2021 is beyond most people's expectations." Su Xiao said.

China's electric vehicle industry policy sprouted in 2009 in the "ten cities and thousands of vehicles" plan, by 2019, although the domestic sales of new energy passenger cars exceeded 1 million, but the vast majority of sales came from the drive of online ride-hailing vehicles. In October 2019, He Xiaopeng said on Weibo that it was "very heavy" to open the sales data of China's electric vehicles, because if the data sold to travel companies is excluded, the data sold to real consumers in the first three quarters of 2019 is only more than 100,000 vehicles.

In 2020, China's new energy vehicle sales reached 1.367 million units, an increase of 10.9% year-on-year. However, in 2020, the structural characteristics of the market dumbbell type are still obvious, and the market increase mainly comes from the high-end Tesla and the low-end Wuling mini-ev, that is, the attributes of electric vehicles as high-end toys and low-end tools have not changed, and the more extensive private user market has not been developed.

In 2021, the new energy vehicle market has undergone sudden changes, one is that the sales scale has reached 3.521 million units, a year-on-year growth rate of more than 160%, followed by the launch of the private user market.

Jin An is the regional head of a leading independent car company, and when developing a new channel outlet in August last year, investors said to him, if you are a new energy brand, I will do it, and the fuel vehicle will not do it. "Investors are very sensitive, and their information comes more from the changes that are taking place in the terminal, such as the growth of orders for friendly competitors, the price situation and the word of mouth of users." Jin An told reporters.

At a morning meeting at the end of 2021, Song Ming, director of the strategic planning department of an autonomous car company, suddenly asked more than 10 ministers attending the meeting: "If you change cars, will you buy Mercedes-Benz or Tesla?" The answer was unexpectedly neat: Tesla. This incident gave Song Ming a great touch.

"In fact, with the income of most of the participants, it is more than enough to buy a Mercedes-Benz E-class, but everyone has chosen Tesla, which may indicate that the mainstream value population's cognition of electric vehicles has normalized." Song Ming told the first financial reporter.

Open the insurance volume data of Tesla, "Wei Xiaoli" and other companies in 2021, and you can clearly see the penetration of new energy vehicles into the entire market.

Taking Tesla as an example, in the first 10 months of 2021, the top five provinces and cities of Tesla sales were Guangdong, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Beijing, accounting for 65.72% of sales. In the traditionally weak southwest, northwest, northeast and other provinces, Tesla's sales value is low, but the year-on-year growth rate is higher.

In terms of market level, Tesla's sales share in the primary market has shown a decreasing trend, with a year-on-year decrease of 13.68% in the first 10 months of last year; the second to fourth level market share growth rate is higher, of which the fourth level market share increased by 7.69%. With the gradual improvement of stores and supporting facilities, Tesla's southwest, northwest and northeast and low-level market growth potential is large in the long run.

Although companies such as Weilai, Xiaopeng and BYD have higher dependence on first-tier cities in terms of sales structure, the low-level market has also begun to show signs of activation.

In 2021, another watershed in China's auto market is the official launch of smart electric vehicles, and its landmark events include Model Y sales exceeding Haval H6 to become the top seller in China's SUV market, THE NIO ET5 booking system downtime, and Xiaopeng P5 delivery of more than 5,000 vehicles in May.

One obvious change at the point of sale is the dramatic increase in young people's attention to smart cockpits and autonomous driving systems.

Wu Ming, the head of sales at a subsidiary of GAC Group, recently accompanied a post-95 friend to buy a car, and he found that the focus and decision-making process of the post-95s on vehicles have changed a lot.

"The first step in buying a traditional car is to look at the engine, and many people will open the cover to see the arrangement of the engine compartment. But my friend's first step in getting in the car was to experience the car machine, slide back and forth on the screen, constantly test the voice interaction, and ask the sales consultant what the car software came with. The decision-making process is much shorter than ever, and it is not tangled at all when ordering up and down the APP. Wu Ming said.

The technology in the field of intelligent cockpit technology and the grasp of Chinese user needs are the collective shortcomings of foreign car companies. In addition to the impact of chips, another important reason for the rapid decline in sales of North and South Volkswagen last year is that customer recognition of Volkswagen brands and models continues to decline. If product upgrades cannot be quickly kept up, the decline in sales of Volkswagen and other foreign brands with fuel vehicles as the main business will be difficult to reverse.

In the third quarter of last year, when the CEO of a foreign car company in China formulated its business development plan in China in the next five years, it predicted that there would be an inflection point in the Chinese auto market in 2025, and the sales of fuel passenger cars would continue to decline from 21 million to 15 million by 2030.

The drastic changes in China's auto market have driven the transformation of global auto giants. Toyota, which has previously been firmly committed to hybrid and hydrogen fuel cell technology, released 19 electric vehicles in one go in December last year. Although this practice is extremely rare in Toyota's history, it is also extremely un"Toyota".

In February, Daniela Cavallo, president of the Volkswagen Union, said Volkswagen must take more aggressive action in China to gain more market share by understanding the needs of Chinese consumers, with a particular focus on software.

"In the era of fuel vehicles, the products and technologies of China's automobile market are mainly based on the introduction of foreign capital, and the preferences of European and American users are used to cover the needs of Chinese users. However, in the era of intelligent electric vehicles, the electronic consumer goods attributes of automobiles are getting stronger and stronger, and the market leadership and change will start from China, and the Chinese market will affect the world's market. A research and development executive of a new force car company told reporters.

(At the request of the interviewees, Li Jun, Su Xiao, Li Qi, Wu Ming, and Zhao Liu are pseudonyms)