Image source @ Visual China
Text | Photon Planet, author | Leng Zelin, editor | Wang Pan
Who would have thought that 2019 is the last cold winter of new cars, and since then, new cars have opened an era of leadership.
In recent months, the monthly deliveries of new forces such as Xiaopeng, Ideal, Weilai, and Nezha have exceeded 10,000, and the deliveries of the four companies in 2021 have reached a new high of 98,155, 90,491, 91,429, and 69,674 units, respectively.
The continuous improvement of new forces has also prompted traditional car companies to transform into new energy.
Traditional car companies have always had a more positive attitude towards sub-brands, similar to most people's fertility concept a hundred years ago, "more children and more blessings". For example, SAIC has a number of brands such as Roewe, MG, baojun and so on.
Of course, due to technical barriers and other reasons, in the past, the joint venture brand was the main force of each OEM.
Therefore, in order for independent brands to occupy a place in the field of new energy, in the early stage of national policy, most traditional car companies have launched a layout, BAIC BJEV was established in 2009, Blue Geely Action originated in 2015, and GAC BJEV was established in 2017.
Compared with the new forces, these car companies both understand cars and have cash flow, which should be the story of the full level of big men returning to the novice village, but they deviated from the direction in the middle.
Previously, traditional car companies were keen on "oil to electricity", changing the high-selling fuel vehicle platform to new energy vehicles for sale, such as the end of 2016 to the beginning of 2017, SAIC Motor has launched a plug-in version of Roewe eRX5 and a pure electric version of ERX5, the prototype is Roewe RX5 (sales exceeded one million in four years of listing).
Such an advantage is that it can reduce R& D expenses and shorten R & D time, and can also sprint subsidies and hard policies. But the disadvantages are also more obvious, due to the lack of clear product and brand planning, there are not many new energy models that have really invested heavily in research and development, and there is no substantial help for accelerating the penetration of new energy, and consumers naturally do not recognize it, and this situation has continued until the emergence of new forces of "silly white sweet" car manufacturing.
Seeing Tesla to understand that the original car can have no physical buttons, seeing Weilai only to find that the user-oriented enterprise can have such a large potential, seeing the ideal to know that the extender is not without a market.
Traditional car companies that cannot stand the continuous division of the new energy market by new forces have begun to be independent brands in the past two years and have practiced "trumpet".
Trumpet leveling has become a trend
According to the incomplete statistics of Photon Planet, as of January 2022, at least 8 traditional car companies have established 12 new energy brands independently or independently on the road of new energy transformation, namely Aeon, Hechuang, Lantu, Extreme Krypton, Jihu, Sharon, Euler, Zhiji, Feifan, Avita, Xilis, and AITO.
Before practicing trumpet, traditional car companies have not tried to open up the wilderness in the original brand.
GAC BJEV was founded in 2017, and its original models were all hung under the name of GAC Trumpchi, and its first product, GE3, was based on the Trumpchi GS3. However, the response to the car was not large, and it was proved afterwards that GAC did not bet all its treasures on GE3, and in 2019, GAC New Energy launched AION S based on GAC's second-generation pure electric platform GEP, and the Aian brand began to gradually stand on the stage.
At that time in the market, there were not many new energy models built based on the pure electric platform, and some new car-making forces such as Weilai, Xiaopeng, Weima and other car companies were also in the stage of just beginning to deliver, and Aian chose to take the first step in positive research and development, and backed by GAC, Aeon's popularity and strength are better than the rest of the brands that are still in the beginning.
Less than 6 months after the launch of AION S, AION LX was released, and the EIAN brand also ushered in a wave of outbreaks, with GAC New Energy's annual sales of 42,003 vehicles in 2019, of which AION S accounted for 77.4%, and the annual sales volume in 2020 reached 60,033 vehicles, about 17,000 more than the new power champion Weilai that year.
However, Aeon has gone the wrong way in terms of market choice, and some data show that by the end of 2020, about 60% of the sales structure of AION S, Aion's main model, is non-personal users, and the operating vehicle market is the secret of Aeon's rise.
What is the B-end market, baicchi new energy, which was established earlier, has already given the answer. The personal travel market and the operating market are often incompatible, after all, if there is a choice, no consumer wants their private car to be called an online car by relatives and friends.
In 2019, Beiqi Blue Valley occupied the first place in new energy sales for seven consecutive years with sales of 150,000, and the following year when the epidemic struck, sales fell off a cliff, with annual sales of only about 25,000 vehicles, down 82% year-on-year. BAIC urgently needs to find a breakthrough in the C-end market, so the Jihu brand, which appeared a few years ago but has not moved, is in danger.
In March 2020, arcfox business unit was officially established, and between the crisis of defeat, Polar Fox gained higher autonomy and is expected to upgrade from a business unit to an independent subsidiary. On the other hand, BAIC BJEV's defeat in the B-end market, Aeon is naturally like a needle felt, is bound to run faster in organizational transformation.
At the Guangzhou Auto Show in the same year, GAC BJEV announced that Aeon would operate independently. State-owned enterprises took the lead, and in 2021, brands such as Lantu, Feifan, JiKr, and Sharon also began to announce independent operations.
Brand independence means that product planning, research and development, marketing, brand planning and other aspects need to operate independently. While independent brands can have higher autonomy, they can also get rid of the low-end image of traditional car companies for many years, and then explore the high-end market.
And these small sizes have one thing in common, almost without exception are competing for the mid-to-high-end market, and the price of models is concentrated in the range of 200,000-500,000. Even Aeon, who started out in the B-end market, released the AION LX Plus in January this year, and the Thousand Mile Edition sold for 459,600.
However, the realization of thousands of kilometers of endurance is very interesting, in addition to the design of the battery, it has also cut almost all auxiliary driving functions except the smart cockpit, which seems to want to return the car to the definition of the car.
AION LX Plus Smart Section Configuration Sheet
The 80D Max version is the other extreme, the whole car is equipped with 33 sensors including 3 lidar, and the high-computing intelligent driving calculation platform on the configuration list is Huawei MDC 610, with a computing power of up to 200 TOPS.
However, this time the cooperation between Huawei and EAN is more like "testing the waters", according to the news released before, Huawei and EAN will also jointly create a luxury sub-brand, which will be listed in 2023. Similarly, BAIC BJEV, which relied on low-end cars to support sales in the early days, also chose to cooperate with Huawei after launching the mid-to-high-end brand Jihu.
New energy vehicles have departed from the original value judgment mode of traditional cars, in addition to the mechanical quality and interior of the car itself, intelligence, perception hardware, sales and service system have begun to become one of the factors considered by consumers.
In the course of practicing trumpets in this batch of traditional car companies, Huawei's figure has always shuttled through it.
In fact, not all car companies have the strength and patience to practice trumpets, and the emergence of Huawei is like a professional game training, giving car companies a new option. It's just that some car companies can't pass only a small part of the levels, so they have handed over some control, while some car companies can't pass most of the levels.
Substitute training stirs up the traditional system
Huawei's current cooperation model with car companies can be roughly divided into three types, one is that the traditional Tier1 business directly provides incremental parts for car companies. Such as AR-HUD, lidar, three-in-one electric drive system, etc.
The second is to provide platform products such as MDC, such as Sharon Mech Dragon using Huawei dual MDC, but the software algorithm is provided by Momenta.
The third is Huawei's HI model, that is, the full-stack intelligent solution, and the current partners are only three car companies: Jihu, GAC, and Avita.
The further down, the closer the cooperation between Huawei and car companies, the stronger the meaning of "generation training", so the stronger Huawei's initiative.
As mentioned above, Jihu was pulled to the forefront when BAIC BJEV was in urgent need of emergency, but the actual sales volume was not satisfactory, so it pulled Huawei and created the Alpha S HI version.
However, the Alpha S HI version has not been delivered on a large scale, and the sales of the ordinary version are not good, and there is still a big gap compared with the growth rate of the same level of Model 3 and P7 delivery in the first year.
Image source: Polar Fox public account
According to the delivery data released by Polar Fox, except for the 200 Alpha S HI versions delivered in a small area at the end of December, the monthly delivery volume was less than 700 vehicles at the rest of the time.
According to reports, the reason for the delay in delivery of the HI version is mainly due to the lack of supply of Huawei's Hongmeng car and machine system that Jihu focused on in the early stage.
When The Extreme Fox is in a hurry, on the other hand, at the Huawei Winter New Product Conference, Yu Chengdong said that huawei's Hongmeng intelligent cockpit will be installed in the Q&A M5 for the first time.
Hi version has not been delivered on a large scale, naturally can not rely on Huawei's sales channels, after the news said that The Pole Fox will enter the Huawei sales channel before the end of 2021, and now that it has entered 2022, we still do not see the figure of the Pole Fox Alpha S (HI version) in the Huawei flagship store.
Some polar fox sales staff told Photon Planet that the current news of the arrival of the exhibition car is not certain, perhaps until March and April.
BAIC's answer to this is very vague
On the contrary, Huawei's relationship with another non-HI model car company, Xilis, seems to be more "intimate".
At the same time as the release of the Polar Fox HI version, the SF5 cooperated by Huawei and Cyrus was also born. At that time, the news was "six thousand orders a week", but even if it was settled in Huawei's smart selection and sold in Huawei's online and offline channels, in fact, the sales of the car in 2021 were more than 8,000 units.
The sales of Cyrus SF5 will certainly not be able to support Huawei's layout in the automotive field, and at the end of the year, Huawei released a new brand AITO in cooperation with Cyrus. The point is that the brand's Q&A M5 is not released by the main engine factory, but by Huawei, which is going to do Tier1, which really makes many people scratch their heads.
Not only that, Xilis even seems to hand over marketing to Huawei, but chooses to cooperate silently. Since mid-December, offline stores have begun to change their signboards and hang up the AITO brand. Nowadays, we inquire about offline stores on the Xilis APP, and they are renamed ASTO User Center.
A sense of tearing seems to emerge in the brand's back and forth movements.
According to the observation of Photon Planet, the customer service on the Cyris APP before the Lunar New Year was changed to "AITO intelligent customer service", and the avatar also used the brand logo of AITO, and after the Lunar New Year, the name was changed to "intelligent customer service", and the avatar was also changed back to Cyrus SF5.
In terms of models, because the M5 is also positioned as a medium-sized SUV, its body data and configuration are almost the same as SF5, and the pricing has not opened up the gap, which makes people feel more like the SF5 with a leather, and it is easy to have a situation of left and right hand fighting.
Where the Cyris SF5 and the brand will eventually go, most people already have the answer in mind, so many car owners are condemning it on the Internet. Under the pressure of public opinion, Cyrus officials also had to come forward to clarify that it would not stop production and would accept orders normally.
In the end, we don't know whether the M5 can subvert the downturn of SF5 under the blessing of Huawei's Hongmeng system, but there are players who have lost interest and retreated in the game, but there are few starvation training.
Why is practicing trumpet favored by car companies?
A research and development engineer at a traditional car company once told Photon Planet that independent brands help shorten the decision-making process for new brands, eliminate the interference of the original organization, and make them more able to keep up with the rhythm of new forces.
In fact, most of the refreshing functions or models we see today are created or carried forward by new forces. Having ideas and daring to do it is the label of this batch of car companies that can step on the new energy outlet.
Xiaopeng once thought of using the color-changing glass on the Boeing 787 aircraft for the P7, ideally for the airbag popping problem under the triple screen to extend the project time, Weilai does not need to say, now everywhere XX center, XX space can also be regarded as a "true transmission".
A traditional car executive told Photon Planet that the previous car companies lacked this "innovative" idea, if the competitor did not have a function, they would not add the function, and most of the time competitors have the same idea as them. This also leads to the fact that no matter how high-end you have a car, you will always have to go to Taobao to buy a mobile phone holder of more than ten pieces.
Of course, we can't blindly blame traditional car companies for not innovating. The modification of a certain part of the car involves the coordination between multiple departments, perhaps behind an interior change is the result of a quarrel between multiple departments such as chassis, seats, interiors, etc., or perhaps a reduction of screws, hiding the next large-scale recall.
Taking the new forces as a point of view, many shocking functions have always stayed on the PPT, and even the true face of the car may not have been explored.
Although most domestic independent brands today still can't get rid of the low-end situation, no one can bear the negative impact that an "innovation" may bring. Therefore, the small innovation of the large number of shoujia should be the thinking of most traditional car companies in the field of new energy.
For example, Lynk & Co in the era of fuel vehicles is a good example.
From CMA to SPA architecture, Lynk & Co continues to digest Volvo's technology and feed back into Geely's body, while the younger model on the marketing side can also be seen as an attempt by Geely. These technologies and experiences will eventually be used in the large, such as in 2019, Lynk & Co passed the CMA architecture to Geely, creating models such as Xingyue, Xingrui, and Borui, and the birth of the Chinese star and the Krypton brand.
Similarly, the sub-brands of other car companies have also shown more aggressive strategies, such as Lantu's liftable triple screen, Salon's unique exterior design, and Zhiji's rough stone plan.
However, the sub-brand can be a strange soldier, raiding the hinterland of the new car-making forces, but it can also be an outcast.
It is also like the Wudang Flying Army formed by Zhuge Liang after pacifying the southern central region after pacifying the southern region, although it made many meritorious contributions in Zhuge Liang's Northern Expedition, it was eventually destroyed by covering the retreat of the commander during the Northern Expedition of Jiang Wei.
In the development history of traditional car companies, there are not a few sub-brands that have become abandoned, such as Ruilin, Weilin, Qoros, and Kaiyi under Chery, two bankruptcies and two selling themselves.
How much should be invested in such a strange army that may become an outcast at any time? No one can give an answer.
Staying in qingshan is not afraid of no firewood, which is the status quo of traditional car companies, and becoming a benevolent person without success is a portrayal of most new forces, and the two are inherently different in mentality, and may also become one of the factors that determine the outcome of the war.
In the new energy game, where the pattern is not yet completely clear, blindly believing that the rest of the players is not a wise choice, and it is also very easy to let yourself overturn in the gutter.