Text: Zheng Driving @ Tan Qing said AI editor-in-chief
Recently, the news that Weilai Automobile made mobile phones has not gone away.
First, a Weibo user with the online name "Logue Scout" broke the news, "Weilai's mobile phone department has recently increased its capital investment, and there are more than 100 new offers after the year, and it is expected to add more than 200 research and development positions..."
The next day, according to 36Kr, Nio has indeed entered the mobile phone industry, and Yin Shuijun, the former president of Meitu Mobile Phone, has joined in to take the lead in taking charge of Nio's mobile phone business.
Under the trend of automobile intelligence, the car industry can be described as hot, Gree in the home appliance industry, Evergrande in the real estate industry, Xiaomi in the mobile phone industry, and Huawei have poured into the car-making track to enter the field of intelligent cars. According to the tianyan search of WEILAI China, the number of its competitors has reached as many as 100, which shows the fiery grandeur of the automotive industry.
Compared with the automotive industry, the prosperity of the mobile phone industry is declining. Overall shipments for the full year of 2020 were about 326 million units, down nearly half from four years ago.
Under the contrast between the two, the incremental space of the intelligent electric vehicle industry is huge, mobile phone companies enter the car, looking for a second growth curve is reasonable, and the mobile phone market has long been a red sea, Weilai is willfully devoted to the mobile phone industry, how to understand the business logic behind it?
Offensive or defensive?
Tesla is the one who eats crabs in the smart automotive industry, and the strongest comprehensive strength is also Tesla, so the new and old domestic car companies pay special attention to Tesla's every move.
As early as the beginning of last year, foreign media announced a set of Tesla mobile phone "Model π" promotional page, and even the picture of the glass panel before and after the mobile phone was released, but the renderings were actually self-made by netizens, and Musk had not announced the creation of mobile phones until now.
What is interesting is that in terms of cross-border mobile phones of car companies, some domestic car companies have already taken the lead. In September last year, the independent car brand Geely took the lead in announcing its entry into the mobile phone field, and said that it would invest 10 billion yuan in the mobile phone industry chain, and a few months ago it was rumored to acquire Meizu.
Weilai is also a car company, is the intention of entering the mobile phone the same as Geely? Is WEILAI's entry into the mobile phone industry offensive or defensive? We may as well sort out the situation that Weilai is facing.
First of all, since the second half of last year, the sales volume of Nio has been less than expected. In the third quarter of fiscal 2021, NIO's revenue increased by 116.6% year-on-year, but the net loss for the quarter rose to 835 million.
Judging from the latest sales ranking, the sales growth rate of the new second-line car-making forces that keep catching up with "Wei Xiaoli" is extremely fast, and the potential of Nezha and zero running can never be ignored.
When Weilai "snoozed", the sales of the new forces of second-line car manufacturing were pressing, and the "Wei Xiaoli" who originally sat in the top three of the sales of the new forces became the current "Xiaoli". Can't help but sigh that the new energy automobile industry is still thriving, and the big brother Weilai seems to have a tendency to fall behind.
Another factor that cannot be ignored is that Weilai's users are mainly referrals, which can be seen that the reputation of old users is good, but excessive dependence on referrals may also reflect that Weilai's brand power is not strong enough.
Secondly, from the perspective of brand positioning, Weilai is aiming at high-end models, and in the long run, Huawei and Apple are also strong enemies of Weilai.
NIO's SUV models, EC6 and ES6, are priced at 368,000 yuan and 358,000 yuan respectively, and the Model Y is a competitor. However, compared with Tesla, which has crushed sales and lower marginal costs, Weilai's cost performance is really not enough to see.
Although Li Bin also explained that Weilai's benchmark is BMW, which is a traditional luxury model, intended to avoid Tesla's sharp edge, but Tesla's price reduction is to quickly occupy the market, and did not give up the research and development of luxury models, and the competition between Weilai and Tesla in luxury models in the future cannot be avoided.
In Tan Qing's view of AI, Weilai and Tesla choose different brand strategies because of their different genetic advantages.
Tesla whether it is three electric, or intelligent experience is the industry leader, in Tesla's eyes, the first opponent is Volkswagen, Toyota, and BBA's market share is too low, it is not worth the effort and they compete for the market.
The level of Wei's research is inferior to Tesla's, and its brand strategy is "Haidilao-style" intimate service, aiming at high-net-worth people who do not care about cost performance, so Weilai's competitive strategy is "good quality control and service".
However, under the trend of intelligence and networking, how to support high-end brands with high prices + good service?
Truly convincing high-end brands must have good product support, otherwise BBA will not be in a hurry to launch new energy models.
Finally, in the long run, the new car industry continues to heat up, and the next wave of car players will be Xiaomi, Huawei, Baidu and Apple.
Last year, Lei Jun told Mi Fan in the "Xiaomi Live Room" that Xiaomi cars will choose between SUVs and cars, and the price may be between 100,000 and 300,000. It can be seen that the product positioning of Xiaomi electric vehicles is different from Weilai, most of them are mass market, more economical, otherwise it is difficult to convert from Xiaomi mobile phone users.
However, judging from Yu Chengdong's recent tiger and tiger mouth cannon, Huawei's intention to build cars has become more and more obvious. And from Yu Chengdong's "annual sales of more than 300,000 vehicles" FLAG, the name to overturn Tesla and BBA, although there is no mention of new forces, but almost certainly Huawei to enter the high-end model, this can be seen from the test of the M5. Moreover, Huawei's product strength and technical layout are relatively comprehensive, and Weilai, which is also positioned as a high-end model, has to be defended.
Since then, although it seems that Wei Xiaoli has its own characteristics and occupies a world and a world, when the new forces enter the game, the pattern will change greatly. Combined with Weilai's slightly weak sales growth rate and loss situation, making mobile phones is mostly a defensive strategy.
The spring of car-machine interconnection has arrived?
A trend of new energy is networking, but the real networking still has a long way to go, and the car-machine interconnection will become a transitional service with insufficient vehicle networking capacity, and even if the networking is really mature, the vehicle-machine interconnection can be applied to different use scenarios, and it is still not outdated.
Therefore, from the perspective of the long-term development of new energy vehicles, the interconnection of vehicles and machines is worthy of being a point of strength. However, what is the development status of vehicle-machine interconnection?
In 2017, Wang Jian, chairman of Alibaba's technology committee, said in a speech with the theme of "When cars enter the era of intelligent networking", "It is a shame for auto people to use mobile phones when they enter the car." After that, Baidu Xiaodu OS, AliOS, and Tencent TAI competed for the Internet of Vehicles, but after 5 years, there are still cars that mainly buy 9.9 yuan e-commerce free shipping mobile phone holders.
The internet of cars and machines has been mentioned for many years, why does it feel that it has not aroused a big splash? Is it really that The Autobots don't work hard?
First of all, the most important reason is that in these years of the new energy automobile industry, intelligent experience and assisted driving are the attractive demands that subvert the driving experience of traditional fuel vehicles, and then the charging anxiety from electrification is the first pain point for new energy vehicle companies to solve, and all new car manufacturers must invest their strength here to maintain competitiveness. That is to say, the focus of the competition has not yet turned to the interconnection of cars and machines.
Therefore, we can see that car companies are trying to find ways to build batteries, build charging piles, and replace power stations, and we can also see after-installer interconnection products such as the car treasure box on the market. These phenomena all reflect that in the past competition for the new car industry, the interconnection of car machines is not a plus for new power brands such as Weilai and Tesla, otherwise it will certainly have been done personally and will not give third-party opportunities.
In addition, the smartphone application ecosystem has become extremely mature. A smart phone is handy, the price of the car mobile phone bracket is very cheap, the car machine interconnection because the cockpit application ecology is not mature, the experience is not much better than using the mobile phone in the car.
However, new energy vehicle companies must next convince the audience that they must come up with new product highlights. The L4, L5 level of automatic driving is still out of reach, the new forces and traditional car companies will be equipped with a large number of L2, L3 level of auxiliary automatic driving, in the field of automatic driving the gap between each other will gradually narrow, so the next time to compare the carpool machine interconnection is coming.
A question worth pondering is, in the face of new forces such as Tesla and Wei Xiaoli, how can the latecomers find their own ecological niche? It is not difficult to derive the answer to this question from the internet of vehicles that the players of the late-starter car have coincided with.
Just on February 8, some users of Xiaomi Mi 11 discovered a feature called "CarWith" in the "Connect & Share" setting. According to reports, users connect their phones and cars through CarWith, similar to Apple's CarPlay and Huawei's HiCar.
So far, Apple (CarPlay), Millet (CarWith), Huawei (HiCar), several post-production car companies have their own car-machine interconnection products. Perhaps each has its own unique positioning, but the car-machine interconnection is definitely a weapon for these late-entry players, based on the innate advantages of the car-machine interconnection, they will pose a challenge to Wei Xiaoli and other first-mover new car manufacturers.
So, for Geely and Weilai, can car companies make mobile phones to make up for the shortcomings of the interconnection of car machines? What is the foreshadowing effect on the construction of the IoT ecosystem in the longer term?
The IoT ecological scramble has begun
The IoT ecosystem is a scramble, and many smart hardware manufacturers either take the initiative to cross borders or cooperate with giants to avoid becoming an island outside the ecosystem. The trend of increasingly intelligent cars is nailed down, and all car companies are already aware of it.
Some people say, "The car machine system is so garbage, or get the car right first, and then get the mobile phone." ”
As everyone knows, if you want to make a qualitative leap in the intelligence of the car machine, you must start with the mobile phone. The function of the car machine always follows the mobile phone, and the feasibility of some functions of the car machine is actually verified in advance by the mobile phone use scenario.
First, the car machine is different from the mobile phone, and all new functions must start from safety.
As a means of transportation, the safety attributes of the car are greater than everything, and the stable intelligent link can also sweep away the worries on the safety of locomotive driving. As the smart terminal closest to the smart car, the smart machine collects the user experience and feedback first in the smart machine, and the upgrade of the smart car is nothing less than a safety buffer.
Second, the experience of doing smart machines can feed back the intelligence of automobiles, including automatic driving.
Tesla's shadow mode is to let the user's car collect road and driving data and optimize the assisted driving algorithm. One of the difficulties is that in the face of a huge amount of data of the order of terabytes, how to upload data to save traffic costs.
At present, the most direct approach is to screen more valuable data uploads, but throttling is not as good as open source, if the car company has its own brand of mobile phone, you can use the user's mobile phone to upload these data, thereby saving costs, but also can speed up data collection.
The reason is that the mobile Internet as an infrastructure, has developed to the 4G, 5G era, the transmission of data traffic is a kind of high-quality and inexpensive communication services, while the car machine Internet is still far from mature, the cost of use is still relatively high. This model is difficult for car companies to cooperate with mobile phone manufacturers, and self-made mobile phones can be better realized.
On the other hand, the pace of mobile Internet companies releasing new products is "small steps and fast running, rapid iteration", which will slow down when they reach the car.
At the policy level, in order to avoid the industry falling into barbaric growth, it will also limit the speed of iteration. Strict privacy protection regulations also make it difficult for car companies to collect accurate preferences and improve intelligence through a car. But the problem is that without the feedback of users many times, it is impossible to make good software, and good software is explored from continuous trial and error.
Therefore, for car companies, entering the game to do smart phones, making money or not may not matter at all, just like many car companies layout Robotaxi, in order to better collect road data, driving data and user data, car companies also have the need to make mobile phones.
Third, it is easier to go from the car to the mobile phone and then to other smart hardware. Smartphones have many characteristics such as high frequency, the widest user coverage, and comprehensive functions, and are the commanding heights of the IoT ecosystem.
The power of the ecological closed loop lies in the solidity, users are easy to come in, it is not easy to lose, so building an ecology is the only way to maximize the release of brand value. A typical case is Apple's hardware ecology, revenue from applications accounts for nearly 60%, Apple's hardware profits for mobile phones have been the highest in the industry, but Apple sells software more than selling hardware.
Seven years ago, Lei Jun shouted "investing in 100 ecological enterprises in five years" and tried to expand from a mobile phone company to the entire hardware ecology. Today, Xiaomi currently invests in more than 330 ecological chain enterprises. It is incredible that Xiaomi does not have Apple's product strength, but it still expands a hardware ecology from the mobile phone as the center, which can prove the central position of the smartphone in the IoT ecology.
Write at the end:
In the new energy automobile industry, the ecological division war is also brewing, whether it is a new force or a traditional car company, its C-end business is relatively single, and the ability in the ecological system is not in the same magnitude as the giants that ran out in the mobile Internet era. This may mean that when Xiaomi, Apple, and Huawei build cars, the ecological wall has been built, and it can form a dimensionality reduction blow to other car companies from the ecological level.
Therefore, regardless of whether the mobile phones made by car companies can be sold, from the perspective of ecological confrontation alone, it is necessary to try to sell their own mobile phones, because the characteristics of the ecological closed loop are that the user is sticky, easy to defend and difficult to attack, and it is likely that it is too late to wait until the "Huamiguo" car is listed to think of making a mobile phone counterattack.