Focus on 3.15| buy a car and buy a lonely, the order pre-sale model "looks beautiful"

Economic Observer reporter Zhou Ju used to buy a car as a bulk consumer product, from paying money to picking up the car for two weeks. However, with the arrival of new car manufacturers and new brands with new business models, the traditional delivery ecology has been broken in one fell swoop. After checking the complaint platform, the Economic Observer reporter found that many consumers still could not see the car for three or four months after paying the deposit, and even did not know when they could pick up the car.

"I bought the Xiaopeng P5 car on October 21, 2021, and the sales promised to get the car at the end of October, so I sold my car at the end of October. But now I still haven't gotten the car, and every communication with the sales is a few days, followed by a month of drag. On the black cat complaint platform, Xu Tao (pseudonym) described his encounters in the process of buying a car.

There are not a few people who have the same experience as Xu Tao. "I ordered Xiaopeng Automobile P5 with a deposit of 5,000 yuan on October 31, when the sales said that the car could be picked up at the end of November, and at the end of November, it said that the car could be picked up at the end of the year (the end of December), and at the end of December, I pushed back and said that I could pick up the car before the Spring Festival, and before the Spring Festival, I said that I didn't know when I could pick up the car, and there was no delivery information so far." The same experience made the prospective owners of Xiaopeng P5 join forces to launch a "class action lawsuit" against Xiaopeng Automobile, believing that Xiaopeng Automobile was suspected of false publicity and defrauding consumers.

In fact, it is not only Xiaopeng Motors, in the current pre-sale model of orders, the risk of consumers not being able to pick up the car on time is expanding. On the black cat complaint platform, there are also many complaints about delayed delivery vehicles such as Great Wall Euler, Geely Krypton Automobile, and Zero-run Car. In this process, consumers, instead of enjoying the services they deserve, have bought a stomach full of gas. In this case, the car "speculation single person" came into being, and the market order began to be disrupted.

While new car manufacturers and new brands bring model innovation, they have caused unexpected losses to the interests of consumers. So what causes car companies to fail to deliver on time? How should consumers avoid stepping on the "pit" and protect their rights and interests in the new car consumption period? This has become a new problem that needs to be considered in the new era of automobile consumption.

Delivery is frequent

At present, new car manufacturers and new brands generally adopt the direct sales model, and in order to lock customers in advance, they often use the order pre-sale method, that is, before the product is listed, it begins to pre-sell to the outside world, consumers can lock in orders after paying a certain deposit, and car companies deliver in the order of order after the product is listed.

With the blessing of freshness, consumers have also begun to "blind determination", that is, they have not yet seen the true appearance of the mass production car, and they will pay a deposit. Car companies are busy promoting the popularity of their orders. For example, Xiaopeng P5, Xiaopeng officially said that the cumulative order volume in the 53 hours after the opening of the model reservation has exceeded 10,000 units; the Xilis equipped with Huawei's intelligent driving system has been promoted to generate 2,000 large orders within 3 days of sale; and the tank 300 indicates that the number of monthly orders for models has exceeded 10,000 units continuously.

Regardless of whether there is moisture in the number of orders advertised by these advertisements, after frantically creating a hot selling atmosphere and receiving orders, some car companies have problems in the delivery process, resulting in consumers delaying in getting the car.

"The 4S store originally promised that the owners could pick up the car for 2-3 months, but the manufacturer delayed for various reasons and did not have any account for the consumer, resulting in the dealer not having a car delivery, and the consumer could only wait for a long time, consuming the patience and trust of consumers again and again." Euler owners said so in a class action lawsuit launched in February.

Another prospective owner of a krypton car has not even seen the car for more than half a year. "The order was paid on May 27, 2021, when it was said that delivery would begin in October 2021, then postponed until December 2021, and now it continues to be extended, the manufacturer does not make any explanation, does not give any information, does not refund, and has a tough attitude." The prospective owner complained.

Why are many car companies unable to deliver vehicles on time? The news released by Xiaopeng Automobile is that due to the impact of the epidemic, the supply of major components such as lithium iron phosphate batteries is extremely tight, resulting in insufficient battery supply, which affects the production progress of Xiaopeng P5460 models, so it can only be delayed. But it said there is currently no compensation plan for car owners.

Euler Automobile said that it was affected by factors such as chip shortages, rising costs, and subsidies declining, resulting in black cats, white cats and other models being unable to be delivered on time. Recently, Euler Automobile has announced the suspension of receiving orders for black cats and white cats. Krypton said last year that the delivery was delayed due to air suspension, EC light-sensitive canopy and other configuration options, and said that it will give 1,000 points per day to customers who delay delivery from January 1 this year.

Despite the objective unfavorable factors such as the shortage of chips and battery raw materials, this obviously cannot completely eliminate the anxiety of consumers waiting, and many consumers said that car companies have repeatedly delayed delivery and the service experience is not good, causing great harm to themselves.

At the same time, this situation also exposes that there are still many things to be improved in the innovative model of order pre-sale. First of all, there are many ambiguities in the pre-sale order contract, so that the rights and interests of consumers cannot be well protected. For example, some Xiaopeng owners pointed out that Xiaopeng Automobile did not specify the specific time limit for the delivery of the vehicle in the "Xiaopeng Automobile Purchase Agreement", but only wrote that "Xiaopeng Automobile will deliver the car to you within a reasonable period of time after the car you ordered arrives at the store and your purchase price has been paid in full". Therefore, some car owners questioned: "According to such a contract, Xiaopeng Automobile will not default on the delivery of the car after 100 years." "This makes penalties for breach of contract even more impossible."

In addition, the order pre-sale model did not transfer the car buyer to limit, the order was speculated by high prices under the condition of "blind determination", and the goods were not on the board, which caused further damage to the rights and interests of consumers.

When is the order hype closed

The difficulty of delivery in the pre-sale order model, as well as the promotion policy of the first batch of orders exclusive to many rights and interests widely used by car companies, accidentally gave birth to a new profession - car "speculation single person", these people grab the order at the first time after the product starts to pre-sell, and then sell the order price by thousands of yuan or even tens of thousands of yuan to get benefits from it. But this makes consumers who really want to buy a car and pick up a car have to spend tens of thousands of yuan more to get the qualification to buy a car, and the existence of the car "speculation single person" has seriously disrupted the normal market order.

The hottest order to be hyped recently is the delayed tank 500. The Economic Observer reporter found on a second-hand trading platform that there are tank 500 "prospective owners" who are selling their tanks 500 pre-sale orders at a price of 50,000 yuan, which said that "tank 500, the first 10 car codes, not much to say, is definitely the first batch of cars." ”

In addition, there is a large number of order markup transfer information involving popular models such as Tesla ModelY, Extreme Kr 001, Zero Run C11, Gaohe HiPhiX and so on on the second-hand trading platform, and the price ranges from 8000-60000. The order scalper made a lot of money, and some people said that they had made 100,000 yuan on salted fish by reselling new car orders.

The value of a mainstream electric vehicle is less than 300,000 yuan, and buying an order from a scalper alone may cost 1/5 of the price. In the past, there were price increases on high-end models such as Alpha and Lexus, but in the current new car consumption period, price increases seem to have become the norm.

The industry's view is that this reflects some problems of new car manufacturers and brands, on the one hand, these car companies have not made overall arrangements for production capacity and orders, and in the case of limited delivery capacity, there is a practice of deliberately shortening the promised pick-up time because of the hope of locking in customers, which in turn leads to a large backlog of orders. This is also considered another way of "hunger marketing". However, at present, laws and regulations do not have clear restrictions on this practice.

On the other hand, many car companies do not stipulate that the orderer and the pick-up person must be the same person in the terms of the pre-sale of the order. Even some car companies have clearly stated that they support the transfer of orders. For example, Zero Run Auto once told the media: "At present, we support the transfer of orders in the same store, and the transfer will not affect the rights and interests of the reservation"; Extreme Kr Automobile also allows users to modify the order information, including the owner information and car purchase information. All these have contributed to the atmosphere of speculation.

However, some companies have begun to crack down on such transfers, such as tank brands saying that they will upgrade the delivery confirmation process, and new orders from November 28 last year are considered invalid orders if the order of the person under the target does not match the actual consignee and cannot prove that it is an immediate family member or a limited license leasing relationship.

From the perspective of industry regulations, the Measures for the Administration of Automobile Sales do not stipulate that in the process of consumers buying a car, the person who orders the car and the person who picks up the car in the future must be a person, or the relationship between them must be proved. In the face of new problems brought about by the pre-sale order model, the Measures for the Administration of Automobile Sales also need to be further improved.

The "blind fixing" in the pre-sale mode of orders also brings new problems to consumers, such as the wrong goods. In November last year, due to Euler's promotion of the Qualcomm 8-core chip planned for the future in advance, it produced a consumer misleading, resulting in a collective complaint by the owners of good cats after discovering that their car machine system chips were old Intel processors.

In the era of new car consumption with pre-orders, many unexpected new problems are happening intensively. While these problems are sounding an alarm bell for automobile manufacturers, they also remind consumers to operate cautiously before and after placing orders and picking up cars to avoid stepping on the pit. At the same time, new demands have also been put forward for timely follow-up of industry policies and better protection of consumer rights and interests.