The recent news of the general price increase of new energy vehicles is believed to have been well known to the vast majority of people, and at present, the price increase wave is most affected by A00 and A0 products.
In addition to the price increase, this part of the market is also accompanied by deeper fluctuations, from the earliest Euler official stop taking orders, to Changan's Ben Ben e-star to Geely Geometry's Kung Fu Niu and other models can not be delivered on time, and even encounter user rights protection. It is not an exaggeration to say that the A00-A0 class models are experiencing an unprecedented catastrophe.
From the market point of view, the price of less than 100,000 yuan A00-A0 class new energy models has been the absolute main force in the domestic new energy market sales, the association data show that in 2021 A00 and A0 class pure electric cars sales of about 1.3 million, accounting for about 40% of the overall new energy vehicle sales, of which individual monthly sales accounted for even close to 50%, that is to say, half of the entire domestic new energy market, are low-cost small electric vehicles.
The reason why small electric vehicles are welcomed by the market, behind the natural is the needs of users, compared to the same price of fuel vehicles, lower purchase costs and travel costs, parking is more convenient and other advantages are very obvious, on the other hand, due to the long subsidy policy cycle, the development of the power battery industry is faster, so that A00 and A0 level cars can also achieve 300 km of driving mileage, reach the subsidy threshold, catch up with the policy subsidy of the East Wind, the promotion of the market is undoubtedly very huge.
However, with the official decline of policy subsidies this year, the small electric vehicle market at the beginning of this year has been hit by a wave, and the recent wave of price increases in chips and batteries has brought about a straight rise in the cost of new energy vehicles.
So then again, when it comes to the lack of cores and the epidemic and the increase in the price of materials, it seems that it has been going on for a while, but why haven't you seen such a big reaction from the market before?
Behind this, we can analyze the reasons for this.
The lack of cores in the automotive industry has become a cliché, initially stemming from a series of chain reactions triggered by a fire at a Renesas chip factory in Japan, and then gradually evolving into business practices such as supplier hype. And now a new round of chip shortage, mainly due to the direct or indirect production of chips of semiconductor materials in short supply, such as silicon wafers, electronic gases, photoresists and other materials, which also superimposed the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian war, Ukraine is the main supplier of electronic gas, so the entire semiconductor industry card neck phenomenon is serious, in addition, affected by the epidemic, some Southeast Asia and other places chip factory production capacity has also declined.
According to the report of CCTV Finance, in the previous year, the price of cars and chips has risen across the board, a core chip of the body electronic stability system with an original price of only about 20 yuan, the latest quotation of 2800 yuan and does not include tax, the price of other car chips is also rising, and the increase is several times small.
In addition to the chip problem, the rising price of power batteries has become another direct factor driving the production cost of new energy vehicles.
In the past year, the price of valuable metals such as nickel, manganese, cobalt, and lithium, which are raw materials for power batteries, has risen rapidly, especially lithium carbonate for battery cathode materials, which has risen the most, almost one price a day.
For the impact of car prices, a ternary lithium battery new energy vehicle with 60-70kWh of electricity, lithium carbonate for every 100,000 yuan increase, battery cost increased by about 4,000 yuan, and now the price of lithium carbonate has risen from 30,000 yuan per ton in the previous two or three years to about 700,000 yuan per ton today. And that doesn't include other soaring raw materials like nickel.
Some car executives estimate that the recent wave of battery price increases exceeded many people's expectations, and the procurement cost of more than 30 degrees of batteries rose from the original 20,000 to nearly 40,000 yuan, nearly doubled, while 60 degrees of batteries, mainstream electric vehicles with a range of 400 to 500 kilometers, the battery cost increased by 30,000 to 40,000, it can be seen that the cost increase is still very obvious.
Previously, Euler brand CEO Dong Yudong once said: "Battery price increases and subsidy declines have brought about a cost gap of more than 7,000 yuan, coupled with the price of a single carbon integral plummeting from more than 2,000 yuan to several hundred yuan, according to this selling method, a car will lose 17,000 yuan."
For the small electric vehicle market where the price is not high, the more you sell, the more you lose, which may become a difficult problem to solve in the future.