The decline of the heavy-duty truck market needs to be reversed by reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
Author | Tetsu Ta
Edit | Wen Liang
"The whole freight environment in 2022 is very unfavorable to us. This car is not running, nor is it not running. Domestic oil prices ushered in 5 consecutive increases, but also to raise, freight rates are getting lower and lower, car loans are not enough. Vehicle damage, maintenance, insurance, car inspection, all have to lose money. Don't run, a dozen or even hundreds of thousands of cars are placed there, dry and do not sweat. In early March, a truck driver used a video on his Douyin account to express the situation he was facing this year.
This is not just the dilemma faced by this truck driver. Since the outbreak of the global COVID-19 epidemic in 2020, the problems of rising oil prices, lower freight rates, and insufficient orders have become more and more acute, becoming a pain that every road freight driver cannot bypass.
At the beginning of 2022, due to multiple factors such as the shock of the global political environment, the problem on the shoulders of drivers was even heavier. "One wheel turns, ten thousand in three days", the days that used to attract countless truck drivers into the industry and a lot of money into their pockets now seem to be getting farther and farther away from them.
According to statistics, there are about 30 million truck drivers in China, and their situation is like the multi-prism of the entire trucking industry, under the mirror, it reflects the industrial trend of one link and one link: from OEM OEMs to logistics companies, the glorious dividend era of traditional heavy trucks seems to be no more.
How to achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase has become a new proposition and urgent challenge that the heavy-duty truck industry has to face. Correspondingly, a whole new industry is gaining momentum.
The "growth bottleneck period" of fuel heavy trucks
Under the combined action of epidemic prevention and control, rising oil prices, standard switching and other factors, the mainland fuel heavy truck market has suffered a sharp decline in sales for the first time after many years of continuous growth in 2021.
Since the outbreak of the epidemic in 2020, restrictions have been placed on the production activities of enterprises throughout the country for prevention and control. Even if enterprises gradually resume work, the progress of resumption of production of various enterprises is different, and it is still difficult to make the logistics and transportation smooth. Fewer orders have led to oversupply in the logistics industry, and the problem of insufficient supply has been further aggravated.
In addition to the shortage of supplies, the rise in oil prices has led logistics drivers to abandon long-distance transportation.
At present, many countries around the world have experienced energy crises, and crude oil prices have risen significantly. The mainland crude oil has a high degree of dependence on foreign countries and a large demand, making the existing diesel prices continue to rise, the wholesale price of diesel was once 8500 yuan / ton, and the wholesale price is higher than the retail price. Recently, after the price increase of the refined oil mechanism in many parts of the country, the price of gasoline and diesel has been further increased.
At the same time as the rise in oil prices, some gas stations have limited sales due to the shortage of diesel, such as a car can only add 100 yuan of diesel. In order to save costs and increase profitability, logistics companies or retail drivers mostly choose short-distance logistics.
More importantly, the switching of the National VI standard has a more obvious impact on the sales of fuel heavy trucks.
China VI standard, full name national sixth stage motor vehicle pollutant emission standards, parts of the mainland officially implemented the national vi standard for heavy-duty diesel vehicles on July 1, 2019. Compared with the previous generation standard, heavy-duty diesel vehicles require NOx and particulate matter limits to be reduced by 77% and 67%, respectively.
After a period of trial implementation, the mainland began to fully implement the National VI emission standards for heavy-duty diesel vehicles on July 1, 2021, requiring the production and sale of heavy-duty diesel vehicles that do not meet the National VI emission standards, and imported heavy-duty diesel vehicles should comply with the National VI emission standards.
After the standard switch, the production and sales of heavy-duty trucks in the second half of 2021 have decreased significantly compared with the first half of the year. For example, in October 2021, 53,000 heavy-duty trucks were sold in mainland China, down 62% from last year's sales.
In fact, the decline in sales of heavy-duty trucks in the mainland has appeared several years ago. From 2017 to 2019, the sales volume of heavy-duty trucks in mainland China fell from 52.38% to 3.2% year-on-year, while in 2021, the sales of heavy-duty trucks of many OEMs increased by negative year-on-year.
In order to increase the sales of their respective heavy-duty trucks, OEMs have launched relevant products and technologies in response to possible problems in the market a few years ago, such as the release of new energy heavy trucks without fuel consumption, intelligent driving technology, etc.
Among them, intelligent driving is one of the most favored technologies for OEMs customers in the past two years.
Sinotruk has told the media that the application of intelligent driving technology has greatly promoted product sales, and many customers have discussed cooperation with them because intelligent driving technology can reduce operating costs.
Yang Tengfei, vice president and operation director of MAXIEYE, a related technical service provider, also recently revealed that in addition to the basic safety functions required by regulations that have been mass-produced, its own 1R2V products that solve the blind zone of heavy trucks and the L2+ MAXIPILOT system including eACC's economic adaptive cruise function are also accelerating the empowerment of customers.
At present, the practical dilemma of the logistics industry is difficult to eliminate in the short term, and only by effectively reducing costs and increasing efficiency, the sales volume of heavy trucks in OEMs is expected to usher in a second degree of growth. Intelligent driving technology is one of the methods.
The logistics industry solves the problem of cost reduction and efficiency increase
In fact, the market demand for heavy trucks is still strong.
The data shows that in 2021, the sales volume of new energy heavy trucks in the mainland will increase by nearly three times year-on-year. In the 352nd batch of new vehicle announcements announced by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in January 2022, the number of new energy heavy trucks accounted for about 39% of the total number of declared models.
However, new energy heavy trucks can only solve some problems in the logistics industry, and the logistics industry still has a large space for cost reduction.
Logistics costs, as a whole, consist of warehousing, manpower, fuel consumption, taxes, insurance and other expenses. In 2020, prospective economists have surveyed a number of logistics companies and found that labor costs and capital costs have risen the most. Among them, the main reason for the rapid rise in labor costs is that the personnel gap in some logistics enterprises is large, and labor costs, especially the cost of grass-roots drivers and stevedores, increase at a level of more than 10% per year.
With the development of new energy heavy trucks that do not require fuel consumption, the problem of higher capital costs plaguing logistics companies and drivers will gradually be alleviated, and labor costs will become the most prominent problems that inhibit the logistics and transportation industry.
In addition, the further intensification of the aging of the mainland social population has further increased the labor costs of the mainland logistics industry.
In this case, if the heavy truck equipped with the intelligent driving system is widely used, it can alleviate the fatigue of the driver to a greater extent, improve the efficiency of the driver's single driving, and save labor costs for the price-sensitive logistics company.
On the other hand, intelligent driving will reduce the traffic accident rate, thereby reducing the property damage of logistics enterprises.
Since 2017, the General Office of the Ministry of Transport of the Mainland has issued a number of regulations and policies for commercial vehicles, requiring operating vehicles to install ADAS functions including a forward collision warning system and a lane departure warning system.
The U.S. highway safety insurance agency has calculated that cars equipped with ADAS functions can avoid more than 60% of traffic accidents.
In the past few years, manufacturers including Bosch, Continental, Matrix Partners Hengrun, MAXIEYE, etc. have launched related products. Among them, MAXIEYE's ADAS products have been mass-produced and applied to nearly 200,000 heavy trucks, including Shaanxi Heavy Duty Truck and Foton. Under the trend of digitalization, the adoption of intelligent driving technology in the logistics industry will be one of the trends of the times.
The Deloitte report believes that the logistics industry will transform from a labor-intensive industry to a data-intensive industry in the digital era, from a capital-intensive to a technology-intensive, and technologies including big data, logistics robots, intelligent driving, etc. will be the technologies that the logistics industry must integrate into in the future. With the close integration of more information data with the logistics industry, it will greatly improve the efficiency of the mainland logistics industry and accelerate the development of mainland logistics.
Liu Dacheng, deputy dean of the Internet Industry Research Institute of Tsinghua University, even believes that intelligent driving technology will also intensify competition between logistics companies, promote mergers and acquisitions and alliances between enterprises, and achieve cost reduction and efficiency improvement of the entire logistics industry.
"From our technical service provider's point of view, it is more important to be able to truly provide safe and reliable products for the industry. For example, the current AEB technical problems commonly faced by the industry, how to improve system performance from the bottom of perception, and minimize false triggers in the case of reducing missed inspections. Yang Tengfei said, "At the same time, the data closed-loop system we built on the mass production vehicle will also help customers win the first-mover advantage in the landing of high-end intelligent functions." ”
Intelligent driving has become a magic weapon that must be fought for in the logistics industry. Under this possibility, if the main engine factory launches a heavy truck equipped with intelligent driving, it may seize the market in advance, thereby reversing the decline in sales of heavy trucks.
Mining Smart Driving Rich
The smart driving heavy-duty truck market is like a rich mine to be mined. Yiou think tank has calculated that the number of heavy trucks in China's trunk logistics is expected to reach 6.27 million in 2030, and the potential economic benefits of autonomous trunk logistics will reach 1404.5 billion yuan.
In fact, a number of OEMs in the mainland have foreseen the market demand in advance, and have developed L2-L4 level autonomous driving commercial heavy trucks through self-research or cooperation a few years ago, which can be seen from the frequent actions of domestic first-line heavy truck manufacturers in recent years.
In 2019, FAW Jiefang initiated the establishment of an autonomous driving company, Zhitu Technology. Within a year, Zhitu Technology successfully developed the world's first L3 level autonomous driving heavy truck. In July 2021, FAW Jiefang's J7 super heavy truck was launched in a small batch of front-loading mass production and has the ability to be put into practical application.
In March 2022, Dongfeng Commercial Vehicle and MAXIEYE launched a cooperation on a high-end smart heavy-duty truck project, which will provide Dongfeng Commercial Vehicle with intelligent heavy-duty truck technology solutions and services equipped with advanced pilot assistance system.
In addition, SAIC Hongyan's 5G smart heavy-duty trucks also have certain autonomous driving capabilities. As the process of automotive intelligence accelerates, OEMs, Tier1 and technology suppliers are constantly exploring new business models to achieve win-win results and promote each other's development.
For example, Chery Automobile previously cooperated with AntChain, which applied the Internet of Things and blockchain technology to Chery Commercial Vehicles to help Chery Automobile transform into a commercial vehicle operator; MAXIEYE and Desay SV jointly deployed unmanned technology and operation services to explore the operation service model of smart heavy-duty trucks.
After long-term cooperation with OEMs and suppliers, some technology suppliers have accumulated rich experience and formed a set of technical solutions. According to the understanding of the new intelligent driving, MAXIEYE will officially disclose three major technical solutions in the near future, namely security solutions for the regulatory market, intelligent solutions for market-oriented needs, unmanned operation and technical solutions.
Under the active cooperation and joint exploration of many parties in the industry, the logistics industry in the mainland may be renewed in the future.
Write at the end
After the full implementation of the National VI standard, many industry experts believe that the market demand for diesel commercial trucks in the mainland will continue to decline, and eventually the sales growth will be flattened.
In this case, Zhong Weiping, secretary general of the Commercial Vehicle Professional Committee of the China Automobile Dealers Association, once said that in the future, mainland OEMs and dealers must transform from simple car sales to integrated service providers.
At present, from the OEM of heavy trucks such as Jiefang, Dongfeng and Shaanxi Heavy Duty Truck, to the OEMs including Geely and Chery, etc., they have been laid out in related aspects, and technologies such as automatic driving, Internet of Things, and data analysis will become new things that more OEMs actively embrace.
Under the demand of the industry to reduce costs and increase efficiency, the technology represented by intelligent driving will become the second growth curve to promote the commercial truck market in mainland China.
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