In 2015, in an interview, Qian Yingyi asked Musk: As a layman in the rocket industry, how did you become a rocket expert in a short period of time?
Musk laughed and said: Obviously, read more.
Uncle Ni, I am willing to bet a dollar, bet: Zhu Jiangming, the founder of Zero Run Car, must have seen this interview, so he must say: We benchmark Tesla.
If Musk learned to make rockets by reading books is a ridiculous and true story, then Zhu Jiangming's zero-run car is about to go to Hong Kong for an IPO, becoming the "first stock" in the second echelon of the new car-making forces is another equally absurd and true story.
Before founding zero-run cars, Zhu Jiangming had never touched the "car" thing.
When Zhu Jiangming was interviewed by the media in the early years, he himself did not shy away from this, telling reporters:
"When I first wanted to make cars in 2015, I really didn't know what the majors of cars were, I went to recruit people, which people I wanted to recruit, it was all a smear."
Zhu Jiangming did not even know that the production and sales of automobiles needed access qualifications, thinking that if they were manufactured and qualified for testing at the China Automobile Center, they could be sold.
In fact, as early as 2015, the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly issued the "Regulations on the Management of New Pure Electric Passenger Car Enterprises", which stipulates that car companies must have "production qualifications" and "product qualifications" to produce pure electric vehicles.
Therefore, zero-running cars have invested more than 1 billion yuan in the construction of Jinhua plants in 2019, and it was not until December 2020 that zero-running cars obtained vehicle production qualifications through the acquisition of New Fuda.
Therefore, when on June 28, 2019, the first mass-produced model of zero-run cars, "S1", was officially delivered under the banner of "self-produced and self-developed" and "after Tesla, the second manufacturer with complete independent research and development capabilities of intelligent electric vehicles and mastery of core technologies" was officially delivered...
In fact, it is produced by Changjiang Automobile.
Factories that cost more than a billion yuan to build, but can not be used because of lack of qualifications;
The brand that focuses on the concept of "self-production and self-research", the real delivery is OEM;
And this embarrassment is just the beginning for the layman's "zero run".
1
In 2019, zero running without any background in automobile production and manufacturing needs to prove itself to the market through scale delivery, and the first mass production model S01 is a key battle for Zhu Jiangming.
To this end, Zhu Jiangming also publicly set a "small goal": by the end of 2019, the target for zero-run cars is 10,000.
But I didn't expect the face punch to come so quickly, in the S01 media test drive activity organized by Zero Run, a media teacher was stopped by the traffic police in the process of test driving the vehicle, and was found to be using a fake pro card. Media teachers will also face a penalty of 12 points.
It is difficult to imagine that having "the only vehicle manufacturer with complete independent research and development capabilities in the field of domestic automatic driving" cannot even get a temporary license.
The embarrassment of a "layman" in the car circle is exposed, but this is only the beginning...
After the zero-run S01 was listed, a car owner in Hangzhou was driving the newly bought zero-run S01 to the vehicle management office to put on the card, the dashboard suddenly displayed the power system fault code, the vehicle could not start, because of the fear that such a situation if it happened on the highway will be a disaster, the owner insisted on returning the car.
Another Jinhua owner questioned the false publicity and demanded to return the car on the grounds that the actual purchase of the vehicle did not have the high-tech driver assistance function and other functions claimed by the manufacturer.
In May 2020, more than 200 zero-run S01 first batch of car owners collectively defended their rights and published an open letter to zero-running cars on the Internet, listing four major types of quality problems, involving brake system failure, vacuum booster pump failure; power system failure, battery overheating protection; car machine system failure, main control screen black screen; control system failure, vehicle stop for no reason, etc.
Evaluation of overturning, false publicity, collective rights protection of car owners... Such a start has greatly damaged the reputation of zero run.
According to the payment data of compulsory traffic insurance, the actual sales volume of zero-run S01 in 2019 is about 1,000 vehicles, which is far from Zhu Jiangming's small goal.
On the last day of March 2020, Zhao Gang, vice president with high hopes, announced that he had left from zero, leaving a sigh of "difficulty in building a car".
Since then, the label of "outsider" has been tightly pressed like an ancient curse on zero-running cars and zero-running people.
2
In 2020, zero-run cars were in trouble for a while.
People familiar with zero-run cars told Caixin that in the most difficult time, the top brass hesitated to give up building cars.
What makes the story of zero running stick to it is that the second model T03 launched by zero running is a car that looks very similar to Smartforfour, priced at only 70,000-85,000, which is only a fraction of the price of the new energy three silly cars.
But it is precisely because of the distinction between the target market, T03 with a price of about 70,000 yuan, more than 400 kilometers of endurance, as well as the same level of models rare L2 level driver assistance system and other configurations, and at the same time to force channels, a year to expand the number of stores three times, and finally opened up the market sales.
By the end of 2021, T03's cumulative sales volume was 46,000 units, accounting for 85% of the total zero-run car sales share.
Since then, starting in the third quarter of 2021, the quarterly delivery of zero-run cars has exceeded 10,000 units for the first time, exceeding the 8,080 deliveries in the whole year of 2020, and the sales volume continued to exceed 10,000 units in the following fourth quarter, reaching 17,045 units.
From annual sales of less than 10,000 vehicles to quarterly sales of more than 10,000 vehicles and then to monthly sales of nearly 10,000 vehicles, zero-run cars have only taken less than two years...
By delivery, zero-run cars are the fastest growing of emerging electric vehicle companies.
This is the reason why zero-run cars can be firmly in the second echelon of new car-making forces and can grab the IPO.
But the problem of zero running is also obvious, and many media have summed it up:
In order to sell 50,000 cars, the loss was 5 billion
But it is gratifying that not making money is a unified feature of all new car-making forces.
So, all that's left is how to tell a story that the capital market believes.
3
It can be seen that Zhu Jiangming told this story very hard.
As the CTO & co-founder of security giant Dahua Co., Ltd., Zhu Jiangming has nearly 30 years of R & D and manufacturing experience, and is good at embedded algorithms and chip-level soft-hard combination of computer underlying. He invented the HDCVI video transmission technology, which became the international standard in 2014.
As a veteran technical person, he has always been considered by the outside world to be a bad at words.
When all the friends have begun to talk about "changing the world with me", he will only talk about "self-production and self-research" over and over again.
You know, in the new energy vehicle market, this is a very bad thing. After all, the reason why many electric vehicle owners choose electric vehicles is simply that they think it is cool to drive an electric car, or that it is cool to open a certain brand, and the lack of storytelling ability makes Zero Run in a disadvantageous position in brand marketing.
But in order to go public, at the Zero Run 2.0 strategy conference in July 2021, Zhu Jiangming put down his bold words:
"Surpass Tesla in three years, enter the top 3 of new car-making forces in 2023, and 800,000 vehicles in 2025."
As a man who landed on the Hurun Rich List with a net worth of 3.6 billion, Zhu Jiangming certainly understands: stocks play with expectations.
Super Tesla, new car-making forces TOP3, 800,000 vehicles delivered, whether these three goals can be achieved is not important, what is important is to give the market a large enough expectation ...
And be sure to clarify the theme of the story: challenging Tesla
Zero-run cars from the very beginning were:
Around the story of "zero running is the only new energy vehicle company besides Tesla that truly has a closed loop of the complete industrial chain of intelligent car self-development, self-production, sales and service integration".
With successful experience in the field of security, Zhu Jiangming believes that the self-research of core technologies is of great significance to the long-term development of enterprises, so from the beginning, Zero Run firmly chose "global self-research", from chips to three-electric systems to vehicle networking solutions and other core technologies, always adhere to independent research and development.
One of the most noteworthy is: zero running and behind the "gold lord" Dahua jointly created the intelligent driving chip "Lingxin 01", if Lingxin 01 achieves mass production, it is expected to become China's first independently developed intelligent driving chip.
Regarding Lingxin, Zhu Jiangming's statement is: Lingxin 01 has reached 8.4 TOPS in computing power, and can top twenty or thirty T's of other people's homes."
However, compared with the "self-confidence" of Zhu Jiangming's statement, many experts in the industry have expressed "disapproval":
"The chip is actually not very advanced. First of all, no one has used this chip, that is, it has not been verified by the market, there is no comparison or reference, so why is it very strong."
More people familiar with the research and development of zero-run cars revealed:
"The products and technologies of zero-run cars are all developed by themselves, and many places still do it according to non-car products: because the products of security can be used no matter how they are, they can not be done in accordance with strict compliance requirements, so the definition of products that everyone understands is not the same."
And when Zhu Jiangming tried to make a breakthrough at the hardware level through "self-production and self-research", Tesla focused a lot of energy on the research and development of FSD (Full Self Driving). The FSD, a self-driving assistance system released by Teska in October 2020, is currently being trialled in 60,000 vehicles and is updated approximately every two weeks.
Tesla hopes that FSD will eventually be able to achieve driverless driving. This means that software systems are constantly updated, and each large-scale system update is similar to the release of a new model.
Judging by the frequency of updates, this is a huge investment.
From the perspective of R& D input costs, not to talk about catching up with or surpassing Tesla, just 'Wei Xiaoli', often a company's annual investment in research and development is 1 billion yuan, and the net profit of Dahua shares in the first three quarters of 2021 behind zero running is only 2.4 billion yuan...
Compared with: zhu Jiangming's many technological visions, and zero run's own technology investment of less than 200 million yuan per year, in strong contrast, it seems incomparably thin...
Obviously: from the current situation, zero-run data collection is in its infancy, whether it is at the hardware level, software level or even the actual car scene...
Three years beyond Tesla is more like a slogan, a marketing done to rub Tesla.
Just half a month ago, Musk publicly asked to single out putin's news, brushing up the hot search of major social networks, netizens said that Musk rubbed a good hot spot.
But who thinks: The heavens are good reincarnation, and the heavens have spared whom...
Musk rubbed Putin on the hot search, and the other end, zero run on Musk to go to Hong Kong IPO, this is rubbing out of an IPO!!!
No wonder people say: it is better to make cars than to make chips
China's car, stable !!!