The outbreak of domestic hybrids, trapped in the dispute over the route of the car companies finally survived?

On April 3, BYD officially announced that it would stop producing fuel vehicles, its monthly sales of new energy vehicles exceeded 10W, BYD officially completed the transformation of new energy, and fuel vehicles withdrew from the historical stage.

A female colleague of the company waited for 3 years and finally shook the license plate number, before it was time to buy a car, the price of No. 95 oil has soared to 9.5 yuan per liter. "I hit the license plate so hard, but now I regret it a little!" Commuting nearly 60 kilometers a day, she feels that the cost of driving is too high, and struggles with whether to buy new energy vehicles instead.

Compared with fuel vehicles, new energy vehicles do not have to worry about rising oil prices, but also do not have to purchase taxes, acceleration performance is much better than the general fuel vehicles, more suitable for daily use for ordinary car owners, but the high price of battery raw materials has also led to a recent general increase in the price of new energy vehicles.

When the market measures which is more cost-effective for fuel vehicles and electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles that claim to solve mileage anxiety and save fuel have been active in the market for a while. In terms of market acceptance, hybrid models are one of the optimal solutions that automakers can give at present, even exceeding the growth rate of pure electric vehicles. So, why in this node in 2022, domestic hybrid technology suddenly exploded, where are the advantages, why do domestic car companies want to collectively rush to layout hybrid?

01 Chinese brand hybrid into a new outlet

There is a saying that I believe everyone is familiar with: "There are only two kinds of hybrids in the world, one is called Toyota hybrid, and the other is called other." However, this sentence is probably inappropriate now. The hybrid of other brands not only achieves the fuel consumption of Toyota Dual Engine, but also better than Toyota Dual Engine in power. Chinese brand car companies are even more eight immortals across the sea, the major first-line car companies are poised to go on the basis of stabilizing the basic disk, and BYD, which is running in front, has reaped rich market returns.

At present, the more famous hybrid technologies in China are BYD DM-i Super Hybrid, Great Wall Motor Lemon Hybrid DHT, Chery Automobile Kunpeng DHT, Changan Automobile Blue Whale iDD, Geely Automobile Leishen Zhiqing Hi· X and so on, it seems that Some market ambitions of Chinese car companies are developing their own hybrid technology, otherwise they are embarrassed to say hello to people when they go out.

Judging from the trend of new energy vehicle data released by the China Automobile Association, the cumulative sales of plug-in hybrid vehicles in 2021 will be 600,000 units, surpassing pure electric vehicles with a year-on-year increase of 121.6%.

In this way, the hybrid market has suddenly become a new outlet for Chinese brands. Only in March this year, self-owned brand hybrid models have been launched: Mocha DHT-PHEV, Changan UNI-K iDD, BYD Song MAX DM-i, BYD Destroyer 05 and other new models. According to the data of the Association, from 2018 to 2020, the sales of plug-in hybrid models in the mainland have remained at about 250,000 vehicles, and in 2021, the sales of plug-in hybrid models have jumped by more than 500,000 vehicles, of which the increase mainly comes from BYD and Ideal.

In terms of range extended hybrid vehicles, the explosive ideal ONE has made a demonstration, followed by Lantu FREE and AITO Q&I M5, I believe other car companies will also consider using range extender models to improve their own product lines.

Just as the development of smart phones cannot be bypassed by Apple, the development of domestic hybrid technology cannot be bypassed by BYD DM-i, in the hybrid market in 2021, BYD accounts for nearly half, and its DM-i hybrid series has accumulated sales of 272,000 new cars. In January 2022, BYD DM-i model sales reached 46,000 units, up 7.6% year-on-year, and DM-i models sold 44,300 units in February, accounting for two-thirds of total plug-in hybrid retail sales (66,000 units) in February. BYD also surpassed SAIC Volkswagen and SAIC-GM to win the runner-up in single-month sales, and for the first time stood in the championship position of the top three independent.

For a PHEV vehicle, the fuel consumption of 100 kilometers when not charging is 3.8L, and the acceleration of 100 kilometers is only 7.3 seconds, and at this power fuel consumption level, the BYD DM-i hybrid system that can currently reach this level is the first echelon level of the entire market.

The reason for the hot sales of hybrid vehicles, in addition to the people-friendly pricing at the same price as fuel vehicles, is also inseparable from "no electric vehicle charging and range anxiety, but like electric vehicles, more economical car costs and the driving texture of the motor." "You know, with the current soaring oil prices, after entering the era of 9 to 10 yuan, domestic consumers are gradually improving their conservative attitude towards new energy vehicles."

Therefore, thanks to the hot sales market of the new energy vehicle market, in 2022, when a number of Chinese brand hybrid vehicles usher in the listing, the hybrid vehicle market is also widely regarded as an important engine for the new energy vehicle market to usher in a breakthrough.

02How to balance technology and cost?

Now Chinese brand traditional car companies want to slowly achieve full coverage of their own fuel vehicle products through hybrid technology, on the other hand, they also want to use self-developed hybrid technology to achieve a breakthrough in brand upwards, so hybrid is put on a higher strategic significance by them.

Analysis from the Federation of Automobile Manufacturers shows that Chinese car companies should adopt a "low-cost high-end" strategy in the development of plug-in hybrid technology, on the one hand, to control costs, on the other hand, not to take a simple high-end strategy. The analysis report pointed out that the fuel vehicles of the joint venture brand are facing the problems of high fuel consumption and low standards, and electric vehicles are difficult to meet the mainstream demand, so the low-cost strategy of independent insertion and mixing can effectively promote the transfer of joint venture fuel vehicles to new energy vehicles.

At the same time, due to the obvious intelligent trend of high-end B-class vehicles, the intelligent process of plug-in hybrid models is relatively slow, it is difficult to compete with Tesla, Weilai, Xiaopeng, etc., so the most important thing in hybrid is to achieve a breakthrough in A-class vehicles first, and pragmatically do a good job of replacing joint venture fuel vehicles with independent plug-in hybrids, which is the top priority.

Of course, for Chinese brands that invest in research and development energy and gradually grasp the advantages in the industrial chain, the full penetration of market segmentation with the help of hybrid has begun. Judging from the performance of the number one player BYD's hybrid models last year, it has technical patents, which have core advantages in the industrial chain and have certain cost control capabilities, which is also the reason why BYD has been able to roll out hybrids in its entire series of models. At the same time, BYD's development in the new energy market is also the sales of its hybrid technology driving the improvement of influence.

In last year's hybrid model price, consumers generally recognized that the most cost-effective is the BYD DM-i model, the first model equipped with BYD DM-i system Qin Plus, when listed in March 2021, the price is only 10.78-14.78 million (this year by the impact of raw materials has risen by 4,000 yuan), the starting price is even cheaper than the Japanese car Liangtian oil-electric hybrid is much cheaper, in addition to enjoying the green card policy. This has led to a shortage of supply now, and many consumers have to wait at least half a year to mention the car after paying the deposit.

So how does BYD control costs to the extreme? Some time ago, an automotive technology practitioner shared a "survey minutes on BYD's cost control", from which some problems can be explained.

According to its introduction, when BYD designed the DM-i power program, one of the core principles was cost control. The engineering team replaced the clutch motor with an oil-cooled motor, which improved efficiency and brought considerable cost reduction indicators. The previous 55kW motor can now be calibrated to 70kW, and the oil-cooled motor manufacturing process is relatively less complicated, the material cost is also intersecting a lot, and the cost of the clutch can be compressed to 200 yuan.

In terms of production costs, BYD does not pursue automated production lines, in addition to motor automation outside the finish line, gearboxes are semi-automated, bringing considerable cost reduction space. For example, the joint venture car company spent 20 to 30 million yuan to establish an automated production line, BYD production line was only 2 or 3 million yuan, and the manual line cost only 300,000 yuan, and the quality was guaranteed by manual re-inspection.

However, this production method also leads to its low production capacity, so there is a situation that everyone has to wait for about half a year to buy a car. After the initial foreign evaluation, it was believed that it could not compete with BYD and wanted to acquire BYD's motor and electronic control factories, but it was unsuccessful, and foreign countries believed that BYD's cost compression was too fierce.

Foreign experience is to earn excess profits first, and then compress the cost evenly through the expansion of production and sales. BYD directly cuts all profits, retains the company's final profit base point, and sells it at a "cabbage price", which the foreign evaluation team thinks is incredible.

But BYD this way is a double-edged sword, in the case of good sales, the cost can be internally compressed and controlled, once the sales are not good, then all the backlog inventory, equipment depreciation risk, all borne by themselves. BYD chose the former, which can be understood in two ways, one is that BYD, which has been hindered in the development of the fuel vehicle era, has broken the boat and is in new energy; the other is that BYD has enough confidence in its own blade battery and DMi technology. Either way, in terms of results, BYD is the right bet.

On the issue of cost competition, the future is the era of competition for hybrid vehicles, if other similar enterprises, can not reach the level of 10,000 yuan per set of BYD DM-i power, such as BYD's 65kW drive motor, if other manufacturers can not do BYD's cost, they will not have any advantage.

At present, the competition of domestic mainstream car companies is the competition of core technology and cost control ability, and now the Great Wall has also produced DHT hybrid, but at present, BYD is still at the forefront in the field of hybrid. If you want to participate in hybrid technology, you need to have the sum of all the technologies of motors, electronic controls, and gearboxes, and control costs and profits to be spread to a very thin situation to compete with them, these high cost barriers are a challenge for any company.

It is the above multiple reasons that cause BYD to form a "dimensionality reduction blow" on the current hybrid models in terms of technology and cost after years of technical accumulation. According to the current market environment, the difficulty of finding a car after the by-device DM-i model is listed has been regarded by many consumers as the "terminator" of japanese oil-electric hybrids.

Therefore, it is not so much how strong the technology of BYD DMi is, but rather that the key to the success of BYD DMi lies in cost control, which is exactly what other car companies can not hope for.

03 New energy reform has become a market vane

From the second half of 2021, the proportion of intelligent technology in the publicity of car companies has become smaller and smaller, replaced by energy-related utilization.

In the field of domestic new energy automobile enterprises, three camps have now been formed: joint venture brand car companies, Chinese brand traditional car companies, and new forces of Chinese car manufacturing. First-class car companies play energy, second-rate car companies play technology, Chinese brand car companies have realized that can play to energy in order to occupy a place in the market, whether it is fast charging, power exchange, hybrid or thousand mile endurance, are technological breakthroughs for energy, which is a ten-year grinding of a sword, and only rely on simple intelligent stacking, and can not play a differentiation in the increasingly involuted automobile market.

As more and more Chinese brand car companies focus on energy utilization, we can divide car companies into three lines in the field of energy:

The first is in the energy replenishment, at present, some domestic car companies have laid out 800V high-voltage super fast charging, because now under the mainstream 400V voltage, the charging power can reach up to 100kW, and the charging time of 30%-80% takes 30 minutes. Under the 800V high voltage, the charging power can reach 300-500kW, and 30%-80% of the charging can be completed in 6-10 minutes. This technology may become the mainstream of high-end electric vehicles in the future, but in terms of cost, it is unlikely that it will become the standard for electric vehicles now.

According to the planning of various car companies, the 800V high-voltage platform that will be released or delivered in 2022 includes Salon Mechalong, Xiaopeng G9, BYD ocean-X, GAC Aean, Lantu Automobile and other car companies or new models, which can be charged for 10 minutes and 400KM, and in 2022, the models with 800V high-voltage fast charging technology on the market will not be less than 10 models.

The second line is in the battery life, the domestic car companies continue to roll in the thousands of miles. Deliveries of NIO's first sedan, the ET7, have already begun, but models with 150kWh battery capacity may not be unveiled until the end of the year, when the mileage will exceed 1,000 kilometers. The ET5 released later also has a version with a range of more than 1000 kilometers. The GAC Aean LX PLUS is their first 1,000 km endurance mass production model, with a battery capacity of 144.4 kWh and a cruising range of 1,008 km.

In addition, the Zhiji L7, which will be delivered in 2022, will also have a version with a range of more than 1,000 kilometers. BYD's planned ocean-X model also has an endurance of more than 1,000 kilometers. With the improvement of the level of battery technology, more thousand mile-endurance models will be released in the future. Even if it is a high-speed 20% discount shrinkage rate, the model with a thousand mile endurance can run seven or eight hundred kilometers. Its single-shot endurance has exceeded that of most fuel vehicles, and it can fully meet the needs for urban transportation.

The third line is in the energy power, whether it is DHT, EV or PHEV, essentially just a different understanding of the use of energy power, how the motor and the engine are scheduled, at which stage to use pure electric mode, beyond which threshold to use the engine direct drive, are the need for car companies to continue to test and test.

The above three lines are the main direction of the future of many car companies, and are related to the ability to power, from this trend point of view, the current stage of new energy vehicle companies, has silently put energy utilization in the first place, followed by intelligence, only in this way can they maximize the advantages of their own breakthrough.

This is also one of the reasons why on the track of new energy vehicles, traditional car companies have slowly caught up with new forces, and even greatly exceeded the new forces. Intelligence is a stumbling block for traditional Chinese brand car companies to turn to the field of new energy, but when it comes to energy power technology or market experience, compared with the new forces of car manufacturing, there are still innate advantages, the essence of electric vehicles is still inseparable from the basic logic of the car, but the determinants of the core indicators from the original engine, chassis and gearbox These three major pieces, into the motor, battery and electronic control of these three electric technologies, so they still have the confidence of technical foundation!

Weipai Li Ruifeng believes: "The main difference between the new car-making forces and traditional car companies is the lack of these core technology reserves, and the intelligent DHT hybrid technology is too difficult for them. Therefore, the new forces must find a track of their own, there is not enough technical reserves, if you start with zero technology, you need to start from the field of pure electric technology. ”

Great Wall Motor Lemon Hybrid DHT 1.5T+DHT130 powertrain

In other words, the new forces are indeed better than traditional car companies in terms of intelligence, but in the core technology reserves of energy power, the new forces have not run out of their own tracks. However, fortunately, the new forces have realized this problem, and the 800V high-voltage fast charging and thousand-mile endurance mentioned earlier are the next direction of the new forces.

Whether to play smart first, or play energy first, after the oil price and battery raw materials have both risen, I believe that car companies already have the answer in their hearts.

04 Wisdom and action

2022 is considered to be the first year of the popularization of plug-and-mix.

Since the birth of the hybrid system, energy saving and fuel saving, no endurance worries have always been its biggest advantages. Today, with the impact of soaring oil prices and collective price increases of electric vehicles, the arrival of Chinese brand hybrid technologies such as BYD DM-i, Changan Blue Whale iDD, Weipai Mocha DHT-PHEV, and Xingtu Wind Chasing ET-i has not only integrated "energy saving and performance", but also raised the ceiling of hybrid technology in one fell swoop. It is foreseeable that with the hybrid technology of independent brands gradually being equipped with the matrix of their respective family products, the pattern of the new energy vehicle market may open a new prelude.

In the next few years, as more and more Chinese brand car companies invest in the research and development of plug-in technology and models, "plug-and-mix" will become a new track for Chinese car companies to achieve curve overtaking. We have reason to believe that with the launch of a large number of new models and the rapid growth of the market, it is just around the corner to break the situation of "two fields dominating" in the Japanese system and walk out of the "plug-and-mix" road belonging to the Chinese.