Spontaneous combustion can not be fired, this car company can still save?

Produced by | Tiger sniff car group

Author | Wang Xiaoyu

Edit | attentive

Header image | Visual China

The new official took office three fires, and the Aiways car, which had just undergone a change of blood at the senior management level, caught fire.

On April 5, AIWAYS Auto official micro released an announcement about the Vehicle Accident in Chengdu: At 9:29 on April 5, 2022, AIWAYS AutoMotive System received a thermal runaway alarm message from an AIWAYS U5 during charging, and the vehicle location was Sansheng Township, Jinjiang District, Chengdu.

Embarrassingly, although the spontaneous combustion accident rushed into the hot search list on Weibo, Aichi's official micro was ignored, and it was not until 24 hours later that the first messager appeared: "Your car is really dangerous."

The current situation of the company is indeed very dangerous. According to public data, aiways' only model on sale, the AIWAYS U5, had a cumulative sales volume of 4684 units in China last year. In addition, AIWAYS exported 2,783 units overseas last year, adding up to less than 8,000 units.

Sales did not improve, but financing was not delayed.

Aichi, which just completed the last round of financing half a year ago, completed a new round of financing of hundreds of millions of dollars in January 2022, financed by Chen Xuanlin and his Dongbai Group. At the same time, the senior management of AIWAYS has also undergone a major change of blood, Chen Xuanlin became the chairman of AIWAYS Automobile, Zhang Yang, former vice president of Weilai Automobile, served as CEO, and founder Fu Qiang continued to serve as the president of AIWAYS Automobile. However, Gu Feng, the former co-founder and CEO of AIWAYS, did not appear in the latest management list.

The problem facing aiways' new senior management may not be as simple as dealing with spontaneous combustion accidents. At the same time, the crisis of Aichi is not unique, and there are not a few new car-making forces in the same situation as it.

Born ahead of one's time

"We think the biggest feature of AICHI is that it 'can be said and done'. We don't want to talk too much and too much when we're not fully prepared or when real materials can be shown to the public. As early as 2017, when he first appeared to the outside world, Fu Qiang set up an image of "building a car steadily" in front of the media.

Compared with the "Wei Xiaoli" that came out in the same period, AIWAYS is indeed a down-to-earth one, taking the consistent path of the traditional automotive industry - self-built factories and self-built sales channels. At that time, AIWAYS claimed to be "the only company with a channel first among the new car-making forces". It is undeniable that the early development process of Aichi was smoother than that of "Wei Xiaoli". This is inseparable from the strong shareholder background of Aichi in the early days.

On the official website, the founding time of Aiways Auto is shown as 2017, but its story began earlier in 2015.

In 2015, Foxconn, Tencent and Harmony Automobile cooperated to jointly establish a company, Harmony Futeng. Shortly thereafter, two electric vehicle manufacturing companies were incubated: Future Mobility and Car Company.

The former focuses on high-end electric vehicle brands, while the latter focuses on home-friendly electric vehicles. Future Mobility is the Byton who was later reported by CCTV to "burn 8.4 billion and spend tens of millions of snacks". And the car company is the predecessor of today's protagonist Aiways Automobile.

2018 is the most beautiful year for the vast majority of new car-making forces. At the Beijing Auto Show that year, Byton, Aichi, Singularity, The Future, and the Right Way all appeared. In order to attract more traffic, AIWAYS also invited Lin Zhiying, the "immortal male god", on the booth. But in the next two years, the new forces have entered the stage of mass production and delivery, with sales surviving, financing the continuation of life, and more are eliminated in the big wave.

Former AIWAYS CEO Gu Feng (left), Lin Zhiying, and Aiways Auto President Fu Qiang (right)

At the end of December 2019, AIWAYS' first model, the U5, was officially launched and started delivery worldwide at the same time.

Unlike other new car-making forces, AICHI's layout is faster abroad than at home. The company set up a German subsidiary in 2017, but the domestic factory was only built in 2018. Therefore, AIWAYS started to deploy sales channels overseas very early, and in 2019, it got the EU full model type certification, which means that AIWAYS can be registered in EU countries, which is earlier than Weilai and Xiaopeng.

In theory, this is a good start.

But U5 has just been listed, the epidemic has come, and the first step of Aichi's global layout has been tripped. Alexander Klose, executive vice president of AIWAYS overseas operations, said in an interview: "Since the outbreak of the epidemic, the world has changed. To support our goal of entering Europe in 2020, we had to move to a traditional distribution model in most markets. "The domestic market under the epidemic is more difficult.

Around the Spring Festival in 2020, this was originally a critical period for Aichi's production capacity climb, and it was also a key period for launching the first battle of product delivery. However, not only the offline sales channels have been frustrated, but factory production has also been implicated, and even wages have been temporarily suspended by the media for a period of time. That year, Cai Jianjun, who was in charge of marketing, also chose to resign as executive vice president of Aichi Automobile because of the impact of the epidemic.

In 2020, there were not a few new car-making forces that fell, including Aiways' "brother enterprise" Byton. But fortunately, Aichi relied on the accumulation of a large amount of funds in the early stage and survived. In 2021, AIWAYS received two more key financings to complete the "renewal" of the company. Among them, the C round was invested by Didi Chuxing, and then the NINGDE era participated in the strategic investment.

One is a giant in the field of travel, and the other is a giant in the field of power batteries, which shows that the strength behind Aichi is not simple.

Consumers don't recognize the goods?

In fact, Aichi is not useless, it has also worked hard.

For example, Aichi has tried to get a birth permit for his factory. In 2019, the joint venture company of Jiangling Group, Changan Automobile and AIWAYS Automobile, New Jiangling Holdings, was officially established. By participating in the "mixed reform", AIWAYS obtained production qualifications for its own car. But the price is that AIWAYS Auto increased its capital by Jiangling Holdings by 1.747 billion yuan. In contrast, the ideal acquisition of Lifan Automobile's qualification only cost 650 million yuan.

After nearly two years of investing in Jiangling Holdings, Aiways chose to withdraw in 2021. Aiways Automobile, a shareholder who originally held 50% of the equity of Jiangling Holdings, was changed to Jiangxi Guokong Automobile Investment Co., Ltd. In fact, the story of Aichi and Jiangling is indeed related to Jiangxi.

The early Jiangling Holdings was established as a joint venture between Changan Automobile and Jiangling Motors. The latter was developed from the Jiangxi Automobile Manufacturing Plant established in 1968, and later Jiangling Holdings launched a new brand of Landwind Automobile, which produced a "net red car" that "looks like a Land Rover and has a bmw" - Lufeng X7. Because of its design, it is very similar to the Land Rover Range Rover Evoque and was once a hit. Until being sued by Land Rover in 2016, Lufeng and Jiangling Holdings fell into a low ebb together.

At that time, the most valuable thing in Jiangling Holdings may be the car-making qualification, at that time, the most lacking thing about AIWAYS happened to be a car-making qualification, and more coincidentally, Aiways' factory was in Jiangxi, and the hometown saw the hometown, and the two tears were flowing. Although after a short period of cooperation, the two sides still chose to "break up", but the most scarce qualification problem was solved, and the Aichi factory also had a "quasi-birth certificate".

According to AIWAYS' official information, "AIWAYS Auto Super Smart Factory is located in shangrao Economic and Technological Development Zone, Jiangxi Province, and is a digital, intelligent and integrated twin factory built with Industry 4.0 standards." In addition, AIWAYS also claims to be: "the first super smart factory in China to truly realize the Industry 4.0 standard." ”

Interestingly, Huawei once looked at Aichi's factory. According to Caijing, before Choosing to cooperate with Xilis, Huawei had considered Aiways Automobile at that time, mainly focusing on the Industry 4.0 intelligent manufacturing production line built by Aiways with the help of Siemens, which can export its products to Germany without certification, so that it can gain more national recognition.

In the Aichi factory, the logos of Siemens and the Dürr Group of Germany are in sight. As early as November 2018, AIWAYS and Siemens announced the signing of a strategic cooperation, when the signing amount alone was as high as 30 million euros (about 200 million yuan). But this is only a small amount, in this factory, according to the plan of AIWAYS is a total investment of 13.3 billion yuan, the annual output of 300,000 pure electric vehicles.

For this factory, AICHI is enough to pay for it.

As a reference, Xiaopeng Automobile built its own factory in Zhaoqing City, Guangdong Province, with a total investment of 10 billion yuan in the first and second phases. According to the current progress, Xiaopeng's two-phase plant in Zhaoqing can reach an annual production capacity of 200,000 vehicles. Dongfeng Honda's new electric vehicle plant is also investing 10 billion yuan, with a planned production capacity of 256,000 vehicles.

It can be seen that Aichi has planned this factory as the scale of a mature car company from the beginning, which is not wrong. But the key is that the product can't stand up.

On aiways' official website, there are three models of U5, U6 and U7ion, and only one product is currently on sale, U5.

Judging from the official description, the AIWAYS U5 does not have a good grasp of the needs of mainstream electric vehicle consumers, and there are not enough product highlights. The first page introduces the battery life, charging and car costs, the second page introduces the sunroof, space, storage capacity, the third page is chassis tuning, then battery safety and active safety, and finally a few words of intelligent configuration.

The same thing is happening on the Aichi U6, the second model that Aichi will bring to market this year. Although it is positioned as a pure electric smart coupe SUV, it is more like a cheap version of the NIO EC6 from the configuration. The label of AIWAYS for this car is "big player · big toy", visual inspection is to be performance-oriented, but at present, there is no power, control of the parameter indicators, just in the design of the article.

Further after, the AIWAYS U7 ion, positioned as a "pure electric crossover model for family mobile life", is expected to be a pure electric MPV model, which is still in the stage of concept cars. Similarly, he mainly made a lot of articles on design, such as the design guidance of the U7 and U6 by Kiyoyuki Okuyama , the Ferrari sports car ENZO and ROSA are his design works.

In fact, from the very beginning of its establishment, AICHI has tried to create an image of an international big name.

In addition to asking Kiyoshi Okuyama to design the product, Aiways also invited Roland Gumpert to serve as the chief product officer of Aichi Automobile and the general manager of the German subsidiary Aiways Gongbo in the early days of the brand, Gumpert invented the Audi Quattro system and was also the founder of the Apollo Apollo supercar. After coming to AIWAYS, he built an electric sports car called RG Nathalie.

But it seems that foreign melons do not feel sweet in the eyes of the Chinese people. Since its launch, the monthly sales of the AIWAYS U5 have remained above 500 units from November 2020 to April 2021. But since June 2021, sales of the Aichi U5 have declined, and even in September and December 2021, sales were only double digits, and in February 2022, the Aiways U5 sold only 15 units.

The Xiaopeng G3 (priced at 168,900-203,900 yuan), a competitor model at the same price as the AIWAYS U5 (priced at 16.89-20.39 million yuan), delivered a total of 29,721 units in 2021 and 2,815 units in January-February this year, contributing about 30% of Xiaopeng Motors' sales. There is also the zero-run C11 (priced at 179,800-229,800 yuan), and even though deliveries of this car only started in October 2021, only 4,021 units were sold last year.

However, the Aiways U5, which bears the aura of many designers, can only be sent to run a ride-hailing car in the end. Aiways Auto launched its own mobile travel brand "Fengchi Travel", which was put into operation in Shangrao City, Jiangxi Province. In addition, AIWAYS is also cooperating with Quantum Mobility in the field of ride-hailing and car-sharing. And this time in Chengdu spontaneous combustion of Aichi U5, some netizens broke the news that this is an online car.

It can be said that the current Aichi car has stood on the edge of a dangerous cliff.

And who else is on the edge of the cliff

But the new forces on the edge of the cliff are not only the Aichi family.

The current situation of Tianji Automobile, founded by Zhang Hailiang, former general manager of SAIC Volkswagen and former CEO of LeTV Automobile, is also not optimistic. Founded for 7 years, Tianji has only sold two cars so far, the first car is the pure electric model Tianji M7, priced at 238,880-26.98 million yuan; the second car is the extended range of Tianji M5, priced at 149,900-15.99 million yuan. It wasn't until December last year that Skyline broke through the monthly sales figure of 1,000 units with the M5.

Shen Hui, a former director and vice president of Geely Holding Group, and WM Motors, which he founded, are also surrounded by danger. Today's WM is no longer the peak of the single-model sales in 2019, although it has launched four cars EX5, EX6 Plus, W6, and the upcoming M7, but last year WM only sold 44,000 cars, was squeezed into the second echelon.

The current dilemma faced by these three new car-making forces seems to be only an occasional event. But if you put the three together to analyze, you will find that they have a lot in common. First of all, the founders are all from traditional car companies.

Fu Qiang, the founder of Aiways Automobile, has served as an executive of FAW-Volkswagen and Beijing Benz, and has become the president and CEO of Volvo Cars (China) Sales Co., Ltd. Similar to Zhang Hailiang and Shen Hui, they retain the habits of the original traditional car companies in their way of doing things: like at the marketing level, they all like to invite big stars to attract traffic, WM asks Xiao Jingteng, Aichi invites Lin Zhiying; for example, in design, they like to throw money to ask for masters, AIWAYS invites Ferrari designers, and Tianji invites former Porsche designers.

The method of doing this is in stark contrast to "Wei Xiaoli". For "Wei Xiaoli", the brand image is more composed of the founder image, product reputation, and user portrait, which is also under Tesla. As we all know, Elon Musk never spends money on advertising, he is the brand image spokesperson, and the products and users constitute the overall market image of Tesla.

The problem behind this is that the decision-making level of Aichi, Weima and Tianji may still retain the original way of doing things in traditional car companies, and have not completely completed the role change from professional managers to entrepreneurs. If it is in the sub-brands of traditional car companies such as Extreme Kr and Extreme Fox, such an approach may still work, but as a startup, every penny spent may be related to the survival of the company.

Secondly, Aichi, Tianji, and Weima all invested heavily in building their own factories from the beginning.

Shen Hui was the first to shout out the slogan of "choose OEM, can't sleep", so WM as early as 2018 in Wenzhou's self-built factory, built a WM EX5 with its own name. However, unlike Weilai, to this day, the tail of the car is still printed with the tail logo of "Jianghuai Automobile". Similarly, Aiways Automobile and Skyrim Motors are the same, which were originally under the brand of Industry 4.0 and threw heavy money into self-built factories.

Skyline also has an appointment entrance for visiting the factory on its official website

Li Bin once talked about whether the new forces should build their own factories, he said: "We still focus on research and development, user service, and in manufacturing, we are focused on supply chain management, quality control, process innovation, in other aspects we cooperate with existing manufacturing companies." In Li Bin's view, in the early stage of entrepreneurship, let each new startup spend so much money to build a factory, let everyone do what they should not necessarily spend the most energy on, in fact, it is not necessarily right.

Wei Xiaoli's staged success is not how well the factory is built, but from the user value, it has created a "consumer-perceptible flashpoint". For example, Weilai's high-performance products and services, Xiaopeng is an advanced experience of intelligent driving, and the ideal is a precisely positioned product.

Of course, building your own factory is important, but it is not a key factor in the survival of a new force. Because what attracts consumers to pay is the product with explosive points, not an ultra-modern factory. Obviously, when new forces such as Aichi and Tianji bet on factories, they ignore the product explosion point to a certain extent, which is both laborious and unflattering in the end, and also causes resources to be unconcentrated.

Last but not least – there is no label to remember.

We often say that "Wei XiaoLi" has its own unique label, Weilai's service, Xiaopeng's intelligence, ideal products. In fact, including many second-tier new forces have also begun to gradually find their own labels, such as the zero-run car that is sprinting to the IPO of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, it has put forward the brand concept of "global self-research", through vertical integration to ensure the high cost performance of products, and label their products as "leapfrog experience". Another example is Nezha Automobile, after Zhou Hongyi's 360 shares, began to focus on the affordable route of "science and technology inclusive and building cars for the people".

On the other hand, Weima, Aichi, and Skyrim are all chasing the cusp of the storm. For example, the range extender electric vehicle market is hot, Andiline has launched the range extender model Skyline M5, selling the car at a price lower than half of the mainstream models in this segment; lidar is particularly hot, and the last car is still using WM, which is still using Baidu solutions, but it has installed three lidars on the new car; similarly, Aichi has long proposed to lay out hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, but in addition to the concept, we still don't see any possibility of landing.

For these new forces, in the early stage of entrepreneurship, the story of self-built factories is told to local governments, the story of master-level products is told to consumers in the middle stage, and the story of trends and outlets can only be told to capital in the later stage.

If no one wants to listen anymore, it may not be far from the edge of the cliff.