Source of the head picture: "Embroidered Spring Knife" stills
A campaign to "besiege" Tesla was fought violently.
On April 12, Honda came off with a high profile and prepared nearly twice the R& D investment of Tesla to join the battle. However, the "ammunition" of traditional giants is more than this, before that, Volkswagen, Toyota, Ford, General Motors and other traditional giants have long been fully prepared.
Volkswagen plans to invest 89 billion euros in electric mobility and digitalization over five years; Toyota has prepared 4 trillion yen for pure electric vehicles, including batteries; Ford plans to invest more than $50 billion globally from 2022 to 2026; and General Motors will increase spending on electrification and smart driving to $35 billion by 2025.
The Stellantis Group plans to invest more than €30 billion in the Group's electrification and software development by the end of 2025. At the same time, BMW will spend 30 billion euros on electric mobility and digitalization by 2025, and Mercedes-Benz will invest more than 40 billion euros in pure electric models from 2022 to 2030.
The converted exchange rate is based on the date of writing
Watching Tesla's brutal growth, these giants can't sit still. Most importantly, in addition to Tesla, which has formed a certain scale and has a first-mover advantage in the electric vehicle market, there are also a number of latecomers such as Weilai, Xiaopeng, and Ideal.
The traditional giants have watched as "Teslas" have eroded the market that once belonged to them little by little. In 2021, a total of 6.5014 million new energy vehicles were registered and sold globally, with a penetration rate of 10.2%. Among them, Tesla alone occupies 14% of the market share.
In the face of the arrival of the mighty trend of electrification. Traditional car companies can no longer sit still, and easily give up the land that has been painstakingly won in the era of fuel vehicles to Teslas. The counterattack has begun, and until then they need to constantly invest in "ammunition".
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The traditional giants have invested a lot
In 2021, Tesla once again won the global sales championship with nearly one million vehicles delivered, and accounted for 20.3% of the pure electric market. Against the backdrop, the traditional giants look a little bleak. The earlier Volkswagen sold 452,900 pure electric vehicles in 2021, accounting for less than 10%. GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, etc. are almost negligible.
In the eyes of many people in the industry, Tesla can achieve such excellent results, inseparable from its long-term sustained high research and development investment. Musk also publicly stated in 2019: "Tesla has spent about $20 billion on research and development in the past 10 years, which is an investment that traditional giants do not have." "Counting the R&D expenses in 2020 and 2021, Tesla's total R&D expenditure in the past 12 years is about $25 billion.
R&D and advertising expenditure of some automakers in 2020 (USD/per vehicle);
X-axis: cost (per car); Y-axis: manufacturer name;
Image source: StockApps.com
Recently, a report released by the stock trading information website StockApps.com showed that after comparing the research and development and advertising expenditure of all large automakers per vehicle, it was finally concluded that Tesla's research and development expenditure per car was $2984, which was three times the industry average (about $1,000) and even higher than the sum of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler.
However, there are two problems behind this conclusion. One is that the conclusion is based solely on 2020 data. Second, at that time, the research and development investment of other large automobile manufacturers was mainly based on fuel vehicles, and the technological maturity was higher than that of electric vehicles, and the cost would be lower. Coupled with the apportionment of sales scale, bicycle research and development expenditure will naturally be much lower. Auto analyst Zhang Lin (pseudonym) said.
Looking back at the "ammunition" prepared by traditional giants such as Volkswagen, Honda, and Toyota, it can be seen that it has far exceeded Tesla's research and development investment in the past 12 years. And they've invested a lot before that.
After the "Dieselgate" incident in 2015, Volkswagen began to pay attention to the field of electrification, and in the same year quickly proposed to invest 7 billion euros to develop the MEB modular pure electric platform. Today, despite the big gap with Tesla, the Volkswagen MEB platform has blossomed, and the ID. series models have stabilized at the level of more than 10,000 sales in a single month.
Honda Intelligent And Efficient Pure Electric Architecture "e:N Architecture"
In addition, Honda's intelligent and efficient pure electric architecture "e:N Architecture" and full-stack intelligent control ecosystem "e:N OS" will also be put on the market this year. The low-key Toyota also invested a lot of money in the early stage to develop the e-TNGA modular platform. GM's already released Ultium Aotene platform integrates GM's 26 years of electrification experience.
The scale of these upfront investments, we don't have valid statistics right now. But it can be expected that this should also be a large expense. Take the 70 euros invested by Volkswagen MEB, which is already equivalent to 3 times Tesla's research and development costs in 2021.
Obviously, these traditional giants are not stingy in their electrification investment. The difference is that Tesla came in earlier.
So since traditional car companies also have turning and preparation, why is there such a big gap with Tesla?
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How did the gap widen?
Reality lies ahead of the traditional giants. Tesla used $25 billion in research and development investment to create a capital "myth" with a trillion market value. Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess even praised Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the company he leads many times, "Tesla is a pioneer..." Even Toyota President Akio Toyoda, who rarely speaks out, can't help but criticize.
So the question is, what can Tesla achieve in the past 10 years, with a research and development cost of 25 billion US dollars, a market size of nearly one million vehicles?
"The early competition in the electric vehicle market was not very fierce, basically in a 'blue ocean'. Tesla started relatively early, and the industry threshold is relatively low. Although the R&D cost is low, it can efficiently translate R&D investment into technology, and then easily sell the car under the concept packaging. Zhang Xiang, automotive analyst and dean of the New Energy Vehicle Technology Research Institute of Jiangxi New Energy Technology Vocational College, said.
Meanwhile, when everyone focuses on Musk's identity as the richest man, he has a more important label — engineer. In February, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced a new list of academicians, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk were officially elected as members of the National Academy of Engineering.
Image from a screenshot of NAE
Musk himself describes himself as a "kind of crazy engineer." This has also led Tesla to invest all its money in research and development. Tesla is known not to spend any money on advertising. Under his leadership, in addition to three electric technology and automatic driving, Tesla has also developed many subversive technologies and products, such as Optimus humanoid robots and DOJO machine learning training systems.
"Tesla's investment in research and development funds, the efficiency of conversion into technology is still quite high." But the efficiency with which technology translates into product advantages can be further improved," says a veteran of electric vehicle research. "Traditional car companies are obviously unable to achieve this kind of efficiency at present, on the one hand, it may be the reason for the internal operation of the company, and the fuel vehicle will distract some of its energy in the short term."
Ideal Car founder Li Xiang once discussed this, claiming that "the cost and efficiency requirements for himself are almost perverted." In his view, every sum of money must be carefully calculated, both to know how to attack, but also to choose to give up, to spend money on the blade.
However, in the view of Zhu Xichan, a professor at the Automobile College of Tongji University, the financing ability of the new power brand is relatively strong, and it costs investors' money, so the gambling is stronger. But traditional car factories are different, they spend their own money, the pursuit of stability.
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How much does it cost to catch up with Tesla?
In 2020, Thomas Ulbrich, a board member in charge of Volkswagen's electric vehicle business, said that U.S. electric vehicle maker Tesla has been a full 10 years ahead of competitors in building electric cars and developing software.
However, for this 10-year gap, how can the traditional giants catch up? It's Volkswagen's 89 billion euros, Toyota's 4 trillion yen, or Honda's 5 trillion yen. I believe that no one can give a specific answer. But what is certain is that they will pay a lot more than teslas once did.
"The change in the direction of electrification means that these traditional car companies should start from scratch, and they will definitely need a lot of research and development investment, and it will not be lower than the original traditional car." Xu Haidong, deputy chief engineer of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, said to the car market monogatari, "Tesla's precedent is here, and if you want to achieve the same level as Tesla, the investment will definitely be higher than Tesla." In addition, smart electric vehicles are still in the stage of development, and new things need to be constantly out, and the investment will certainly increase in the future. ”
Professor Zhu Xichan of Tongji University also believes that the sooner you do it, the less money you spend. The more latecomers, the higher the cost, that's a certainty.
Tesla has now reached this scale, investing about $25 billion in real money and silver on research and development. If this data is used as a reference, if traditional car companies want to successfully achieve the sales target of 2 million or more vehicles in 2030, they need two or more US dollars of 25 billion US dollars.
Musk, who is not surprising, has also previously said that Tesla aims to produce up to 20 million electric vehicles per year by 2030. Domestic BYD also took the lead in announcing the suspension of fuel vehicles at the beginning of this month, focusing all its energy on the electrification sector. In the era of "the division of princes", the real money and silver that were smashed down would obviously not be as easy as before.
It is true that the starting line of traditional giants is not on the same line as Tesla. Tesla can be said to have grown up in the pioneering enlightenment stage of electric vehicles, and the traditional giants will face the "melee" stage after the enlightenment in the future. Objectively speaking, in this case, the investment in research and development will only be more than expected.
"Moreover, consumers who have experienced the enlightenment stage of electric vehicles, their cognition of electric vehicles is becoming more mature, and the requirements for products will be higher, which will force traditional car companies to further increase investment in research and development." Improve the conversion rate of technology and products, and finally achieve a high conversion rate of the market," said a marketing leader of a well-known domestic car company.
For the traditional giants, there may be only one way in front of them, that is, to smash out a piece of heaven and earth with heavy gold, and to exchange space for time.
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