As a new brand, the product characteristics presented by its first car will determine the future direction of the brand to a certain extent. So, what should a luxury electric car look like? Whether it's smart, designed and eco-friendly, or power, handling and performance, Chi Ji is trying to give its own unique answer.
"What we really want to challenge is the performance standards of power and handling that the fuel car has spent 135 years to establish, which seem to be unbreakable and seemingly unchallengable," Liu Tao, co-CEO of Zhiji Automobile, opened at the conference of the Zhiji L7 challenge to the Guinness Book of World Records for "Longest Electric Drift".
On April 17, Zhiji Automobile released another of its products: Zhiji L7 Dynamic, priced at 368,800 yuan, in the form of challenging the Guinness Book of World Guinness Record for the longest drift distance of electric vehicles.
In the challenge of the day, the Zhiji L7 set a new Guinness World Record for the longest drift distance for electric vehicles with a continuous drift of 1 hour and 6 minutes, 258 laps, and 43.646 kilometers. The previous record was set by porsche Taycan in August 2020 at the Porsche Experience Centre (PEC) in Hockenheim, Germany, with a distance of 42.171 km.
As the first independent luxury brand under the largest automobile enterprise group in China, Zhiji Automobile has attracted wide market attention since the day it was born. Can state-owned enterprises do a good job of their own brands? Can state-owned enterprises do a good job in electric vehicles? What will happen to its first car? Without a private entrepreneur like Li Shufu, Wang Chuanfu, Li Bin, He Xiaopeng, li xiang, what kind of car brand will Zhiji become? Since state-owned enterprise groups have not had successful cases in the field of luxury electric vehicles so far, people are full of questions about how Zhiji Automobile will play.
"Now the industry and users think so, all electric vehicles are promoting environmental protection, intelligence, design and other aspects of the content," Liu Tao said, "but in fact, in my opinion, a real luxury electric vehicle, its real bottom card, the bottom of luxury value, these alone are not enough." We observe in turn that brands like BBA and Porsche, which have been unbreakable luxury brands for more than a hundred years, have been an unbreakable luxury brand, and one of the fundamental reasons is that they have not given up the ultimate pursuit of power and control."
This is not the first time that a car has emphasized power and handling. All along, the Zhiji L7 emphasizes that its benchmark model is BMW's 530Li.
"In essence, the performance of electric vehicles on fuel vehicles is a dimensionality reduction blow. The overall mechanical thermal efficiency that the internal combustion engine can achieve is about 43%. The mechanical efficiency output of an electric vehicle can easily reach more than 90%," Liu Tao said at the press conference: "Let's take the power of the B brand 530Li, we make a comparison, 2.0T high-power version, can provide 185 million, 350 Nm power output." But on the Zhiji L7, we can easily provide a powerful power output of 425 kilowatts and 725 Nm, which is twice the power of the B brand car."
From the perspective of power output, the Zhiji L7 is far better than the BMW 530Li. Not only the power, compared to the fuel car, the advantages of electric vehicles in the chassis are also obvious. "Because the power of the electric vehicle is too powerful, if the structure, stiffness, control, suspension, etc. of the vehicle cannot keep up, it is simply impossible to really play the majestic power of the electric vehicle", Liu Tao said: "Zhiji L7 relies on the native advantages of the exclusive high-end pure electric architecture, the battery is centered, the dual motors are symmetrical before and after, so that the body posture is perfectly balanced, reaching the real 50:50 shaft-to-load ratio, and this is the perfect premise of super super control."
For another example, zhiji L7 is the industry's first mass-produced horizontal battery cell solution, with ultra-thin size to achieve an ultra-low center of gravity of 490mm, which is lower than the same level of luxury fuel vehicles; this effectively inhibits the roll in the high-speed driving of the vehicle, so that the anti-roll coefficient of zhiji L7 has reached a higher level.
In the chassis tuning, Zhiji cooperated with the williams forward-looking engineering team, the top team of global automotive performance tuning, and after a year, carried out two rounds of careful testing and adjustment of 108 chassis indicators and software parameters at the Millbrook Proving Ground in the United Kingdom.
That is to say, the Zhiji L7, which also adopts the master chassis tuning, can easily defeat the traditional fuel vehicle by virtue of the natural advantages of electric vehicles. This is also the core of the Zhiji L7 always regards the BMW 5 Series as the bidding object.
So, just by beating the BBA brand in performance, can it be called a luxury brand in China? Will consumers really pay for it? In the traditional internal combustion engine market, China has not yet had a successful case. But in the electric vehicle market, it is a different story.
In the domestic market, as the only high-end luxury electric brand that has been successful at present, WEI AUTO high-profile declares that it hopes to "have one of the three points of the world with BBA" in the future. Ideal Cars, which was also a success, announced that the largest group of users who bought the Ideal ONE was BBA owners. In addition, Ideal also announced at the end of 2021 that as a medium-sized SUV, Ideal ONE's sales exceeded the sales of many medium- and large-sized SUVs and electric vehicles under the Volkswagen Group combined. Another domestic brand Gaohe Automobile, which announced a focus on luxury, will release a list every month: a list of luxury pure electric vehicles of more than 500,000 yuan. According to the data, as of March 2022, Gaohe Automobile has won the top of the list for four consecutive months, ranking behind it, in addition to the Hongqi E-HS9, including Mercedes-Benz EQC, Porsche Taycan and so on.
That is to say, the process of china's automobile industry collective "brand up" has achieved certain results. Zhiji brand cut into the luxury electric vehicle market at this time, and it is indeed prepared.
Write at the end:
The zhiji brand's practice of first releasing high-end models is not alone. Brands such as Tesla and Weilai Automobile have adopted the same strategy in their initial stages. The success of Tesla and NIO is obvious, and whether Zhiji Automobile can succeed has yet to be verified. But it is gratifying that the emergence of Zhiji Automobile has made Chinese brands one more challenger in the field of pure electric luxury.