Written | Cold Zelin
Edit the | Wang Pan
On NIO Day 2017, Li Xiang drove the NIO ES8 as the owner of the No. 82 car and the founding investor, and stepped on the stage of the conference that year. Li wanted to spend nearly ten minutes counting the advantages of the ES8.
Coming and going without being rude, a year later, at the ideal ONE press conference, Li Bin took Qin Lihong to sit under the stage and silently followed Li Xiang.
As another Xiaopeng automobile as the head force, it also often participates in such interactions, or Li Bin's auto show platform Xiaopeng, or Li wants to call He Xiaopeng and Li Bin brothers and brothers.
Of course, being on the same track is always inevitable to have some friction, and Weilai and Ideal have a higher degree of overlap with users who are more similar in models and price points than Xiaopeng, and "friction" is also the most frequent in the past few years.
There was an embarrassing scene at the ideal press conference in 2018, when Li wanted to talk about the retention rate of trams: "In a few years, second-hand trams with an endurance of two or three hundred kilometers will exist like chicken ribs." ”
Completely disregarded Li Bin and Qin Lihong under the stage, because at that time, the NEPADC battery life of the WEILAI ES8 was only 355km.
After that, from the "No. 38 car critic" incident, Weilai executive Shen Fei's decline in the increase in distance, to Li wanting to criticize pure electricity, to various intentional or unintentional acts of hiding each other's models in the ranking, in the face of the company's interests, the two also had to put down their former "friendship".
Ideal's crash results released last year were missing EC6s with better results in the same batch
Some time ago, the ideal fell into the "Chengfopo" incident, not only Lan Tu posted a map saying that "Chengfopo has lived together", Weilai also consumed a wave of former comrades-in-arms, posted on the public account, "Don't you just climb a slope?" ”
Weilai and the ideal are like the border junction between the big powers, and from time to time there will be some disputes and pushes. But as long as it does not touch the core interests, it is often big things that are small and small things, and maintain a good relationship on the surface.
However, the relationship between these three families may be completely put on the surface this year.
In the previous article, we believe that this year is a more important year for most new forces, and we need to grab as much market share as possible before the subsidy policy is terminated, the transformation of traditional car companies and the Internet enters the market, laying a solid foundation for the subsequent comprehensive marketization.
This is especially true for NIO, the after-effects of the 2019 funding crisis affected its research and development and product planning for the next two years, resulting in the postponement of NIO ET7 and software updates. Therefore, this year should have been a year for Weilai to catch up with sales after making up classes.
In addition, we have also seen that the low-end market where the waist forces are located has begun to gradually increase, while the high-end market is becoming increasingly crowded, from traditional car companies to new forces to Internet technology companies, all of which have planted seeds in this market.
Wei Xiaoli's path walked together, but his heart was gradually drifting away.
Models of war
Before 2022, Wei Xiaoli has a feeling of "pity for each other" in pricing and model selection.
Xiaopeng is mostly 150,000-250,000 yuan, Weilai is between 350,000 and 550,000 yuan, and the ideal is that the whole system is 328,000 yuan and 338,000 yuan, each occupying the mountain in the field of cars, SUVs, pure electricity, and extended range, but this year this balance is about to be completely broken.
Xiaopeng will release its first medium-sized SUV in June, although the price has not been disclosed, but in its official launch activities, most car owners chose 290,000-390,000 yuan, and this price point and Weilai's current sales of ES6, EC6 has a high degree of overlap.
Among the vehicles delivered by WEIO in the fourth quarter, the EC6 and ES6 models accounted for about 77% of the total delivery, which is a veritable main model.
In addition to Xiaopeng, Ideal Auto has also begun to launch an "attack" on Weilai to explore the price range of its own brand.
Since last month, Ideal has planned a series of L9 warm-up activities, although due to force majeure, the original april 16 conference was postponed, but it still released a lot of information in the "spoiler" activities for many consecutive days.
Ideal L9 according to different configuration price range tentatively set at 450,000-500,000 yuan, this pricing model is different from the previous system-wide price, which means that ideal abandoned the "hard plug" strategy and chose to learn from Weilai to give users more choices.
Similarly, as a 450,000-500,000 yuan 6-seat SUV, the ideal L9 overlaps with the NIO ES8 in pricing and models. In today's car is becoming more and more like a mobile phone, buying new or not buying old is the idea of most people, and the decline in Weilai's sales last year also proves that the market competitiveness of these three models is weakening with the listing of more new cars.
In fact, although the new energy trend has been blowing for several years, the 400,000-500,000 new energy medium and large SUVs on the market are still almost in the blank stage, except for the Audi Q5 e-tron listed in February this year, only the higher price of the HiPhi X. It can be said that the previous ES8 was fighting with the "air", and the performance of the ES8 after joining L9 may be affected a lot.
After all, who would say no to a car that can connect to a Switch?
Source: Ideal Car official public number
Of course, in addition to the product, Weilai's service has also been regarded as one of the competitiveness of the outside world, its power exchange mode has been recognized by many users, and the second-generation replacement power station launched last year will shorten the energy replenishment time to 3 minutes, and the experience even exceeds refueling.
However, at present, this advantage is gradually weakening, and Xiaopeng and the ideal new car have also given their own solutions.
The ideal L9 still uses a range extender, but it has improved its endurance compared to the ideal ONE, the battery pack has been expanded from 40.5kWh to 44.5kWh, the fuel tank has also been expanded from 55L to 65L, and the comprehensive endurance has reached 1315km. On the previous most criticized range extender, this time it was changed to a 1.5T four-cylinder range extender to reassure users.
At the same time, the ideal 800V high-voltage pure electric platform whale and shark will also be launched before 2025, it is not difficult to see that the ideal choice is to increase the range, fast charging two-legged walking, which is also consistent with the previous thinking of Li Thought: "Before the fast charging technology matures, pure electric models will not be launched." ”
The answer given by Xiaopeng G9 is the 800V high-voltage SIC platform and 480kW high-power charging pile, and the official data charging 5 minutes endurance of 200 kilometers.
In contrast, perhaps due to a certain conflict between power exchange and fast charging, Weilai is not particularly keen on high-voltage fast charging, and has not exploded more information in this field.
Although each model is moving towards integration, but in the details of the direction such as endurance and refueling has given different answers, the current Weilai power exchange mode in solving the problem of battery update and attenuation still has advantages. At the same time, according to the statistics of Guosheng Securities, the current layout scale of Weilai in the replenishment system is far more than the other two.
Of course, Weilai is not blind to the ideal and Xiaopeng's "standing pile output".
Li Bin himself has repeatedly revealed his optimism about the NT2.0 platform, and the three models newly sold by Weilai this year are based on the second-generation platform. Among them, the ET5 will start at 258,000 yuan after adopting the BaaS solution, which will form direct competition with Xiaopeng's current main model P7.
The new energy vehicle of 200,000 yuan has a lower entry threshold and a broader audience, and Xiaopeng P7, Tesla Model 3, and BYD Han have all gained a lot of voice in this range.
According to the latest WeChat index of Garage 42, 3 of the top five new energy vehicles are in this range. Et5 will most likely play this role in Nio's product planning.
On the other hand, Weilai Automobile's mass-market brand has entered the key product research and development stage, and Li Bin's days from Hefei to Changzhou and Zhaoqing are not far away.
At that time, will it be Xiao Peng, the ideal chess player who is high, or the Weilai who plays high and low?
War of personnel
If the competition of models is not obvious enough for the time being, then the competition of personnel has completely torn apart the superficial relationship between Wei Xiaoli and Wei Xiaoli.
In March this year, Huang Xin, former director of Xiaopeng autonomous driving products, joined NIO as vice president and reported directly to Li Bin. It is reported that during Huang Xin's tenure in Xiaopeng, he promoted the landing of Xiaopeng NGP and memory parking projects.
The flow of people is not unusual, but the executives began to "circulate internally" in Wei Xiaoli's three homes, and Huang Xin should have created a precedent. This also shows that traditional car companies and the Internet can no longer provide talents who meet the requirements of new cars, especially in autonomous driving, algorithms and other aspects.
In fact, since 2020, new car manufacturers have begun to return to the phenomenon, and many Wei Xiaoli executives have chosen to flee from new cars and return to traditional car companies.
For example, Zhu Jiang, the former vice president of Weilai, who was responsible for user development, went to Ford China after leaving in 2020, and Zhao Yuhui, the former vice president of Weilai Users, also joined Great Wall Motors during the same period as the general manager of the user center of The Great Wall Sales Company; Zheng Xiancong, executive vice president of Weilai, joined Foxconn as ceo of the electric vehicle platform at the beginning of last year after "retiring" from Weilai in 2019.
This is also related to the sense of crisis of traditional car companies, some companies have begun to increase wages, equity incentives and other ways to prevent the further loss of talent.
An engineer from a traditional car company once told Photon Planet that he jumped to Lantu in early 2021, and then many former colleagues also began to jump ship, in order to prevent further loss of talent, the old owner opened a new round of salary increases, and the general wage increase was 20%-30%.
Not only salary increases, but also the independent brands of some traditional car companies have also taken out part of their equity to incentivize employees.
In the mixed reform in March this year, GAC Aeon broke the news that through a non-public agreement to increase capital, 679 employees of GAC Aeon and 115 scientific and technological personnel of the GAC Research Institute were implemented equity incentives, and the relevant incentive personnel contributed a total of 1.781 billion yuan.
It is not only to stimulate the entrepreneurial vitality of employees and avoid falling behind under the impact of new forces, but also to bind talents to enterprises.
On the other hand, in terms of organization and culture, traditional OEMs are also gradually aligning themselves with new cars, and great wall has issued a "de-generalization" proposal in the organizational structure adjustment in 2020; Dongfeng Lantu requires it to be called "teacher" within the company. This time, the total is to eliminate the gap between the superior and subordinate levels, in order to accelerate the flow of information within the enterprise.
In addition, the entry of Internet technology companies has also accelerated the phenomenon of "talent return", if there is a doubt about whether traditional car companies can eliminate the ills that have been precipitated for many years through reform, then the entry of Internet companies gives talents more choices.
Zhu Jiang, who had just completed a year of joining Ford China, once again served as vice president and head of user development and operations of Jidu Automobile; Guo Yandong, chief scientist of Xiaopeng Automobile, and vision experts Tao Xunqiang and Feng Tianpeng switched to OPPO last year.
In addition to job hopping, there are also many executives who choose to start their own businesses after polishing new cars
An automotive wiring harness industry entrepreneur told Photon Planet that the supply chain of the automotive industry is lengthy, and many links are still in the hands of foreign capital, in his view, the emergence of new energy vehicles subverts not only consumer cognition, but also an opportunity for domestic supply chains.
Taking the wiring harness as an example, many traditional luxury brand models have just been off the production line, and the wiring harness is often prone to problems during commissioning, and after a period of use of the vehicle, the aging of the wiring harness will lead to some functional failures.
Especially for the new energy models that generally emphasize intelligence, the use of wiring harnesses is far more than that of traditional models, and there is more demand for high-voltage and high-speed wiring harnesses, when new demand arises, traditional foreign suppliers fail to keep up, that is the opportunity for domestic supply chains to compete for market share.
Similarly, Zhang Jianyong, assistant vice president of autonomous driving who recently left WEILAI, will also invest in a chip entrepreneurship project, while Huang Chendong, former senior vice president who was in charge of Weilai's power engineering team, founded Qianchen Automobile after leaving.
Huang Xin joining Weilai is only the beginning of the Wei Xiaoli talent war, and it will become more and more difficult for new cars to dig up suitable talents from traditional car companies and the Internet industry in the future, and the "internal circulation" of talents may become the norm for new car manufacturers.
epilogue
It is not difficult to see that at the moment when traditional OEMs and Internet car companies are laying out, new car manufacturers also feel a little crisis. New cars are no longer simply competing with fuel vehicles.
The competition between new cars and new cars, between new cars and traditional car companies, and between new cars and Internet companies will become more and more intense.
When Xiaopeng Automobile returned to Hong Kong last year for a double listing, He Xiaopeng told Photon Planet, "Today every family is stockpiling grain and grass, and industry competition has entered the Warring States era from the Spring and Autumn Period." ”
The picture on the left is around 2020, and the picture on the right is around 2022
In the past few years, PPT has been making cars around, and there is a picture printed with the logos of dozens of car companies on the Internet, and after experiencing the new energy winter of 2019-2020, one car logo after another has been crossed out.
However, on the one hand, some car companies fell, and on the other hand, new icons jumped on the paper, and it seemed that they just exchanged the new peach for the old charm.
Perhaps the charge of total war has been sounded, so will a new round of shuffling be far away?