In Smart's 10th year in China, Smart launched a new brand proposition: "There is a kind of pride".
Mr. Ni Kai, President and CEO of Beijing Mercedes-Benz Sales & Service Co., Ltd. at that time, said, "As an urban pioneer travel brand, Smart has always led the urban travel trend with unimaginable, bold and avant-garde ideas, which is also the pride of the Smart brand. It can be said that every member of the Smart family is proud of Smart, proud of owning Smart, and this is 'there is a kind of pride, called Smart!' The true meaning of '. ”
Indeed, under the brand premium ability of Mercedes-Benz, Smart, a grocery shopping car, has been sold in China for more than 10 years in an imported way, making a lot of money Chinese, and the Smart brand is indeed worthy of Mercedes-Benz's pride. But under the pride, Smart was a big defeat in the global market, the North American market removed all fuel versions of Smart models, and then Smart directly withdrew from the US and Canadian markets.
In China, Mercedes-Benz's proud Smart sales are also declining year by year, and even reduced to shared cars, and in 2019, they withdrew from the Chinese market. Is this Samrt's pride?
In terms of brand revenue, Former Mercedes President Zetsche has also said that Smart loses 200 million euros every year. Is a brand that loses money year after year the pride of Daimler?
In 2019, Geely and Daimler conducted a share transaction and cooperation, purchased 50% of the shares of the Smart brand that made Daimler lose tens of billions of yuan, and the two sides jointly invested in the establishment of a joint venture in China to operate and develop the Smart brand, with the intention of building Smart into a pure electric vehicle brand.
On the evening of April 25, the pre-price of the first model of the Smart genie #1 of the Smart brand jointly operated and developed by Geely and Daimler was also announced, and the price after subsidies was 190,000-230,000 yuan, with a total of Pro+ and Premium models, and the faltering brand seemed to be about to be "reborn through electricity".
But the question is, Daimler has spent 20 years not "tuning" a good Smart, is It okay for Geely to come?
Can Geely tune smart well?
Frankly, it's hard for Geely to make Samrt successful on the road to electrification. As a brother of its own brand and the largest private automobile enterprise in China, Geely Automobile's development in the new energy vehicle market in recent years has actually been unsmooth.
In 2015, Geely put forward the "Blue Action" plan with great foresight, according to the original strategic plan: by 2020, Geely's new energy vehicle sales accounted for more than 90% of the group's total sales, plug-in hybrid and oil-electric hybrid sales accounted for 65%, and pure electric sales accounted for 35%.
However, in 2020, Geely's new energy models are only a few models such as Borui ePro, Emgrand EV, Geometry A, and Geometry C, and in 2020, Geely's total sales of new energy vehicles are only 68,000 units, accounting for 5.13% of the group's total sales.
For the failure of the "Blue Geely Action" plan, Li Shufu once said in An internal speech at Geely that the failure to complete the plan as scheduled was not a mistake in the strategic direction, nor a failure in strategic implementation, but that the historical timing was not ripe. But in fact, it was only Geely itself that it had not yet made up its mind to fully embrace new energy at that time, and its products were all oil to electricity products, so the sales of its new energy models would be poor.
Subsequently, Geely announced the "Two Blue Geely Actions" and established a new pure electric brand - Extreme Krypton, saying that it would participate in the competition of smart pure electric vehicles head-on.
In March this year, Geely Automobile's monthly sales of new energy also reached 15,557 units, an increase of 332% year-on-year, as if it had achieved initial results. However, it is worth noting that the krypton brand that was given high hopes by Geely only delivered 1795 units in March, while in February, the delivery volume of the krypton brand was 2916 units, down nearly 40% month-on-month.
The largest contributor to Geely's new energy sales is the Geometry brand, which delivered 10,152 terminals in March. But its products are still oil to electricity, but because the price is cheap, it is loved by travel companies.
To say that Geely has done a good job in the field of new energy, especially pure electricity, it is really difficult to find, relying on Geely to "adjust" pure electric Smart, I am afraid it is not ideal.
Not Smart's Smart
Of course, many people do not put all their hopes on Geely, thinking that Mercedes-Benz can also help Smart rise, but not to mention whether Mercedes-Benz's achievements in new energy vehicles are deep, let's see what smart genie #1 has to do with Mercedes-Benz.
Many people think that the Smart brand is now a joint venture between Daimler and Geely, and its product is a hybrid, but the reality is not. Smart Genie #1 is a new product that is extremely inconsistent with the 20-year history of the Smart brand, it is not a mini car, nor is it highly personalized, it is not a Smart in the traditional sense.
Today's Smart Genie #1 is more like a product covered with a layer of Smart and Mercedes-Benz skin, and it is not too much to say that Smart only has a name on it, because the most critical aspects of this car are responsible for Geely, and Mercedes-Benz is only responsible for vehicle design.
So strictly speaking, the Samrt Genie #1 built based on the Geely Vast SEA architecture is a pure Geely car, its reinforced iron bone comes from Geely, and it belongs to the same vein as Geely.
Is it expensive to sell from 190,000?
Many people wonder, is the Smart Genie #1 with a pre-price of 190,000-23 million yuan expensive? First we have to see how the car really goes.
Smart Genie #1 positioning small SUV, the whole does not have any luxury elements, and there is no spit point in the styling design, the style is simple, stylish, and even a little playful and cute. The vehicle also uses the popular hidden door handle, suspension roof design, and even borderless doors, although bezel-less doors are also common in previous Smart models, but still fashionable and cool.
Today's Smart Genie #1 is no longer a lightweight, compact model, under the influence of battery pack and rear-drive design, the entire vehicle weighs 1820 kg, and the wheelbase is 2750mm, which is comparable to BYD's meta PLUS size.
The interior design is also simple, compared with the previous Smart grade sense has been improved, but it has a sense of convergence with the interior design of many models, and there is no unique personalized design.
Today's car machine in the vehicle system status is also getting higher and higher, especially in pure electric products, a car's car machine system is regarded by consumers as the most important configuration, the higher the degree of intelligence of the car machine is also more loved by consumers, and vice versa.
Although Smart Genie #1 is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 chip, the size of the central control large screen also reaches 12.8 inches, and the system is also equipped with a full-scenario digital ecological car machine called Smart OS, but the underlying logic and application ecology information of the entire car machine is very small.
In the view of the Travel Bureau, this is likely to be because the vehicle's vehicle-machine system is dominated by Geely, and the underlying logic and ecology of the vehicle-machine are seriously converged with Geely's Galaxy OS and GKUI car-machine systems. The hot models such as Boyue and Xingyue equipped with Geely's Galaxy OS and GKUI car and machine systems have been complained by car owners on the complaint network for a long time because of problems such as car caton and black screen.
Vehicle power and endurance is the key selling point of Smart Genie #1, which is equipped with a 66KWh ternary lithium battery, the maximum pure electric mileage under CLTC conditions is 560 kilometers, the maximum power of the permanent magnet synchronous electric drive can reach 200KW, the peak torque is 343N·m, and the zero hundred acceleration time is 6.7 seconds.
In terms of configuration, the 190,000 entry-level models also have panoramic canopy, remote start, keyless start, 64-color atmosphere lights, automatic air conditioning, rear exhaust air outlet and other functional configurations, which seem rich, but in fact, these configurations are also available on the meta PLUS, AION Y, and dolphin, and there is nothing eye-catching.
The price of the yuan PLUS is 13.76-16.58 million yuan, the price of AION Y is 13.76-18.98 million yuan, and the price of dolphin is 10.28-13.08 million yuan, these three products are not much different from Smart in terms of design, endurance or vehicle ecology, but smart's standard has a certain attraction for many people. But this has to mention another car - Audi Q2L e-tron, which has a pure Audi pedigree, hanging audi LOGO, but the guidance price is only 243,800 yuan, there are currently tens of thousands of yuan of discounts, Geely made Smart what to compare with it?