Persistently "surpassing" Tesla and gradually losing the "cost-effective" label, where will the Leap Car go?

After shouting the slogan of "3 years of intelligent technology surpassing Tesla" in 2021, in an interview with the media a few days ago, Zhu Jiangming, founder of Leap Auto, once again said, "We are still confident that we will surpass Tesla in at least some links in 2024."

As the fourth largest new force in car manufacturing after NIO, Xiaopeng and Ideal, the market voice of Leapmotor has been slowly declining in recent years. Since its landing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in September 2022, Leap Auto has seen sales decline for several months, with monthly deliveries not exceeding 10,000 units in the fourth quarter, and only 1,139 new vehicles delivered in January 2023, a decrease of 86.59% month-on-month.

After several price increases, doubts about the "ambiguous positioning" of Leap cars in the industry have frequently emerged. An analyst told Blue Whale Auto that after the national subsidy declines, the market's requirements for the product strength, technical strength, operation ability, brand credibility and other hard power of car companies will be greatly improved, "For Zerorun, it may be more urgent to anchor the appropriate market positioning in the process of refined development of the industry than to catch up with Tesla." ”

Full-stack self-research, what is the strength?

At the beginning of its establishment, Leapmotor positioned itself as a technology company. In Zhu Jiangming's view, "the gene inherited by Zerorun is to focus on technology, focus on innovation, and full-stack self-research." ”

The so-called "full-stack self-research" refers to self-developed and self-developed all key software and hardware of the core system and electronic components of intelligent electric vehicles. The hardware structure starts from the resistor, and the software starts from the code, and does not rely on third-party manufacturers to provide hardware.

Self-developed technology seems to be the breaking point of Leap Auto's external efforts, and chips are the core of it.

From 2019 to 2021, the annual R&D expenditure of Leapmotor was RMB358 million, RMB289 million and RMB740 million, respectively. In the third quarter of 2022, the R&D expenditure of Leapmotor was about 404 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 138.9%; Combined with R&D expenditure of RMB526.4 million in the first half of the year, Leapmotor's R&D expenditure in the first three quarters of 2022 was approximately RMB930.4 million. In comparison, NIO, Xpeng and Li Li spent RMB3 billion, RMB1.5 billion and RMB1.8 billion respectively in the third quarter of 2022. Tesla's R&D investment in 2019-2022 reached about 9.369 billion, 9.729 billion, 16.9 billion and 20.9 billion yuan, respectively.

According to the CCRT test results released by CAERI in March 2022, the Zerorun C11 Premium Edition, which is positioned as a "fully intelligent super electric SUV", received a total score of 69.4 points, of which the intelligent score was only 42.6 points. In terms of intelligent driving and intelligent experience, the Zerorun C11 Premium Edition scored 35.7 and 53.0 points respectively, neither of which reached the passing line.

In terms of computing power, there is still a certain gap between Zerorun self-developed chips and the products of mainstream manufacturers in the market.

According to official information, the self-developed Lingxin 01 chip officially listed on September 28, 2022 has a comprehensive computing power of 8.4Tops, while the comprehensive computing power of the chips equipped with Avita 11, Feifan R7, Li L7 and L8 Max, and Xpeng G9 listed in the same period is above 400Tops. During the year, Tesla's self-developed FSD chip single computing power was also 72Tops, and Model 3/Y was equipped with 2 chips, with a comprehensive computing power of 144Tops.

China (Wuxi) Internet of Things Research Institute previously issued a document that the self-developed automotive-grade chip capital threshold is very high, according to expert predictions, only to the investment of basic chips as an example, the starting threshold is 1 billion yuan, if coupled with the overall research and development and operation, the general chip generally needs more than 10 billion yuan of investment scale. NVIDIA's Orin was built by NVIDIA over 4 years and billions of dollars to build.

From the current data, Zero Run still has some way to go.

In addition to the cost performance, what should ZeroRun aim for?

On January 1, 2023, the national purchase subsidy policy for new energy vehicles, which has been implemented for 13 years, officially left the market, setting off a wave of price adjustments in the domestic new energy vehicle field.

On the same day, Leapmotor announced that its T03 and C11 models will adjust the price, of which the price of the T03 series will be increased by 3,000 yuan, and the price of the C11 series will be increased by 6,000 yuan.

In fact, as early as March 2022, Leapmotor increased the price of T03 and C11 on the grounds of rising raw material prices, with the price of T03 raising by 3,000-5,000 yuan and C11 rising by 20,000-30,000 yuan. In August of the same year, Leapmotor raised the price of T03 again, of which the onyx version increased by 5600 yuan, and the price of the star diamond version, the jade version, the amber version, and the Yaojin version increased by 6600 yuan.

After three price increases, the price of Zerorun T03 reached 82,500-99,500 yuan, and the price of C11 reached 185,800-235,800 yuan. The prices of the two at the time of listing were 68,900-84,900 yuan and 159,800-199,800 yuan respectively.

In contrast, Tesla China announced on January 6 that all domestic models will reduce prices, including a price reduction of 36,000 yuan for the Model 3 rear-drive version and 48,000 yuan for the Model Y long-range version; after the price reduction, the price of the Model 3 starts at 229,900 yuan and the price of the Model Y starts at 259,900 yuan. At this point, the price gap between Model 3 and C11 after price increase has narrowed to 30,000 yuan.

According to data released by the Passenger Association, after a vigorous price reduction event, Tesla's sales of Chinese-made vehicles reached 66,051 units in January, an increase of 18% month-on-month.

A number of industry insiders believe that the continuous decline in sales of Leap Motor, on the one hand, is closely related to the decline of national subsidies, and on the other hand, it stems from the exploration period of transformation from the low-end market to the high-end market.

According to official data, in the third quarter of 2022, Zerorun T03 achieved delivery of 17,790 units, a year-on-year increase of 48%; Deliveries of the C11 mid-size SUV model reached 17,257 units, a year-on-year increase of 6,721%; 561 units of the C01 pure electric medium and large sedan were delivered. Although T03, priced below $100,000, contributed most of the deliveries, the proportion of deliveries of the more priced C11 and C01 increased significantly.

"If NIO's keyword is user service, ideal is car experience, Xiaopeng is intelligent, Tesla is technological innovation, there is no word that can more accurately summarize the brand image of ZeroRun," one of the analysts told Blue Whale Automobile, after the subsidy declines, the market's requirements for various hard power such as product strength, technical strength, operational ability, and brand credibility of car companies will be greatly improved. In the process of refined development of the industry, it may be more urgent to anchor the appropriate market positioning. ”

Recently, Leapmotor officially announced that the C11 extended range version will start pre-sale on February 9, and is scheduled to be delivered in the first quarter.

After tearing off the label of "cost performance", where will the Leap Car go?