The car that sells the most and suffers the most complaints, BYD's path has gone astray?
Text/Tao Li
3024417 units, which is BYD's cumulative sales for the whole year last year.
In a voice of doubt, BYD still exceeded the 3 million sales target at the beginning of the year, in just a few years, it has become the best-selling new energy vehicle brand with the wave of new energy vehicles, and its unique vision and excellent strength are indeed worthy of admiration.
As for this year's sales target, it is widely predicted that it will start at 4.5 million units. In the eyes of many "melon-eating people", with the current strong growth momentum of BYD, the increase of 1.5 million vehicles obviously underestimates BYD's strength. But I don't think so.
On the one hand, from the perspective of market growth, the penetration rate of the domestic new energy vehicle market in the past three years was 13.4%, 28% and 35.7% respectively, although new energy vehicles are still the general trend, but the growth rate has slowed down. And according to the forecast of the China Automobile Association, domestic sales of new energy vehicles will reach 11.5 million this year, a year-on-year increase of 20%. At present, the market competition is becoming increasingly fierce, and it is not so easy for BYD to achieve a growth of 1.5 million units or even higher.
On the other hand, for BYD, it may be time to slow down and shift its focus to improving product strength. Since last year, BYD has significantly accelerated the pace of "impacting the high-end", Denza, Equation Leopard, and Yangwang have launched new products one after another, but high-end cars are not only sold at high prices, but the most important thing is to have a good user reputation, in this regard, BYD still has a long way to go.
Because the current sales volume of BYD is Qin, Song, Yuan series, as well as seagulls and dolphins, the price is basically below 200,000, which means that BYD does not have the ability to pay a premium for the brand, and once the price exceeds 250,000, it will be difficult to improve.
At the same time, while becoming the most selling new energy vehicle brand in China last year, BYD's complaints also soared. According to the data of Cheqq.com, in the list of complaints in the past year, BYD accounted for 6 of the top 10, and its hot-selling Song PLUS, Han, Tang, Seal, Song Pro and Qin PLUS are all on the list.
In particular, Song PLUS and Han, which are the top two in terms of complaints, have 5,140 and 4,026 complaints respectively, far exceeding the Toyota Camry (2,383) in third place. Although this has something to do with its high sales, it still makes people worry that the market reputation of domestic cars that they have built up with great difficulty will gradually collapse.
Perhaps many people will talk about BMW Brilliance, which has dominated the list for a long time, but as a first-line luxury brand, the brand influence of BMW and BYD is not in the same dimension at all.
In the simplest terms, the former sells as a "standard", but BYD sells as a "cost-effective". Just thinking about quickly seizing the market, regardless of the feelings of consumers, too many complaints will inevitably greatly affect BYD's reputation among consumers, thus affecting the rhythm of impacting the high-end market.
The reason why high-end brands are high-end has a lot to do with the good car buying and car experience it brings to consumers, but BYD doesn't seem to be good enough in this regard. Judging from the content of the complaints, aside from the previous complaints caused by the "atmospheric fuel tank" incident, most of the others are related to price changes, imperfect service processes, system upgrades, etc.
What is impressive is that before, almost every time BYD opened the OTA upgrade, there would be old car owners who reflected why their models did not have them, as if they had become an "outcast" version of the existence. There are many similar examples that affect consumers' car purchase and car experience.
For a brand that is about to hit the high-end market, the most sold cars, the most complaints, this obviously does not form a virtuous circle, which may be difficult for some consumers who value "experience" to accept and pay for it.
Write at the end:
After the domestic market gradually reaches its peak, the next overseas is bound to become an important choice for BYD and even other domestic new energy vehicles, as an important opportunity for the rise of domestic cars, if it cannot do a good job of reputation, it may "once return to the pre-liberation period".