Focusing on the pain points of ideal cars! The sales volume of the world is overwhelming that of ideal cars, and the most embarrassing thing has appeared!
On January 16, Ideal announced the sales ranking of new forces from 1.8 to 1.14. The result was very embarrassing, in the second week of 2024, the ideal sales still did not exceed the question boundary, and for two consecutive weeks, he was pressed under his opponent and gave up the position of the boss of the new forces.
Everyone knows that the "weekly list" of new forces' sales is actually a list tailored for themselves by their ideals. kicked out BYD, Tesla, and Aion, and the plan is to enjoy the position of the boss alone. As a result, he made a halfway trip to bite the gold and ask the world, and repeatedly gave the ideal car a good look. What's more, Wenjie is actually a perfect ideal "learner", and many of its strategies are basically to perfectly replicate ideals.
Why is the ideal being overtaken by the latecomers, and does it still have a chance to surpass back? Let Kung Fu Auto take you to see it together.
（1）抄作业抄成老大，问界连说sorry
Li Auto was founded in 2015, and in October 2018, it released its first product, the Ideal ONE, and then started its own legendary road.
Among all new energy vehicle companies, Ideal is definitely a unique type. Although it has the innate advantage of electrification, Ideal does not play racing, and never advertises how fast it accelerates and how well it handles. And only focusing on home users, the official statement is to create a mobile home, to create a happy home. At the technical level, Ideal is a pioneer in the commercialization of extended-range electric vehicles, and has been sparing no effort to promote the advantages of extended-range electric routes.
It has to be said that the ideal portfolio strategy is still very successful. The main extended-range electric vehicle not only avoids the range anxiety of pure electric vehicles, but also is more energy-efficient than fuel vehicles. The large space SUV also has an innate advantage in the home field, although the ideal car is not cheap, but compared with the BBA, these advantages are still obvious, and by the way, it also avoids the competition of Tesla.
In this way, the ideal brand has been on the rise in the past few years until it meets the problem.
As Huawei's smart car brand, Wenjie was born in December 2021, several years later than Ideal. The first model, the M5, is also the Tesla Model Y, and the selling point is that it is equipped with the HUAWEI DhiveONE pure electric drive range extension platform and the HarmonyOS intelligent cockpit.
The start of Wenjie was very prosperous, and it only took 87 days to achieve a cumulative total of more than 10,000, setting a record for the fastest delivery of a single model of a new brand at that time. In August 2022, the overall monthly delivery volume of the AITO Wenjie series exceeded 10,000 units for the first time, but after almost half a year, the sales volume of Wenjie did not rise but declined, and remained at a relatively stable level.
Later, the problem was discovered, although the strength of the technical level is very strong, but in the marketing and product setting, it is not focused. What kind of users should buy the world, this concept is not conveyed. What should the world do? Soon the answer came to pass, and that was to copy the ideal homework.
Since the second half of '23, Wenjie has shifted its propaganda to the household field. The new M7 has been upgraded and upgraded, and the most important thing is the increase in comfort configuration. As a result, Wenjie began to kill indiscriminately in the field of medium and large SUVs. According to the latest news, the number of orders for the new M7 has exceeded 130,000 units in the four months on the market, and this "credit book" can be said to be half of the ideal.
(2) Focus on the ideal pain points and ask the innovative logic of the world
Qi Baishi, a master of Chinese painting, once said, "Those who learn from me live, and those who resemble me die." It stands to reason that it should be difficult for one brand to succeed if it learns from another brand's strategy. So why can the world of questions surpass the ideal? In fact, it has to do with the core of the two.
First of all, the ideal, as mentioned earlier, the ideal brand strategy is actually very good, and it is a must for the identification and mining of market segments. Even Li Xiang himself is very complacent, and has previously launched an online course for product managers, aiming to show off his ideal experience in model design.
To put it bluntly, the ideal positioning is an electric car that can burn oil, and at the same time has a large space and a good luxury construction. Of course, these alone are obviously not enough, and the ideal has also added a trump card, that is, intelligence, and its achievements in the field of intelligent cockpit and intelligent driving are not bad. But these ideal actions almost all hit the window of the question.
Taking HarmonyOS 3, which was fully upgraded last year, as an example, this system brings differentiated experience, atomic services, and AI into the cockpit, making the car a new entrance to the digital world. Whether it is intelligent performance or interactive capabilities, HarmonyOS far surpasses the cockpit systems of major new forces, and this battle is really impossible to fight.
Another example is that Ideal plans to launch a pure electric MPV MEGA, which is claimed to be a new generation of technology flagship, and it turns out to meet the newly launched Wenjie M9 in a narrow way. The latter is not just a simple upgrade of the size, in fact, the basic platform, the electrical platform, the car machine system, the intelligent driving system, and even the lights and audio, have been upgraded in an all-round way, and the ideal is only to be passively beaten.
Recently, it was reported that Ideal has once again postponed the official delivery time of MEGA, on the grounds that the manufacturer is not confident that the new car will be delivered to users under such circumstances, which can be said to be miserable.
The ideal can be done, but the ideal can not be done, and this asymmetrical war really makes the ideal feel uncomfortable.
(3) It is difficult to reduce prices alone, and the ideal needs to find new selling points
After the sales plummeted in the first week of the new year, Ideal quickly adjusted its sales strategy almost immediately, and the discount for the whole series reached 30,000-50,000 yuan. Therefore, judging from the sales volume of the second week alone, the ideal is actually very close to the question world.
There are joys and worries, the good news is that the ideal market response is really fast enough, and the worry is that at this stage, the ideal can play not many cards, and it is a double-edged sword in the long run to increase sales through price reductions.
It has been before September last year, that is, before the new M7 began to harvest the market, the ideal is the car company with the strongest price among the new forces, and it can be said that it has always insisted on not reducing prices. But then the performance is a sharp turn, Li Auto first launched an insurance subsidy of 10,000 yuan, and then began to gradually increase the preferential range, and now the cumulative price reduction has reached more than 40,000 yuan in just over four months.
Regarding this point, Ideal also gave an explanation, starting the product transition from the fourth quarter of last year. In other words, just as Ideal ONE was abandoned at that time, Ideal will give up the existing L7, L8, and L9. There is nothing wrong with this, if it can only be maintained through price reduction, then this product line really needs to slowly fade out. But the crux of the question is, what kind of products should Ideal come up with to deal with it?
The experience of MEGA has proved that there is no advantage to taking the pure electric route ideally. After all, Ideal has neither enough supercharging stations nor first-line energy replenishment technology. In fact, it is also very difficult, and the ideal does not have the ability to develop its own core components, which means that it cannot fight a price war with BYD and Aion.
Continuing to take the high-end route is almost the only way out of the ideal. It's just that when the ecological niche is gradually occupied by the questioning realm, the road to continue is actually confused, and the ideal has to make a decision immediately.
(4) Kung Fu shooting
The development of the new forces is really changing, the hottest new force in 19 is Weilai, because it is the first to achieve mass production, and the positioning is high enough, the hottest in 20 years is Weimar, because its sales are fast enough, 21 years is Xiaopeng, P7 is the first model of the new forces out of the circle. Ideal has dominated the past two years, but at the end of 2023, it has fallen on its heels, and now it is exhausted.
NIO and XPeng have also had a second outbreak after experiencing a low tide, and XPeng G6 and NIO ES6 have regained their attention. Can the ideal do this?