In 2024, the car price war, plug-in hybrid and pure electric, is it more suitable to buy hybrid?
After announcing the shutdown, HiPhi Y, which was originally priced at 350,000 yuan, dropped by 150,000 yuan and started the promotion at a price of 199,000 yuan. If in the era of price war, Gaohe's promotion has more extreme particularity, then the price war opened by BYD will become the main theme of this year.
The price of BYD's new Qin PLUS Glory Edition model is 79,800, and the Glory Edition of other models such as Dolphin will be brought in the future, and the price of the product line will continue to decline. Through comparison, although the BYD Qin PLUS Glory Edition is 20,000 lower than the previous Champion Edition model that sold 99,800, the configuration is higher than that of the Champion Edition model, not only the whole system has been upgraded with intelligent power-on, but also realized the continuous dialogue function.
From December last year to January this year, the actual minimum price of the BYD Qin PLUS Champion Edition DM-i 55 km endurance model is 84,800 yuan, which is 5,000 yuan different from the lowest configuration model of the Glory Edition.
The price war does not stop, what should old car owners do?
Different from the price war started by DPCA last year, after BYD took the lead this time, except for a very small number of compact fuel vehicles such as Hyundai Elantra and Mazda Ankesaila, the other official models are all new energy.
Among them, Changan Qiyuan played the slogan of "electricity is lower than oil", and the price of Qiyuan A05 dropped from 89,900 yuan to 78,900 yuan; Geely's product of the same level Emgrand L HiP also launched the Longteng version in due course, which also dropped by 20,000 yuan, and the price dropped to 89,800 yuan; Wuling Xingguang is a relatively rational single product, and among the two configuration models, only the price of the high-endurance advanced version model was reduced by 6,000 yuan, and the starting price became 99,800 yuan. According to the actual preferential situation, the price difference before and after the official drop of Qiyuan A05 is 8,000 yuan, and the difference between the price of Wuling Xingguang before and after the official drop is 4,000 yuan.
The above models are all completed in the case of no shrinkage configuration, and some models also have the intention to follow up the price war, but they are slightly inferior in the ability to control costs, and can only reduce the starting price by launching a low-profile version of the model.
The price war routine in the previous rounds has basically not changed, or the car companies have the ability to participate in the price war with the support of large-scale effect and supply chain system after achieving phased results. Either they are in a hurry and don't want to watch their friends harvest the market effortlessly, and forcibly reduce their allocation to participate in the price war.
Relatively speaking, due to the mature system and price reduction of the model, some even increased, for the old car owners who have just mentioned the old model is not very friendly, but this situation will continue, after all, in the new energy market, there are relatively many factors affecting the price reduction of new cars, and the phenomenon of price reduction and increase in the future may be more;
The price war in the hybrid market continues, and the pure electric market has not really started the price war
Compared with two years ago, Tesla and the ideal car owners shouted "backstabbing" every day, since the large-scale price war in March last year, consumers' mentality towards the price war has suddenly calmed down.
Studying the products in the hybrid market and the pure electric market, there is a clear difference in the price adjustment logic of the two market segments. Taking this price war as an example, almost all the models that can reduce prices without reducing configuration are hybrid models, while pure electric models can only rely on reduction if they want to reduce their prices.
A point worth paying attention to, following BYD's price reduction of this batch of products, BYD Qin PLUS, Changan Qiyuan A05 will reduce the price to less than 80,000, the common feature of these two models is that the pure electric battery life is shorter, basically stuck 50 kilometers, only a few kilometers more than the minimum range of 43 kilometers exempt from purchase tax stipulated by the state. The price of Wuling Starlight and Geely Emgrand L HiP is more expensive, but the pure electric range is more than 100 kilometers, and the vehicle configuration is higher than that of Qin PLUS and Qiyuan A05.
Among them, the battery capacity of Geely Emgrand L HiP is 15.5 kWh, the battery capacity of the high-range model of Wuling Xingguang is 20.5 kWh, while the battery capacity of BYD Qin PLUS is 8.32 kWh, and the Kaizen A05 is 9.07 kWh. In other words, if hybrid models such as Geely Emgrand L HiP and Wuling Starlight launch a lower power version of the model, on the basis of the existing price, further price reductions can be achieved, and if some configurations with low daily use rate are reduced, the starting price will be reduced to 80,000 yuan, or even 70,000 level, which is not impossible.
For models like the BYD Qin PLUS, there is no way to make a big adjustment in electric capacity (to meet the purchase tax reduction policy), and there is almost no room for another significant official reduction in the short term, so we can only wait for the cost of batteries and electronic components to further decline.
Therefore, the price war at the beginning of this year has not yet been completely fought to the end, from the point of view of the means of price reduction of various car companies, at least this price reduction at the beginning of the year, most car companies are still in the tentative stage, and have not yet fully released the big move, which is also in line with the law of the market.
In addition, even if many pure electric models have announced price reductions and promotions since the beginning of the year, they are basically because of the price reductions brought about by the replacement of old cars or the clearing of inventory, rather than essentially bringing down the price of the car in the real sense. Therefore, this price reduction is not a price war for pure electricity, because pure electricity is far from being able to start a war, after all, the mainstream pure electric technology that is currently being developed has not yet been able to form a generation gap with friends, or the extent of forming a market scale. What can support the price war has to rely on the reduction of costs in all aspects. However, this year may be a watershed for pure electric vehicles, and the ability to open up the generation gap with competing products in core technology is the capital that will cause price wars in the future.
So now is it better to buy a hybrid?
Starting from consumer psychological factors, if it is said that there will be no big official reduction in pure electric products in the short term, such as who has a new car and the price of the new car is tens of thousands lower than the old one, then there will not be too much psychological gap in buying pure electric models at least in the short term. But from a practical point of view, hybrid may be a better option now.
As mentioned above, there are still a considerable number of hybrid product prices that have not yet bottomed out, after all, there are more ways to reduce the price of hybrid models at this stage. For example, the large battery will be replaced with a small battery, and there is recent news that the official website of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has appeared on the declaration map of the new Wei brand Gaoshan, and it is reported that this car will change the low-profile model to a small battery to achieve the purpose of price reduction. Combined with a reduction in configurations, such as AR-HUD, which seems to have a strong sense of technology but will not have any impact on actual driving, for economic hybrid models, there is more room for price reduction than pure electric models of the same level.
In other words, although the price reduction cycle of hybrid models may be shorter and fluctuate greatly, the hybrid products that consumers buy in each price reduction cycle must be the most cost-effective among all new energy products in the same class. In addition, the tone set at the beginning of this year is "electricity is lower than oil", and the only products that can achieve this point are hybrid models.
epilogue
BYD sales introduction, after Qin PLUS was sold to 79,800, there was an endless stream of visiting users, and they wanted to buy this product by name. According to the sales data, in addition to BYD's two pure electric products, Seagull and Dolphin, almost all of the other models with oil and electricity are hybrid products. This is also in line with the general trend that from 2023 onwards, the growth rate of hybrid vehicles will be significantly higher than the growth rate of pure electric vehicles. In other words, hybrid vehicles have gradually gained market advantages, coupled with stronger price reduction capabilities, the growth rate will further accelerate.
It's just that for consumers, although it is not strange to reduce prices frequently, it seems difficult to make old car owners have no "backstab" feeling at all.