215,900 cases! Xiaomi Automobile, which "lost money", fell into the life and death situation of the industry

After three months of warm-up, Xiaomi finally officially released its first electric car, the Xiaomi SU7, on March 28.

In the three years since Xiaomi announced its car construction, as long as there is a lot of talk about Xiaomi cars, it can almost cause heated discussions, and it has been on social media hot searches countless times.

Before the release of the Xiaomi SU7 on March 28, its biggest suspense was the price - just like the "1999" that Xiaomi smashed in the smartphone era in the past, countless people also expect it to be "the first electric car for young people". But on the other hand, Lei Jun and Xiaomi kept emphasizing that "Xiaomi cars are a bit expensive" and "it can't be less than 199,000 yuan".

The outside world's expectations for the price of Xiaomi cars and the conflict between Xiaomi's internal positioning of the Xiaomi SU7 high-end have made how to price this new car a very tricky problem. At the same time, the increasingly fierce price war this year has also made it more difficult to price Xiaomi SU7.

On the evening of March 28th, Lei Jun finally answered the most concerning question: Xiaomi SU7There are three versions, the standard version is priced at 215,900 yuan, the Pro version is 245,900 yuan, and the Max version is 299,900 yuan.

This time, the Xiaomi SU7 also broke a convention in the automotive industry - in the past, car companies were accustomed to announcing the pre-sale price first, and then announcing the official price at a lower price, in order to create a "preferential" mentality. But the huge attention of the Xiaomi SU7 has broken this, there is no pre-sale price, and the final price is the release price.

The price is the most concerned about the Xiaomi SU7, but it is not the only one.

What is the product power of Xiaomi SU7?

As a pure electric coupe, Xiaomi SU7's selling point focuses on performance and handling, so targeted development has been made in 100 kilometers of acceleration, shock filtration, etc.

In terms of motor and range, the Xiaomi SU7 is a "global silicon carbide", with a range of 700km for the standard version CLTC, 830km for the Pro version, and 800km for the Max version.

Among them, the Max version is an 871V high-voltage platform, which can replenish energy for 510km in 15 minutes, accelerate from zero to 100 in 2.78s, have a maximum horsepower of 673PS, a peak torque of 838N·m, and a maximum speed of 265km/h, while the standard version is a 486V high-voltage platform that can replenish energy for 350km in 15 minutes.

As a coupe, the materials and tuning of the chassis have a direct impact on its handling. Xiaomi SU7 adopts a front double ball joint double wishbone + rear five-link independent suspension, and the suspension link is all-aluminum. In addition, it is equipped with a closed-type air spring system jointly developed by Xiaomi and Tuopu Group, and a CDC damping variable shock absorber provided by ZF, Lei Jun said that the closed-type air spring system has 100% faster adjustment speed than the traditional open-type system.

With Brembo four-piston fixed calipers, Dr.'s DTB intelligent decoupling, ESP.10.0 body stabilization and other brake control systems, Xiaomi SU7 controls the brake within 34 meters.

In terms of intelligent interaction, which Xiaomi is good at, Xiaomi SU7 has achieved the current mainstream in hardware, and has also made certain characteristics in software. The cockpit is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8295 chip, based on the surging OS, equipped with a 16.1-inch central control ecological screen, with 3K resolution, 16:10 ratio, 91.7% screen-to-body ratio, and 1024 levels of dynamic dimming. The central control of the car machine also supports the "Magic Desktop" function of the mobile phone and the car machine interconnection, which can realize the application flow between the mobile phone and the car machine. And it also supports Apple AirPlay and CarPlay.

Last year's explosion of intelligent driving, Xiaomi SU7 has not been left behind, the whole system is equipped with intelligent assisted driving as standard, including Xiaomi Pilot Pro, Xiaomi Pilot Max version, support high-speed pilot, one-key valet parking and other functions, high-speed NOA is ready to use after delivery, and urban pilot assistance NOA will be launched in August this year.

In general, compared with the competing Tesla Model 3 at the same price, the Xiaomi SU7 clearly wins in all key configurations, but the brand influence and user volume still need to be slowly established. Compared with self-owned brand pure electric sedans such as ZEEKR 007 and Xiaopeng P7i, Xiaomi SU7 is also not lagging behind, including acceleration performance, power consumption, and intelligence.

At the recent earnings call, Lu Weibing, president of Xiaomi Group, said that the phased goal of Xiaomi Auto is to enter the top three sales of pure electric luxury cars.

Last year, the third pure electric car with a sales volume of more than 200,000 yuan was ZEEKR 001, with an average monthly sales of 6,300 units, and this year's new ZEEKR 001 was increased and reduced, with a starting price of 269,900 yuan, which is also quite competitive, and has received more than 20,000 large orders in less than a month.

In terms of parameters and configuration, Xiaomi SU7 is undoubtedly a very competitive model. However, the uncertainty faced by Xiaomi SU7 has nothing to do with the product itself, but the common problem faced by the "pure electric car of more than 200,000 yuan" in which it is located - the industry ceiling seems to have arrived.

The Xiaomi SU7's dead end comes from the category cap

In 2023, Tesla sold 147,000 Model 3 units in the Chinese market, a year-on-year increase of 18.5%, but it is down 4,000 units from 151,000 units in 2021. That's just 10,000 units higher than the 137,000 units in 2020 – and that was three years ago.

The Model 3, with 147,000 units, was the best-selling pure electric car in the Chinese market last year with more than 200,000 yuan, and its sales have hovered around 140,000 units for four consecutive years. During the same period, sales of the more expensive Tesla Model Y in China increased from 9,000 units to 456,000 units, an increase of more than 700%, of which Model Y sales in China in 2023 increased by 44.7% year-on-year.

Growth is not limited to the Model 3, but also the BYD Han EV, which was the second-best-selling EV in the same price range last year, is also facing a similar dilemma, with its sales in 2023 falling by 26.5% year-on-year to 100,500 units.

In fact, the growth difficulties of the two leading models are not just the problem of one model or car company.

According to statistics from Pacific Technology (ID: PConline), the top six pure electric cars with sales of more than 200,000 yuan in China in 2023 are Model 3, Han EV, Zeekrypton 001, BMW i3, Xpeng P7 (including Xpeng P7i) and NIO ET5, with a total sales of 466,000 units, which is basically the same as the sales of Model Y of 456,000 units in the same period.

After the explosion of 800V architecture and intelligent driving last year, a large number of new models have been launched one after another, but even with the blessing of new technologies and new selling points, the market performance of most models of the same price is still not outstanding.

In November last year, Huawei's Hongmeng Zhixing Zhijie S7 was released, as a pure electric car priced at 249,800 yuan-349,800 yuan, its sales in the last two months were 784 and 604 respectively. However, part of this is due to factory production problems.

The other two popular models in the same price range, Zeekrypton 007 and Chery Star Era ES were both launched in December last year, and the sales of Zeekrypton 007 in the last two months were 857 and 5853 respectively, while Chery Star Era ES was 740 and 504, which is also difficult to say.

These models are not without selling points, in fact, they almost surpass fuel vehicles at the same price in terms of product power, compared with Model 3 and Han EV are also not lagging behind, for example, Zhijie S7 is equipped with Huawei's self-developed high-end intelligent driving solution and chassis system; Zeekrypton 007 is currently the cheapest 800V architecture + 100 degree battery pure electric car; Star Era ES is equipped with a rare air suspension at the same price + CDC electromagnetic damping and damping system as standard, and its price is higher than Model 3 is 20,000 yuan lower, and the price of the entry-level version launched not long ago has dropped to less than 200,000 yuan after removing the air suspension + CDC.

But obviously, whether it is a price advantage or a configuration advantage, their sales are far from the "explosive model".

In fact, although the battery life of pure electric cars with more than 200,000 yuan is often higher than that of SUVs of the same level, and the price is also lower, users' willingness to buy SUVs is significantly higher than that of sedans.

According to the data of the China Passenger Car Association, in December 2023, B+C pure electric sedans accounted for 9.4% of the entire new energy market share in China, while the same class of pure electric SUVs was 14.2%, much higher than the former.

In 2024, the growth trend of the pure electric market may not be good. Not long ago, An Conghui, CEO of ZEEKR Intelligent Technology, said in an interview that this year's competition will mainly rely on the stock market, and the growth rate of the pure electric market is not expected to exceed 20%. In his opinion, the knockout round has already begun, and the industry may change more than expected in 2024.

Huawei, Zeekr, Xiaopeng and even Tesla, BYD have failed to break through the industry ceiling, how can Xiaomi answer? For the Xiaomi SU7 priced at 215,900 yuan to 299,900 yuan, this is the biggest challenge - is the product strength of the Xiaomi SU7 good enough to break through the existing industry bottleneck?

According to the official Weibo of Xiaomi Auto, it took only 4 minutes for Xiaomi SU7 to break 10,000, and it broke 20,000 after 7 minutes. Obviously, at least Lei Jun can get a good night's sleep tonight.

"People's car ecology" is both a challenge and an opportunity

Wang Chuanfu, chairman of BYD, has a famous judgment on electric vehicles: the first half of new energy vehicles is electrification, and the second half is intelligence.

Since the middle of last year, driven by models such as Xpeng G6 and Wenjie M7, intelligent driving has exploded, and then many car companies have announced their own intelligent driving solutions and boarding time, and intelligent driving has quickly become an industry consensus. Xiaomi also promotes smart driving as one of the core features of Xiaomi SU7.

Xiaomi's vigorously promoted "people, car, home ecology" model is considered to be a typical example of "intelligent ecological unification", and many car companies are interested in layout. Its multi-device collaboration capabilities, especially the collaboration between mobile phones and car machines, are currently only able to compete with Huawei's HarmonyOS Zhixing. Therefore, in terms of products, "people, cars" undoubtedly bring rare differentiated functions to Xiaomi cars, especially in the case that Apple has given up making cars, Xiaomi has in fact become the only mobile phone manufacturer that completely produces electric vehicles independently.

Lu Weibing, president of Xiaomi Group, also said previously that Xiaomi is realizing the world's only and complete closed-loop "people, vehicles, and home ecology".

Lei Jun believes that intelligent electric vehicles are essentially "car x electric x intelligent", "the problem of electrification has been solved in the past ten years, and the next ten years will be a decade of intelligence." Intelligence will be the decisive point of this era."

Not long ago, Huaxin Securities also listed the five core technologies of Xiaomi cars in the research report, the first three are motors, batteries and die-casting machine groups, and the last two are intelligent driving and "people, cars and home ecology".

On the other hand, this model has not really been verified in the market, whether it is Huawei, or NIO and Lynk & Co, which have released the "car-machine-mobile phone" collaboration, they have not yet been able to truly reflect the appeal of intelligent driving in the market.

Of course, this is also a rare opportunity for Xiaomi to show its difference, if the Xiaomi SU7 shows enough competitiveness in the "people-car home ecology", Xiaomi can establish a new brand label for itself like Huawei and Xpeng's success in the field of intelligent driving.

"There is no turning back when you open the bow", Xiaomi SU7 is on the market, and the days when Lei Jun will be truly tested are still ahead.