The 2024 car world is very exciting!
On March 28th, at the Xiaomi car press conference, Lei Jun invited the three founders of Wei Xiaoli to support the scene for himself, and this scene was ridiculed by netizens as "Lei Jun except for three electricity";
In March, Li Auto delivered 28,984 new vehicles, and AITO delivered 31,727 vehicles. In January, Wenjie increased by 35% month-on-month, with 33,000 units delivered across the series, and the ideal decreased by 38% month-on-month, with 31,200 units delivered. Wenjie delivered 21,142 new vehicles in February, down nearly 36% month-on-month from January, but up 503.2% year-on-year. Li Auto delivered 20,251 vehicles, and was once again "cut down" by Wenjie Automobile.
Looking back on the first quarter, Wenjie has been firmly in the delivery champion of new forces for three consecutive months, and the delivery gap between Li Auto and Wenjie reached 5,442 vehicles in the whole quarter.
Looking back on 2023, Wenjie Automobile has won the 2023 delivery champion of new car-making forces, the annual revenue stands at hundreds of billions of steps, and the third new energy vehicle company to achieve profitability after Tesla and BYD, but in 2024, Li Auto has encountered the "head start" of Wenjie Automobile. With an unfavorable start, Li Auto is under great pressure to achieve its previously set goal of delivering 800,000 vehicles for the whole year. The new king is established, and the old king is gone, which undoubtedly does not explain the fierce and cruel competition in the domestic automobile market.
In fact, Wenjie Auto has always been an opponent that Li wants to respect and even fear. Last year, Li Xiang also said on Weibo, "In the third quarter of 2022, the release and operation of the M7 directly disabled the ideal ONE, we have never encountered such a strong opponent, and we have no power to fight back for a long time." ”
And this year, Li Xiang's own "Sinophobia" may be committed again, and Li Xiang, who was previously known as the "king of Weibo", is now a lot more low-key on social platforms, and has not updated Weibo for a long time after the launch of MEGA, and last month, Li Xiang also rarely chose to "take the initiative to admit mistakes". An all-staff letter entitled "How to solve the current problems faced by Li Auto" was swiped on the screen of the car. Li Xiang, CEO of the company, reviewed the many problems caused by the MEGA incident in March, and proposed solutions on how to deal with the problems, "seek truth from facts, and correct when you know your mistakes". The weekly sales charts, which used to be published on time every week, are no longer updated.
Although the sales volume of the ideal car has been overtaken, but it can still rank second in the list of new car-making forces, and now it seems that it is a little redundant to worry about it, and some people must say that you are just alarmist, but it can be said that the crisis of the ideal car has appeared. It is not the key that sales are overtaken, the key is these two issues.
The first one, the pure electric transformation is unfavorable, the previous ideal car relied on the dividend of the range extender and the label of the daddy car, in the new energy vehicle circle, it has become the first profitable new force in China, with a cumulative sales of more than 700,000 units, but the range extender is a transition plan after all, with the technological breakthrough of the power battery, the ideal car is bound to carry out the pure electric transformation, and as the first product of the pure electric transformation, the results of MEGA are obviously not in line with expectations, and more importantly, the pure electric car market has long been a red sea, this time the ideal car to break the situation？
Second, lacking a deep moat, Li Auto has accurately found a segmented blank market in the extremely mature automobile market, and its product positioning capabilities are worth learning from other car companies. However, compared with NIO's battery swap and service, the intelligent driving of Wenjie, the moat of Li Auto is relatively shallow, and the positioning of serving family travel is also easy to be copied by other car companies.
With the intensification of market competition and the continuous progress of technology, the differentiation between new energy vehicle companies will be more obvious, and the phenomenon of the strong and the weak will be more prominent.