After four months of delivery traps, the new Zhijie S7 was re-launched after the price of some versions was reduced by 20,000 yuan, and the new version added a pure visual intelligent driving solution, removing the 62-degree battery pack, directly on 82/100 degrees. But more important than the product upgrade, Huawei and China's automobile power process is firmly bound in Yin Tongyue's praise, from SAIC Chen Hong, Changan Zhu Huarong to Chery Yin Tongyue, the attitude of the three Chinese car people towards Huawei is undergoing profound changes.
Text丨Zhijia.com Zero sauce, plum muyu
Editor丨Langlang Mountain and Mingzhi Mountain
Xiaomi Auto, which has just had a big tear with SAIC Zhiji, surprisingly sent out a gentle blessing before the launch of the Zhijie S7. On the afternoon of April 9, Lei Jun posted on Weibo, "The next ten years will be a decade of intelligence, and China's new energy vehicle industry will move forward together." I wish Zhijie S7 a big sale!(Zhijia.com note: "forward" is the slogan of the Xiaomi SU7 press conference)"
And Hongmeng Zhixing also responded on Weibo: "Congratulations to Mr. Lei for leading the Xiaomi car team to achieve the hot sale of SU7 and a successful start!
The same is the 7th generation,ZhijieS7It turned out to be more than XiaomiSU7It has the advantage of being on the market for nearly half a year,At that time, it was a big sale with the new Wenjie M7,ZhijieS7The limelight is also unique for a while。
Among the four models launched by Hongmeng Zhixing so far, the Zhijie S7 is the car with the best quality and performance.
Chery's stronger quality control and manufacturing capabilities once made the outside world particularly optimistic about the Zhijie S7.
But who expected a fire in the backyard.
The news about Chery engineers leaving due to dissatisfaction with the Huawei team spread all over the Internet, and the Zhijie S7, which was trapped in the capacity trap and could not be delivered for a long time, contrasted strongly with the Chery Star Era, which was delivered immediately after listing, and seemed to confirm that the success of AITO could not be replicated.
Chery is not a cialis, and the circumstances of the intellectual world and the question world are very different.
In the past four months, China's smart electric vehicle market has changed dramatically.
A new round of price wars came and went, the starting price of Extreme Krypton 007 was as low as 209,900 yuan, Xiaopeng P7i dropped to 209,900 yuan, Xiaomi SU7 successfully broke the circle with a phenomenal press conference, holding 40,000 orders, and the factory stayed all night.
In the past year, traditional car companies that have been exhausted in the face of Huawei's strong marketing suddenly found that there is another traffic king who is also unstoppable.
Imitation and tribute come and go.
The four-month time advantage was wasted, and the first shot of the Zhijie brand was dumb.
But blessings and misfortunes depend on each other.
In the past year, the question that has scratched the head of the automotive industry is, how can Huawei live in harmony with its old players? Now that it has become the king of traffic that suddenly appears, traditional car companies seem to have no ability to resist except imitation and blunt rubbing.
This time, Chery's attitude has changed.
The change in attitude is not only that Yin Tongyue, who has been building cars for more than 40 years, personally stands for Zhijie as a student, but also Chery's high-end brand Xingtu's Xingtu Star Era ES is directly mixed with Zhijie S7 in the same range in terms of pricing.
On April 11, at the return press conference of the new Zhijie S7, a total of five models were launched: Zhijie S7 Pro, Max, Max+, Max RS four-wheel drive performance version and Ultra four-wheel drive performance version, with a price of 249,800-340,800 yuan, compared with the price of the previous model, in addition to the Pro version and Ultra, the three models of the main sales dropped by 20,000 yuan.
▲Comparison of the price of the old and new Zhijie S7
Of course, a less noticeable point is that the Zhijie S7 has added an Ultra version, forming a complete benchmark for the five models of the Star Era ES.
▲The picture can be clicked to enlarge
▲The overlap of the price range means that in the Chery system, the Star Era and the Zhijie have formed internal competition
After the Xingtu Yaoguang CD-M conference on March 11 this year, Chery's management told Zhijia.com that in order to ensure that its brand positioning (Chery brand, Jietu brand, iCAR brand, and Xingtu brand) can be implemented in place, Chery has adjusted its organizational structure model this year, and integrated the project management personnel, modeling personnel, project management personnel, financial personnel, quality personnel, and marketing personnel in the R&D in the form of business divisions to respond to market demand at the fastest speed.
Exactly one month later, Yin Tongyue, chairman of Chery Automobile, who appeared at Huawei's spring press conference, delivered a jaw-dropping speech, saying:
"As a 40-year-old car driver, my perception is that if China wants to build good cars, it can't do without Huawei. If China wants to change from a big automobile country to an automobile power, it needs the blessing and empowerment of Hongmeng Zhixing. ”
The surprising thing about this passage is that he did not mention that "if Chery wants to build a good car, it can't do without Huawei", but directly set the tone as "China can't do without Huawei if it wants to build a good car".
Yin Tongyue's praise for Huawei even makes people feel like they are killed.
He then changed his tone and said:
"Therefore, we regard cooperation with Huawei as Chery's core strategy and the first priority strategy. Make the intellectual community the first priority project. We have set up a completely independent Zhijie brand division, led by the leader of R&D (Gao Xinhua) and the leader of manufacturing, led by two people, and I and Mr. Yu (Yu Chengdong) communicate offline at least once a month, online communication at least once a week, and WeChat communication every day. ”
The frequency of such exchanges is on par with some couples from major Internet companies in Chaoyang District and Xierqi, and exceeds the frequency with which boarding school children meet their fathers who work at Zhiji Automobile.
With the independence of the Zhijie brand, this means that the Zhijie brand is not only at the same level as Chery's four major brands (Chery brand, Jietu brand, iCAR brand, and Xingtu brand) in terms of organizational structure, but also as the first priority strategy, its resource investment has been better than Xingtu, and of course better than Xingtu.
The Zhijie Brand Division implements independent accounting and independent operation, which also clarifies the cooperation model between a mature OEM like Chery and Hongmeng Zhixing.
Although they are both partners of HarmonyOS Zhixing, Chery and Cialis are very different from each other at the beginning of their cooperation with Huawei.
When Cialis first met Huawei, its own economic situation was in a precarious state, while Chery has maintained a sales increase in recent years and has been the No. 1 brand in overseas exports for many years.
In recent years, every time Zhijia.com meets Chery's management, you can feel their inner self-confidence.
Yin Tongyue's statement is compared with the "soul theory" of SAIC Chairman Chen Hong at the shareholders' meeting three years ago ("It is unacceptable to cooperate with an intelligent driving solution provider like Huawei, so that SAIC becomes a body and the soul is handed over to others. and Zhu Huarong, chairman of Changan Automobile, half a year ago, made a "harm to users" ("Changan Automobile must have its own brand to make cars, and some models will even hurt users" alludes to Huawei's smart car model to make OEMs lose their own brands and hurt users. For details, see "What is Zhu Huarong's view of Huawei?") can be said to completely let go of mustard and face Huawei as a student.
But Yin Tongyue, as a well-respected car person in China's auto industry, is very amazing:
"A German master told me that he said that the first important thing in modeling is proportion, the second most important thing is proportion, and the third important thing is proportion, and in the process of cooperation with Mr. Yu (Yu Chengdong), we found that his pursuit of this proportion is the same as that of the Germans, and the pursuit of technological innovation and the pursuit of details exceeds our imagination. Huawei's ultimate pursuit of products and technology, and the pursuit of paranoia make Huawei a role model for us. We are also learning from Huawei to accelerate technological innovation and brand improvement. ”
Yin Tongyue also emphasized that as the sincerity and strength of cooperation with "great companies", the upgraded Chery Intelligent Connected Super Factory II can increase its production capacity to deliver one Zhijie S7 per minute.
16 seconds faster than the Xiaomi SU7.
Of course, Yin Tongyue's praise for Huawei does not rule out politeness and politeness on specific occasions.
But in fact, it is also a real impulse to Huawei's products.
Describing his feelings after driving the Zhijie S7, he said: "AMAZING!"
For such an evaluation, he even joked to himself: "People of my age rarely have such immature performance."
Behind Yin Tongyue's immature performance, it may have something to do with the strong sales of the world.
According to the data released by Yu Chengdong, "the cumulative orders for the M7 exceeded 174,000 units, and the delivery exceeded 20,000 units for three consecutive months, and the cumulative orders for the M9 exceeded 70,000 units, and the monthly shipment volume is expected to exceed 25,000 units." ”
The sales data of Xingtu Epoch is very heartbreaking: in December 2023, Epoch ES sold 740 units in a single month in China. In January 2024, 504 units were sold in a single month. In February 2024, 482 units were sold in a single month.
In the pure electric vehicle market, there is no traffic, that is, no sales.
With Huawei's strong binding, it is too early to say whether it can reap the same "splashing wealth" as Cialis, but the "splashing traffic" must be stable.
With Yin Tongyue's guarantee, in response to the delivery of Zhijie S7, Yu Chengdong promised at the press conference to "schedule production when the decision is made".
However, after four months of pushing and pulling drawers, the re-listed Zhijie S7 not only quietly reduced the price, but also realized the standard configuration of the whole series of high-end intelligent driving through the addition of configuration, and at the same time removed the 62-degree battery pack and directly went to the 82/100-degree battery pack.
Another surprise is that Zhijie S7 has built-in ETC, 95% discount on national highways, and directly gets the national high-speed network.
As the only one of the four models in this update that has not been reduced in price, the entry-level model Zhijie S7 Pro has found some benefits in the battery pack.
The previous Zhijie S7 Pro was equipped with a 62 kWh lithium iron phosphate battery with a CLTC range of 550 km, while the new Pro pushed the battery pack to 82 kWh and had a range of 705 km.
It is more than 30,000 more expensive than the Xiaomi standard version, runs five kilometers more, and has a pure visual intelligent driving solution.
Other models of Zhijie S7 have also arched the battery pack forward by one level, 62-82, 82-100, and the overall battery life is on par with the leading companies in the industry.
The Zhijie S7 also launched a new model Ultra four-wheel drive performance version, equipped with a 100kWh Huawei 800V whale battery. Under the premise that four-wheel drive models generally sacrifice battery life, the official CLTC comprehensive working condition range can still reach 751km.
This highest battery capacity, comparable to the already delivered Zeekrypton and NIO, is symbolically one degree lower than the Xiaomi SU7, and one-third less than the Zhiji light-year battery that has just been pre-sold.
Of course, the biggest surprise is that the low-end version of the model without lidar is equipped with a high-end intelligent driving function that is purely visual.
Huawei's entry into pure visual intelligent driving is a big surprise.
When Huawei first released the intelligent driving solution, it revealed that it had also considered a pure visual solution in the research and development stage, but considering that China's road conditions are much more complex than those in North America, for safety reasons, the lidar solution was finally used.
At the 100-person meeting of electric vehicles in mid-March this year, Yu Chengdong not only stole the limelight of Xpeng's intelligent driving in person, but also frankly said that Huawei's intelligent driving solution has a high cost due to supply chain and other problems, and it is a loss of money to use the system for models below 300,000.
On April 11, Yu Chengdong first proposed the basic version of Huawei's ADS, that is, a pure visual version that does not include lidar.
Huawei has become the second company to promote the mass production and listing of high-end intelligent driving products with pure vision after Jiyue.
The Zhijie S7 Pro model, which originally did not contain lidar, took advantage of the trend and directly became a pure visual version.
Although it is 30,000 yuan more expensive than the Jiyue 01, which also uses a pure vision solution, it is not impossible to smooth out the gap of 30,000 yuan with a range of 705km, an 800V platform and a Huawei ecosystem.
Yu Chengdong did not explain in detail what configurations the ADS basic version has at the scene, but just threw a report card compared with Tesla, and the results in high-speed NCA coverage, tunnel pass rate, number of de-escalation, intelligent speed regulation, recognition of water horse cone barrel, intelligent parking and other fields are far beyond Tesla, of course, it needs to be clear that this is not Tesla with an FSD version.
On the second day of the press conference, GAC Group also released a pure visual intelligent driving solution that does not rely on high-precision maps and lidar.
As if he had the ability to predict, Yu Chengdong emphasized at the press conference: "The intelligent driving function of the intellectual world is not futures, but spot, and it is the best spot." "There is no concern for advertising laws.
However, there is no harm if there is no comparison, Huawei has launched an independent intelligent driving solution in four months and delivered it to be equipped, and GAC's pure visual intelligent driving, which shouted the slogan, plans to get on the car in 2026, and it will be two years later.
Yin Tongyue said, "If China wants to build good cars, it can't do without Huawei." It can be understood that it is not only a praise for Huawei's technology, but also a description of Huawei's fast iteration efficiency, which pushes the industry forward like a catfish.
This year, Huawei will also jointly build two new brands with BAIC and JAC.
After the rebuilt Zhijie S7, after Yin Tongyue personally made a statement, Huawei's Hongmeng Zhixing mode (smart car mode) was raised to the height of building an automobile power.
It can be said that Yin Tongyue has redefined the relationship between Chinese car companies and Huawei.
However, for such a relationship, there is a view that this is a traditional Chinese car people bowing to traffic.
After the press conference of Xiaomi and Zhiji, many media colleagues are lamenting that the car conference is gradually becoming an attack for car companies to compete for traffic, and products and basic values are becoming less and less important.
Zhijia.com also described the embarrassment of some Chinese car people in front of the traffic of Xiaomi cars in the article "Lei Jun is not a good example":
"In order to chase traffic and rub traffic, many Chinese car companies, and even many new car-making forces, are prostrate in front of Lei Jun's hunger-breaking marketing for Xiaomi SU7. ”
For the hunger and envy of traffic, there is even a view that the traffic battle between Xiaomi and Huawei will be a phenomenal contest this year.
But this is clearly an underestimation of the size and innovation capacity of China's auto market.
In a super car market with annual production and sales exceeding 30 million units, there is plenty of room for innovative companies to grow.
An entrepreneur who has been in the automotive industry for more than 40 years, Yin Tongyue's low profile is where the vitality of China's own brands lies.
And Huawei needs to stay sober at all times in the midst of such praise.
The Huawei HarmonyOS Ecosystem Spring Communication Conference, which was temporarily changed to online, did not have the noisy background sound of "far ahead", but made the display of technology more pure.
This is a unique time, and no one is immune to backlash.