Pickup trucks seem to be a very "screwed" model in China.
Since its inception in 1925, pickup trucks have been popular for nearly 100 years, surpassing almost all other models in terms of adaptability to outdoor scenes. Pickup trucks have been the best-selling model in the United States for many years in a row, and they dominate the sales charts.
However, pickup trucks have suffered serious adaptation in China. In 2023, China's pickup truck sales will be less than 330,000 units (excluding exports), compared to the total sales of more than 30 million vehicles, which can be described as "pitiful".
At the end of the day, the impression of pickup trucks on Chinese users is too deep-rooted, they are only limited to the field of pulling goods, off-road, the road is too narrow, and it cannot meet the needs of users.
In this case, so that when the new energy wave arrives, almost no pickup truck brands can realize how much success the pickup truck can achieve by the advantages of new energy technology and the super outdoor scene adaptability of the pickup truck.
After Tesla launched the Cybertruck, it seems that some people realized that pickup trucks can still be built like this, and the market can be so big.
In fact, in Cybertruck, a Chinese company has already entered this market, and launched a year earlier than Cybertruck, with new energy technology to raise the upper limit of product quality, greatly expand the boundaries of outdoor scenes, verify the feasibility of new energy pickups, and complete market expansion, attracting more attention to focus on this market segment.
This company is Geely Radar, a new energy outdoor ecological brand.
Build a Chinese version of the Cybertruck
The brand of Radar may be relatively unfamiliar to most people, but as a mid-to-high-end new energy intelligent vehicle company focusing on outdoor ecology, Radar focuses on the pickup market segment by sharing Geely Holding's superior resources and professional strength, and has formed differentiated development with Geely Automobile, Lynk & Co, Zeekr, Lotus and other key sectors of Geely Holding Group.
Geely Radar has the first M.A.P radar Hanhai platform under the outdoor ecological new energy architecture in China, which not only provides the radar horizon with basic pickup attributes beyond traditional pickups, but also enables it to have three attributes: energy platform, IoT platform and intelligent platform.
From the perspective of the supply side of the market, there is a serious shortage of fuel pickup trucks in the mainland, although Great Wall, Jiangling, JAC and other brands are currently showing a trend of competition in the field of fuel pickups, but the layout of the electric pickup market is not extensive, not to mention products that have subversive significance for the industry like Tesla Cybertruck, on the other hand, the positioning of radar is to focus on the electric pickup market.
Electrification transformation has become the main theme of almost all car companies, because the transformation of energy drive form will bring some new functions and gameplay, and when pickup trucks also begin to turn to electrification, its capabilities in all dimensions have also ushered in an unprecedented improvement.
From the point of view of product positioning, the characteristics of the pickup truck make it have the passability of SUV, the comfort of the sedan and the loading of light trucks, although the pickup trucks in the mainland are mainly cargo-based, but after the arrival of electrification, with the advent of models such as the radar horizon, more and more players and even family users have begun to pay attention to this category.
What sparks will be generated when a pickup truck is electrocuted?
First of all, let's look at the passability, usually this is an important criterion for us to choose an off-road SUV, we need to test the power of the vehicle, chassis and other links, and as a qualified pickup, it also needs to be comparable to the off-road SUV in this regard to be considered up to the standard.
For electric vehicles, the most important thing is power, Radar Horizon This product is also China's first high-performance dual-electric drive system pickup, just look at the book data, this powertrain can burst out of 315kW of peak total power, including 115kW of the front motor, and 200kW of the rear motor, the peak total torque can reach 594N.m. For comparison, the Radar Horizon has 1.6 times the peak power and 1.3 times the peak torque of the Ranger.
In traditional fuel pickup trucks, limited by low-end and tool-based attributes, the power performance is often not outstanding, but based on such a powertrain of 97.1% ultra-efficient motor, the radar horizon can achieve 000 acceleration in 4.5s, and the maximum speed is 190km/ h, in terms of power performance, it is equivalent to a 3.0T large pickup truck, which is a patent for a few expensive high-end models in the era of fuel vehicles, and in the era of electrification, the performance of dual-motor four-wheel drive allows ordinary users to have, and to some extent, it is also regarded as the right to science and technology.
For users of pickup trucks, trekking through mountains and rivers is a high-frequency car use scenario, which puts forward more stringent requirements for the passability of the vehicle. Compared with traditional pickups, the chassis of the radar horizon is already very high, and more importantly, the driving modes are really rich, such as off-road, wading and other different modes, which can be fully adapted to different road conditions to meet complex road conditions such as mud, snow, sand and gravel, and its strong ability to get out of trouble makes it easy to control various offroad scenarios.
Take wading as an example, in the face of 300mm wading depth, the radar horizon does not need to switch any driving mode, only need a foot accelerator pedal to pass smoothly, and in the face of deeper wading depth, you need to turn on the professional wading mode, at this time the vehicle will automatically turn off the air circulation function of A/C, thereby reducing the safety risk of the vehicle, the data shows that the maximum wading depth of the radar horizon is 815mm, the data is the first in China's pickup, which shows its strong passability.
Friends who are keen on traditional hard-core off-road vehicles know that in the face of some particularly complex and difficult-to-pass road conditions, it is usually necessary to take the initiative to hang differential locks, adjust the suspension height, inflate tires and a series of other operations, but for Radar Horizon, all you have to do is choose different driving modes, and the rest can be handed over to this car.
It can be said that the radar horizon gives full play to the technical advantages of electric four-wheel drive, and realizes intelligent recognition functions such as load recognition, climbing recognition, and all-terrain recognition through environmental fusion technology and intelligent algorithms, which is simply a dimensionality reduction blow for traditional pickups.
Through the all-scene adaptive technology, the radar horizon will also dynamically adjust the torque distribution in real time, greatly improving the control accuracy and response rate, which is reported to be 10 times faster than the Ranger, because it will appear more relaxed when dealing with complex environments and road conditions.
Electric pickup trucks explore new scenarios
As more and more outdoor demand has been born, electric pickup trucks have gradually become a popular outdoor item, although the track selected by radar cars seems to be niche, but because of the sweep of electrification and intelligence, electric pickup trucks not only calmly cope with the off-road road conditions that traditional pickup trucks are good at, but also can create a richer expansibility than traditional pickups.
For example, in terms of towing capacity, because the electric pickup truck brings stronger torque and power, it also allows it to support 3000kg towing capacity, and this is basically the current level of high-end pickups, which can fully meet the needs of users towing RVs, ATV motorcycles, yachts and other large-scale outdoor play equipment, which is the most needed ability for many current senior players, and can really make users play.
As a representative of the current pure electric pickup, the radar horizon is also very good in terms of load, with a maximum rated load of 865kg, more than 700 kg more than the traditional pickup, and it is also the product with the highest rated load of the original pure electric pickup, and it is very intimate to add the industry's only cargo capacity display function, which can fully meet the needs of outdoor play, agricultural and fishery transportation and emergency rescue.
If you want to say that the attributes that can best highlight the attributes of the radar horizon electric vehicle, it also belongs to the full-scene discharge function it is equipped with. The radar horizon has a maximum of 21kW discharge function, you should know that the power of the general new energy vehicle external discharge is mostly about 3kw, from the power point of view, the external discharge of 3kw can already support high-power outdoor appliances such as electric cooking hot pot, which is enough for most users.
However, the engineers of the radar horizon are obviously not satisfied, so it is equipped with 21kw external discharge, which means that it can even be transformed into a super power plant at any time to meet the needs of 380V industrial/commercial and 220V household discharge.
For example, when camping, you can not only eat hot pot and sing songs, but even use the powerful discharge function provided by the radar horizon to build a large outdoor venue, large-scale projection, band instruments, and on-site lighting are not a problem, which is a new possibility in the expansion of the scene after the technical advantage is transformed into an experience advantage.
Of course, the vision of the radar horizon is not limited to this, it also hopes to create an outdoor IoT ecology, the coverage of the Internet of Things reaches 300 square meters, and the number of intelligent hardware categories connected to the ecology can be concurrently accessed exceeds 100, which is a bolder imagination, we can take the radar horizon as an outdoor mobile home, how to build this home, users can completely DIY on demand.
In the competition of the new energy intelligent pickup market, the "ecology" wins the world, and the radar brand has a deep insight into the changes in user needs in this process, and has created a new outdoor format based on a series of leading strengths such as the electric ecology of super pure electric pickup trucks.
epilogue
Combined with the product functions of the radar horizon, the electric pickup can almost do what the fuel pickup can do, but on the contrary, the electric pickup can do, the fuel pickup can not necessarily be realized, which is the dimensionality reduction blow brought by the new species.
In terms of parameters and performance, the radar horizon is not worse than Tesla's Cybertruck in terms of comprehensive competitiveness, and it is better than it in terms of scenario-based applications, and more importantly, compared with the Cybertruck, the price advantage of the radar horizon is very obvious.
This is of great significance to the development of China's pickup truck market, if 2024 is the first year of electrification of China's pickup truck market, then the radar horizon is the vanguard that rushes to the forefront, which brings fresh blood to the Chinese pickup truck industry that is still in the fuel era.
(This article was first published on the Titanium Media App)