The "price war" in the automotive industry that started in 2023 is still "burning".
This has led to a more serious wait-and-see mood among some domestic consumers in the first quarter of this year, but under the joint stimulation of the preferential treatment of car companies and dealers and the automobile subsidy policies of local governments, the terminal transaction volume of the domestic passenger car market has indeed shown signs of gradual recovery.
According to the number of domestic and imported vehicles that best reflects the real transaction volume of the market, domestic passenger car sales in the first quarter of this year increased by 15.8% year-on-year to 4.952 million units.
Among them, February and March fell by 14.6% and 3.9% year-on-year, respectively, but fortunately, on the basis of lower sales in the same period last year, the year-on-year increase in January rose by 71.4%, making up for the losses caused by the first two.
The decline for two consecutive months was mainly due to the sharp decline of 18.5% and 20.6% year-on-year sales of conventional fuel vehicles, respectively. In particular, in March, although the total market volume has rebounded to 1.60 million units, there were only 893,000 units of traditional fuel vehicles, an increase of only 150,000 units month-on-month.
The decline in the passenger car market narrowed to single digits in March, mainly due to the relatively strong trend of the new energy market (including plug-in hybrid, pure electric, range extender, methanol and fuel cell), which increased by 30.7% year-on-year, creating a new increase of 167,000 units.
The completely different trends of traditional fuel and new energy have made major changes in the market in March: the share of traditional fuel vehicles fell to 55.8%, and the penetration rate of new energy exceeded 40% for the first time in a single month, and reached 44.2%, exceeding the previous highest value of 38.5% in November 2023 by nearly 6 percentage points.
This is of course due to the continued growth of pure electric and plug-in hybrid (including range extenders).
Specifically, after years of rapid progress, the growth rate of the pure electric market in the past two years has indeed slowed down significantly.
Affected by the Spring Festival factor, coupled with the high base of comparison, the year-on-year growth of this segment directly turned negative in February this year, but immediately returned to the growth track in March, with 422,000 units not only increasing by 11.0% year-on-year, but even slightly higher than the 372,000 units in January, which also allowed the year-on-year growth rate of pure electric vehicles in the first quarter to maintain at 19.7%.
The rapid recovery of the pure electric market in March is due to the efforts of brands such as BYD, Wuling, Geely, Changan, NIO, Deep Blue, Chery, Zeekr, Xpeng, Volkswagen and Buick, among which the biggest contributor is BYD.
As we all know, in the past two years, in order to achieve higher annual goals and seize more market share, BYD has released several new models, including pure electric models such as Seagull, Song L and Yuan UP, plus the launch of Qin PLUS, Yuan PLUS, Dolphin, Song PLUS and other models at the beginning of this year, actively promoting the rise of pure electric sales.
At the same time, plug-in hybrid sales continued to grow rapidly, with a year-on-year increase of 78.0% in March and 81.0% in the first quarter, continuing to provide the strongest growth momentum for new energy and even the entire passenger vehicle.
The difference in the development trend of the two has also narrowed the gap between their proportion in the new energy market.
Relying on the strong support of the government, the active promotion of car companies and the advantages of early start, the volume of the pure electric market in mainland China has always been significantly larger than that of plug-in hybrids.
However, with the rapid development of the new energy market in recent years, the number of domestic electric vehicles has increased rapidly, and as of the end of last year, it has exceeded the threshold of 20 million for the first time, which also makes the inconvenience and problems in the use of electric vehicles gradually exposed.
Among them, due to the pain points such as high dependence on energy supplement, generally expensive prices, low value retention rate, low actual mileage and poor comfort, consumers' satisfaction with pure electric vehicles is getting lower and lower.
Plug-in hybrids, which have greater advantages in charging, price and usage scenarios, are increasingly favored by consumers, and car companies are also launching more and more corresponding models.
Especially in the past two years, with the joint efforts of independent brands such as BYD, Ideal, Wenjie, Tank, Denza, Deep Blue and Geely, the plug-in hybrid market has become the most dynamic segment in the entire passenger car market.
This also makes the gap between plug-in hybrid and pure electric in terms of sales continue to narrow, last year they accounted for about 3:7 in domestic new energy sales, after entering this year, whether it is a single month or a quarter of plug-in hybrid accounted for more than 40%.
For now, the sales of pure electric vehicles in the domestic passenger car market this year will still be far ahead of plug-in hybrids, and the whole year may end at about 6:4.
In terms of vehicle types, when the penetration rate of new energy exceeded 40% for the first time in March, the market share of new energy cars and new energy SUVs also exceeded 20% for the first time, at 21.3% and 21.1% respectively.
According to the list of the top 20 sales of sedans and SUV models in March, although there is still a certain gap between the volume of new energy and traditional fuel, the number of new energy models in the two lists has been almost equal to that of fuel vehicles, and the top three seats are mostly occupied by new energy.
For example, in the TOP20 sedans, even if Nissan Sylphy won the third place, BYD destroyer 05 and BYD Han are only more than 1,000 less than it, and the gap is not big, and the top five SUV sales are all in the bag of new energy.
What's more noteworthy is that in March, the peak of Tesla's delivery, the sales champion of the domestic passenger car market is no longer Model Y, but BYD Qin PLUS.
This is very rare. The reason behind it is obvious, it is the above-mentioned Qin PLUS Glory Edition on the market, which reduced the starting price of the car to 79,800 yuan, and for the first time probed to the price band of 100,000 yuan, which caused a large market response and also obtained a large number of orders.
As for the smaller MPV market, its share of the passenger car market finally returned to more than 5% in March, the first time since July last year. This is mainly due to the contribution of new energy products such as Denza D9, Xpeng X9, Li MEGA, VOYAH Dreamer, Trumpchi E8, BYD E6 and Trumpchi E9 with a 1.7% share, creating a very considerable new increment.
Although, up to now, among the many new energy MPV models, only the sales of Denza D9 can compete with traditional fuel MPVs such as Buick GL8, Toyota Sena and Trumpchi M8, and the rest of the models are mostly unable to rank among the top ten in the MPV market, especially pure electric MPVs such as Xpeng X9 and Ideal MEGA, but it has to be admitted that their arrival does provide consumers with more choices, thereby increasing the sales of new energy MPVs.
To sum up, at present, in the domestic passenger car market, affected by factors such as imperfect charging infrastructure and high prices, the growth rate of pure electric vehicles has indeed slowed down significantly, but it will continue to maintain positive growth in the future. At the same time, due to the advantages of charging, price and usage scenarios, plug-in hybrid will continue to grow rapidly, and sales will continue to approach pure electric vehicles, becoming a vital backbone in the new energy and even the entire passenger car market together with the latter.