NIO's cheapest new car is finally here!
Some time ago, with a starting price of less than 250,000 yuan, the ideal L6 won more than 40,000 orders in less than 3 weeks after its release, which successfully made the ideal feel a wave of "bitterness", which shows that it is feasible for new power brands to go down the market this way.
No, NIO also hurriedly arranged it! Today, Li Bin, CEO of Weilai, announced at the 500,000th mass production ceremony of Weilai that the new brand Ledao Automobile will be officially announced on May 15, International Family Day, and the first model Ledao L60 will also be released at the same time.
Since the International Day of Families is specifically mentioned, it is implied that the main target customer group of the Ledao brand is home users. As a sub-brand of NIO, Ledao Auto will focus on the pure electric vehicle market of 200,000 yuan to 300,000 yuan, and the new car Ledao L60 is positioned as a mid-size coupe SUV, and its most direct competitor is Tesla's Model Y.
Even the glass of the new car test car is labeled "better than edamame Y", which looks full of confidence.
It is said that this time, Ledao also successfully launched before Xiaopeng MONA, so it is also the first sub-brand in the camp of new domestic forces.
Interestingly, since Model Y entered the Chinese market, it has become a "debut is the peak" player, and it is also the benchmark in the eyes of many competitors, whether it is Xpeng G6, Jiyue 01 or BYD Song L, they are trying to compete with Model Y, but at present, Model Y is still firmly sitting in Diaoyutai, so Ledao L60 is just a new model of a new brand, what is the strength to fight with it?
Judging from the frequently exposed real car pictures and spy photos in recent days, Ledao L60 also adopts a minimalist and sci-fi design style, using a fastback coupe SUV design, and the front face still adopts a split headlight design, which echoes the shape of the fog lamp area below.
In addition, unlike the common 1 roof lidar of NIO models, this new car seems to have been canceled, but it still retains two "horns", that is, two high-pixel cameras, and it is expected to use the vision scheme of millimeter-wave radar + high-definition camera.
The side of the body will adopt a fastback coupe SUV shape similar to that of the NIO EC6, and it will also be equipped with frameless doors and hidden door handles, which will have a similar feel to the BMW X4. The vehicles exposed this time also use privacy glass configurations. It's hard to know if the production version will retain the configuration.
The tail shape is quite similar to that of the NIO EC6, including the camera on the rear windshield and the upturned "ducktail", but the blacked-out rear surround protrudes upwards for a sportier look. At the same time, the through-type taillights were cancelled and replaced with a narrow "L"-shaped taillight cluster, which echoed the front face.
As for the design of the interior of the carriage, this time NIO's secrecy work is very in place, and Li Bin revealed a very wide rear legroom through a video.
In addition, Li Bin also revealed that Ledao L60 will be larger than Tesla Model Y, the central control screen will be larger, and the charging will be faster.
In terms of intelligent driving ability, Ledao will continue Weilai's own advantages, I believe that Nvidia Orin/Orin-X will still be on the car (the follow-up may be replaced by Wei's self-developed Shenji NX9031 chip), with the support of about 100TOPS computing power, so Ledao L60 is likely to support urban areas and high-speed intelligent driving, the only question at present is whether the intelligent driving hardware is standard?
The front is just a decent design and configuration, and what can really make Weilai's new car "bet" is his power configuration and killer "battery swap" technology.
First of all, the power information, it was revealed that the new car will provide two battery packs with different capacities to choose from, namely a 60kWh lithium iron phosphate battery pack and a 90kWh ternary lithium battery pack, provided by BYD and CATL. In addition, all models of the Ledao L60 are based on the 900V silicon carbide platform, which greatly reduces power consumption, and through the low wind resistance styling design, its official energy consumption data is within 13kWh/100km, making it an electric car with official energy consumption lower than that of Tesla Model Y.
Here's the point! It is likely that the new car will continue to use NIO's BaaS car purchase plan, so that the price of the new car can be significantly reduced.
Using NIO ET5 as an example, if you choose the traditional way of buying a car, the price of the entry-level version is 298,000 yuan, but if you choose the BaaS plan, the starting price can be reduced to 228,000 yuan, and then you only need to pay a monthly battery lease fee. Therefore, the entry-level version of the Ledao L60 equipped with a 60kWh lithium iron phosphate battery is generally speculated to start at 229,900 yuan, which may be 40,000 to 50,000 yuan less than the retail price under the BaaS solution, and eventually reach about 170,000 yuan or even lower.
In this regard, a netizen made this suggestion, and a netizen who claimed to be an insider said, "He guessed correctly".
In addition to a more affordable price, Ledao L60 also has a big move that can compete with Model Y, that is, battery swap technology.
At present, the NIO battery swap station has evolved to the third generation, and it only takes 3 minutes to change the battery once, and there is no need to get off the car during the battery swap, so that users can go anywhere conveniently, and they can also achieve flexible upgrades, using small batteries in urban areas and large batteries for long-distance running.
As a comparison, the current peak power of Tesla's supercharging is 250kW, and the fastest charging speed is "15min to replenish 250km", and NIO's advantages are still obvious.
In addition, some netizens have also photographed a disguised suspected red Ledao brand new car in front of the battery swap station testing the battery swap service. In the video, the new car seems to have completed the battery swap and drove out of the battery swap station.
It is also worth mentioning about the chassis suspension of the Ledao L60, a source broke the news that the front suspension of the Ledao L60 is a MacPherson suspension, and the rear suspension is a multi-link (five-link) suspension. Therefore, the Ledao L60 is actually the first model in the entire NIO series to be equipped with MacPherson suspension.
And what's more interesting is that Ledao L60 will also be the first model of NIO's third-generation technology platform NT3.0, although ET9 also has it, but it will not be available this year.
At present, there are many good examples of tuning the front MacPherson suspension, in addition to the Porsche 911 belonging to the luxury car, there are also Volkswagen's ID. family built by MEB architecture, FAW-Volkswagen Audi Q4 e-tron, SAIC Volkswagen Audi Q5 e-tron, etc.
On the whole, the opportunity of Ledao L60 this time is also quite big, and the way to go is still a bit off-edge.
In the past, most of the models that wanted to challenge Tesla's Model Y would attract consumers from the perspectives of providing unique features and higher cost performance, such as through design, intelligence, etc., which were different from Model Y. This approach does attract some buyers who are interested in something new, but it may not be very appealing for die-hard Tesla fans.
However, the strategy of Ledao L60 seems to be different, it is not just about the price, but also about solving some practical car problems, this time some of the configurations of Ledao L60, not that you can buy it with money, they provide some unique experience, which other models cannot provide.
Moreover, Ledao L60 also has an advantage that cannot be ignored, that is, its price threshold is very low, Li Bin himself said, Ledao L60 The cost will be about 10% lower than Model Y.
In addition, the new car has rich configurations, such as the 900V platform, Qualcomm chips, and especially battery swap technology, which are all pluses, and it is easier to gain consumer trust.
Judging from the comments and feedback of netizens, whether the new NIO car can highlight the encirclement is also the price, most people said that if the starting price is really about 200,000, and the price drops to a lower price after adopting the BaaS car purchase plan, then NIO's winning chance is still quite large.
So whether the new car can surprise everyone, we still have to wait until May 15th to know, but judging from the current news, the market prospect of Ledao L60 is still worth looking forward to, and in the end, it is still that sentence, if Ledao L60 can drop the price to about 200,000 to become a hit, there is a high probability that the number of monthly deliveries will exceed 10,000 vehicles, so what do you think? Leave a message in the comment area to talk about it.