On the evening of May 15, Weilai's sub-brand Ledao was officially released, and its first model, Ledao L60, also made its debut, which is a medium-sized pure electric SUV, benchmarking Tesla Model Y and other models, with a pre-sale price of 219,900 yuan.
In terms of pre-sale price alone, Ledao L60 is not cheap, after all, we can indeed buy a pure electric medium-sized SUV within 200,000 yuan on the market today, but for Weilai, this price is low enough, it is the cheapest Weilai model ever, this is the meaning of the existence of the Ledao brand, you can use Weilai's technology, and it can lower the price, so as not to hurt the brand image of Weilai.
The relationship between Weilai and Ledao is like that between Lexus and Toyota, and some models of the two can have no difference in powertrain, body size, and chassis structure, but Lexus will be better in terms of materials and configuration, focusing on texture, Toyota brand can be slightly worse in terms of texture, focusing on people-friendly prices, and the advantage of this is to meet more diversified needs without significantly increasing research and development costs.
But the relationship between Weilai and Ledao is obviously different from Lexus and Toyota, Toyota can give up texture for the sake of cost, give up a lot of configurations, but Ledao will not, at least from the information released so far, Ledao L60 is still maintained at a relatively high level.
According to Weilai's official statement, Ledao L60 can achieve low prices, the reason is related to improving the capacity utilization rate of the factory, evenly sharing the cost of technology research and development, and improving the utilization rate of the energy supplement system, and Weilai also hopes that Ledao L60 can have excellent sales, so that there will be stronger bargaining power in the supply chain, so as to better control costs.
Of course, Ledao L60 will also follow Tesla's example, in some configurations to reduce costs, for example, from the current announcement, the entire Ledao L60 car only provides a 17.2-inch central control screen, and there is no dashboard or co-pilot screen, and it will also use integrated die-casting technology, such a design can indeed reduce costs to a certain extent, at least Tesla has proved that such an operation is feasible through practice.
At the same time, in terms of assisted driving functions, Ledao L60 will not be as radical as NIO models, the four Orin-X solutions currently used by NIO are very high in terms of cost, compared with the current mainstream dual Orin-X scheme hardware cost doubled, but it does not seem to bring significant advantages in terms of assisted driving capabilities. Ledao L60 will inevitably adjust the assisted driving hardware, but in the style of NIO, the shrinkage should not be very strong, and relevant information should be revealed in the future.
What's more critical is that Ledao L60 retains the core competitiveness of Weilai "battery swap", and the existing Weilai battery swap station can meet the needs of the Ledao brand after a simple transformation, which makes Ledao L60 have 2000 or even 3000 battery swap stations available at the beginning of delivery.
In the author's opinion, the biggest surprise of Ledao L60 is that it really pays attention to the needs of the family, in the domestic market, the family car is the most mainstream model, and the success of the Model Y is largely due to the relatively balanced performance in all aspects. Ledao L60 is obviously going to Tesla's target users, so what Model Y can do, Ledao L60 must go further.
"Further" the biggest embodiment is in terms of space and comfort, the official said that Ledao L60 adopts a short front and rear overhang, long wheelbase design, length, width and height are 4828/1930/1616mm, wheelbase is 2950mm, rear net knee room can reach 160mm, and Model Y is only 45mm, such space performance is indeed good enough, although comfort is still very related to the seat and sitting posture, etc., but can achieve large space, it is already the first step to success.
The FSD variable damping suspension is also not absent, and with sensors and ECUs, it can monitor the driving status of the vehicle in real time and adjust the damping hardness of the shock absorbers as needed to ensure the performance in terms of handling and comfort.
At the power level, the power parameters of Ledao L60 have not been announced, but the official said that the comprehensive energy consumption of Ledao L60 is only 12.1kW/100km, which is a lower data than Model Y, the reason is that the drag coefficient of Ledao L60 is only 0.229, which is the lowest drag coefficient of the world's mass-produced SUV, coupled with the blessing of the 900V silicon carbide high-voltage platform, the energy consumption is naturally not high.
Back to the question in the title, will the Ledao L60 be a model that people talk about? The author believes that the current information is not very convincing, after all, there is no shortage of products with excellent paper strength in this market, and the final sales volume has a lot to do with pricing, production capacity, etc.
If, as rumored, Ledao L60 can provide a battery leasing scheme when it is listed, and control the price of the naked car at about 150,000, it will be more cost-effective and has the potential to be a popular model. Since you have chosen the involution, you might as well involute more thoroughly, and now in this market, there is no courage to break the kettle, and no matter how strong the strength is, it will not work.