Recently, Leapmotor C16 was officially launched. As a medium and large SUV, Leapmotor C16 has a "2+2+2" seat layout, and has two power forms of extended range and pure electric, as well as 8295 chips, lidar and other configurations, and the price is very gratifying, with a price between 155,800 yuan and 185,800 yuan.
Therefore, as soon as the model was released, it quickly caused heated discussions on the Internet. However, there are too many interpretations of the configuration on the Internet, so today the author will stand in the perspective of the industry and talk about the views on Leap C16.
In the author's opinion, the birth of Leapmotor C16 is a product with a clear positioning and a successful business path.
Crossing the river with ideals
First of all, Leapmotor C16 is a product with a clear positioning, and it lays out an extremely promising track.
When it comes to words such as "daddy car" and "family travel" in the automobile market, you are likely to think of the ideal first, Li Xiang, who is known as the "excellent product manager in the automobile circle", has walked out of a new road in the new energy vehicle track with his understanding of user needs.
You know, for most people, everyone will have different needs at different ages, young people pay more attention to performance cars, and when they are older, they may choose models with a more mature and stable appearance, but no matter how people's needs change, most people will inevitably experience marriage and children, so what will people's needs be at this time?
Transporting children to and from school on congested roads, taking the family out on weekends, etc., in this case, comfort, large space, and entertainment naturally become a necessity.
It is precisely by virtue of this that most of Li Auto's products have accurately hit the positioning of people with babies, and the word "family" is inevitably brought to the publicity, which seems to be telling users from the beginning what kind of people this car is going to sell to. For example, the ideal L6 positioning family five-seat luxury SUV, the ideal L7 family five-seat flagship SUV, the ideal L8 family six-seat luxury SUV, the ideal L9 family six-seat flagship SUV and so on.
You know,Although these products have become the choice of many home users,But there is still a problem,That is, the price is too high,Even the ideal L6 that has been listed recently,The price has reached 249,800 yuan。
According to the data released by the China Passenger Car Association, in the first quarter of 2024, in the price segment structure of the national passenger car market, the sales of models of 50,000-100,000 yuan, 100,000-150,000 yuan and 150,000-200,000 yuan accounted for the highest proportion, accounting for 66.7% of the overall market sales. In other words, although Ideal has a sales volume that the new forces are proud of, the coverage of its products is not wide.
So for users whose target models are priced below 200,000 yuan, how should they meet the needs of bringing babies?
This is the meaning of the Leap C16. According to Leaprun, 50% of the users who previously ordered Leap C16 were families with two children or more, and 65% were three-generation families, of which the proportion of additional purchases and purchases was as high as 91%.
At this point, the user portrait of Leap C16 is very clear. When they are young, they may also love performance, off-road, etc., and buy a car more to meet their own demands, but when they get married and have children, the focus of using a car will also begin to shift to the family, and consumers pay more attention to cost performance.
For these users, Leap C16 has become a very suitable choice. Large space six-seater SUV, 5290L car volume, MPV-like space design, 2+2+2 seat layout, 67.2% space utilization, range extension and pure electric two power forms, global 800V fast charging, 8295 chip, lidar, NVIDIA Orin-X chip, actually only need 155,800 yuan-185,800 yuan of the price, in the comment area of the Leap account, the comments about C16 are also very interesting.
In other words, in the field of new energy "daddy car", it is the ideal that carries forward this track, and Leap has become the complement of this track with its more extreme cost performance. If the ideal is to cross the river by feeling the stones, then the Leap C16 on the market at this time is obviously crossing the river by feeling the ideal.
ZeroRun's path to success
After the launch of the Leap C16, some netizens ridiculed with such a sentence: "The Leap C16 has brought down the 'ideal' price." ”
It is inevitable that netizens will have such opinions, because Leap has always been the "king of volumes" among the new forces, and its founder Zhu Jiangming even said that he wants to make Leap into Uniqlo in the automobile industry.
Although the price is close to the people, the materials used in the Leap C16 are not bad. At the press conference, Leapmotor said that the core components of Leapmotor C16 are all first-class suppliers of luxury cars. Some people may wonder, how did Leap C16 achieve such a luxurious configuration, but the price is so close to the people?
The author summarizes it into three points: global self-development, generalization of parts, and scale effect.
Since its birth, Leapmotor has regarded global self-development as the company's technology card. According to Zhu Jiangming, "we have 60% of the cost of parts are self-developed, which can save part of the cost space and pass the profit to users." ”
For example, the price of a component is 100 yuan, the gross profit is 10 yuan, if it is purchased from the supplier, it will be transferred to the supplier, and the additional cost will be paid, but if it is zerorun self-development, then you can save this part of the cost, according to Zhu Jiangming, the parts that account for 60% of the cost are self-developed and self-made, and because of this, zerorun can have more room for cost reduction.
Judging from the pictures released at the scene, including multiple components in the cockpit, intelligent driving, electronic and electrical architecture, electric drive system, battery system, and vehicle system architecture, it shows strong research and development capabilities.
The second point is to make the car manufacturing platform and the parts general. To put it simply, the parts of different models can be used universally for models based on the same platform, which can not only greatly reduce the development cycle when launching new models, but also greatly reduce costs. As can be seen from the pictures at the Leapmotor press conference, the generalization rate of its parts is as high as 88%, which is also an important factor for Leapmotor C16 to have a people-friendly price.
Finally, there is the scale effect of industrial production. You know, although new energy vehicles have been endowed with many attributes, but in the final analysis, it is still a car, which is inseparable from the scale effect of industrial production.
For example, the design and R&D costs of a car are fixed, the cost of building a production line and the cost of production machines are also fixed, including the design cost of car parts, transportation channels, etc.
In other words, when the sales volume comes up, the more cars are sold, the lower the cost will be amortized.
The crux of the problem is that Leaprun has a very low price by virtue of global self-development, universal parts and platform production, so that Leaprun C16 has a very low price, as long as the product is increased, profitability is naturally not a problem, this is already a successful path explored by Leaprun, and it is also the core reason why it has always been called the "new power volume king".
End
As early as the beginning of 2023, at the annual new product launch conference of Leapmotor, Leapmotor brought a variety of models and released a new brand strategy, which not only lowered the prices of all models, but also launched a cost-effective extended-range version.
It is precisely because of this move that Leaprun's sales will turn against the trend in 2023, and in the 2023 annual financial report previously released by Leaprun, Leaprun also achieved a positive annual gross profit margin of 0.5% for the first time, laying the foundation for the future new energy competition. In the past June, Leapmotor delivered 20,116 vehicles, and officially entered the 20,000 club. And all of this is inseparable from the successful path of Leaprun.
So after having a successful path, how to start the volume?
Naturally, there is a need for a product with a clear positioning, and the layout is an extremely promising track, and through the analysis above, the "family car" that Leap C16 bets on has been a successful case, and the price of Leap C16 is cheaper, and the range of users covered is also wider.
It can be seen that Leapmotor C16 is a successful path to meet a product with extremely promising market prospects. Under the combination of the two, the effect of "1+1>2" will inevitably be formed, which will arouse strong repercussions in the automobile market.