The automotive media is losing the good days .

Visual China.

Text |Consumption at the forefront.

A few days ago, it was revealed that Xiaopeng would ask questions ** out of the auto show venue, and Xiaopeng Public Relations complained that he couldn't even read the financial report. This incident has sparked a lot of discussion, and this is not an isolated case, similar disputes between car companies and ** will appear on social platforms from time to time.

In the past two years, the relationship between car companies and ** has visibly occurred some antagonistic emotions. At the same time, car companies have also begun to spread the word in person, and the trend of no longer completely pinning on the best is very obvious.

At 6:32 a.m. on December 17, Li Bin and an employee drove a NIO ET7 from Shanghai, when the temperature was minus 2 degrees Celsius. After passing through Cicheng, Taizhou, Cangnan, Fu'an, Lianjiang and Puli service areas, it finally arrived at the Longdudong service area in Xiamen City, Fujian Province at 20:33 in the evening of the same day. The live broadcast was mainly to test the range of NIO's 150kWh battery pack, and its final score reached 1044 km.

Can a battery run 1000 kilometers?Such a gimmicky-filled topic quickly attracted a lot of attention on social platforms, and the heat around NIO returned again.

The CEO went live and tested the battery life, which is the first in the industry, Li Bin seemed to be full of excitement, and even suggested during the live broadcast that "in the future, the CEO will personally test it and do a live broadcast". It is not yet known what other car companies think, but when the fairness and rigor of the auto platform test are more and more questioned by car companies, the executives personally go to the driving test, which is more like a direct counterattack to the right to speak in the auto ** evaluation.

Li Bin's live broadcast was not only hot, but also accompanied by doubts. One of the more important points is that the speed of the car is too slow, which makes the range of more than 1000 kilometers seem less reliable.

During the whole process of the live broadcast, according to NIO, the total driving time without dwell time in this measurement was 124 hours, the average speed is only 839 kmh. Among them, Li Bin was almost at a speed of about 90 kilometers per hour during the air connection with He Xiaopeng, chairman of Xiaopeng Motors. Run 90 kilometers on the highway?This is too slow for most drivers, not to mention, this live broadcast is going south, the temperature is getting higher, if you go north, it is obviously doubtful whether you can reach 1000 kilometers.

This live broadcast test is not perfect, and there are many criticisms and complaints, but on the one hand, it does confirm that NIO's 150kWh battery pack can reach a range of 1000 kilometers, allowing NIO to go out of the circle again and attract traffic;On the other hand, compared with the executives of new energy vehicle companies competing to "brag about themselves" on PPT and talk ruthlessly in the air, the form of live test seems to be more able to show the relevant information of the vehicle more realistically.

Consumers are happy to see it, and the personal test in the live broadcast room carries all kinds of uncertainties and accidents, and this process may be more valuable than the information promoted at the press conference.

It is also a test, and not long ago, the winter test of the car emperor also caused an uproar in the car circle. On December 5, the results of the "2023 Winter Test" were released, in which the test results of the pure electric range achievement rate of hybrid models under severe cold conditions were publicly "ridiculed" by many car companies. First, Yu Chengdong bombarded that Chedi was "a test to mislead the people", and then Yang Xueliang, vice president of Geely, also bluntly said that "it is not scientific, not rigorous, and the conclusion is not convincing".

Not to mention whether the standards and implementation of Chedi Winter Test are unscientific and rigorous, this incident has publicly amplified the conflict between car companies and auto platforms, and linked to Li Bin's live broadcast, the CEO of car companies will also have a weakening effect on the influence of the auto ** platform to a certain extent. These two things actually illustrate a problem, whether it is advertising and marketing or consumer trust, the right to speak in the automobile ** seems to be being snatched by new energy vehicle companies.

For example, after the evaluation was held, after the "Understanding Car Emperor Winter Test Standard Questioning Communication Meeting", Great Wall Motors announced that based on its own years of car manufacturing accumulation, combined with national standards, Great Wall Motors has built a new energy environment testing capability, which is now open to the whole industry. Wenjie revealed on social platforms that before each new car is launched, Huawei and Cialis engineers will conduct rigorous tests.

What does this mean?Before the emergence of authoritative evaluation standards, car companies don't want to let the automotive platform lead the way.

As a rising star of the automotive vertical platform, Chedi has risen rapidly in recent years, and has formed a three-legged situation with the old Autohome and Yiche. Because the revenue of this kind of automotive vertical platform mainly comes from two businesses: sales lead services and advertising and marketing services, and ByteDance is standing behind Chedi, and the blessing of algorithms and traffic gives it a natural advantage in both aspects.

It's just that in the era of new energy vehicles, there have been new changes.

before 2020).

2020 onwards).

From the perspective of the decision-making path of consumers buying cars around 2020, compared with Internet coal and Internet pan-coal, one trend is that Internet pan-media has a longer chain of marketing and direct conversion capabilities, which has an increasing impact on the entire decision-making path. Similarly, the media preference and purchase influencing factors of the intended buyers of automobiles, Jd.The report of the Power China Automotive** Study (AMS) compares the degree to which various information channels help NEV owners and fuel vehicle owners, as can be seen from the figure

Compared with fuel vehicle owners, the official website of automobile manufacturers and their apps have greatly improved the help of new energy vehicle owners in purchasing decisions, and have been on a par with the automotive vertical ** and its APP;In addition, observing new energy vehicle owners, comprehensive forums such as knowledge sharing** social networking and its APP, **live broadcast** and its APP, dealers** and its APP, search, shopping ** and its APP and other information channels are significantly more helpful to their decision-making than fuel vehicle owners.

The change in consumers' car purchase decisions is an impact on automotive vertical platforms such as Chedi, which shrinks its value in advertising and marketing, and the launch of car companies is also dispersed to other information channels.

Li Auto is an example, in terms of cooperation with KOLs, Li Auto has always liked to put bloggers in different fields on various platforms, and does not focus on car bloggers. Among the 6,245 influencers who were put in the past month in July, only 27% of the bloggers in the car introduction, car modification, and car life categories accounted for only 27%, and all the others were bloggers in the fields of life, workplace, and clothing.

Compared with marketing, the greater role of the automotive vertical platform is actually to help car companies find potential customers, which corresponds to the platform's sales lead service. If the diversified marketing of new energy vehicle companies is more in line with the changes in consumer behavior, then for the link of finding potential customers, new energy vehicle companies strive to hold users in their own hands and create private domain traffic.

For example, the Internet car-making forces represented by Wei Xiaoli have always been willing to reinvest at the user level, and they have adopted a series of measures to maintain the connection between car owners and brands, enhance their sense of identity, and increase user stickiness. It is understood that the NIO app has more than 5 million registered users, with more than 500,000 DAU (daily active users) and more than 15 million MAU (monthly active users).

Now, traditional car companies have followed suit and operated their own "user assets".

Although the user base of the automotive vertical platform is still there, this practice of car companies has undoubtedly reduced the dependence on the automotive vertical platform. As one analyst worried, "in the future, auto factories will spend a lot of money to build their own apps to operate their own user base, and the users of traditional portals** will gradually decrease, which will make the data of automotive content platforms become a source of water."

In the past two years, the pattern of the automotive vertical platform has undergone new changes: Autohome has been listed on the Hong Kong stock market, and Bitcar has been privatized with the backing of Tencent and JD.com, and Chedi has quickly become the top of the industry. Although the support of the giants has made it more stable, the development trend is not optimistic.

According to Autohome's financial report, in 2022, Autohome achieved revenue of 69400 million yuan, net profit 185.5 billion yuan, compared with 72 in 2021400 million yuan in revenue and 22500 million yuan of net profit, revenue and net profit have declined. Among them, ** service, lead service, ** marketing and other income, the revenue was 196.3 billion yuan, 305.7 billion yuan, 19$2.1 billion.

The most critical thing is lead service. Judging from the financial report, from 2019 to 2021, Autohome's revenue from clue services was 327.5 billion yuan, 319.8 billion yuan, 298.8 billion yuan, declining year by year. Although 2022 is a little higher than 2021, it is only 305.7 billion yuan, not as good as in 2019 and 2020.

The decline in lead service revenue is largely attributable to dealers. At the beginning of this year, an incident happened in the automotive industry, where the three major automotive online drainage platforms were collectively condemned, due to the sharp price increase of the automotive online platform when formulating a cooperation plan with auto dealers in 2023. To this end, the auto dealer chambers of commerce in Hunan, Sichuan, Anhui and Shenzhen and other provinces and cities issued a statement, and then the China Automobile Dealers Association also called for a temporary suspension of price adjustments for the three major automobile networks.

This incident reveals an essential contradiction: the vertical platform of the car wants to make more money through price increases, but most dealers have no money in their pockets, and they are busy reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

According to a survey by the China Automobile Dealers Association, the inventory warning index of China's auto dealers in December 2022 was 582%, which is above the boom and bust line, coupled with staff turnover and poor operating conditions, has triggered pressure such as a shortage of working capital. The "2022 National Auto Dealer Survival Survey Report" released by the China Automobile Dealers Association in February this year also shows that less than 20% of dealers completed the annual sales target last year, and less than 30% of dealers achieved profitability, 452% of dealers are in the red.

A car dealer in Jiangsu said, "Selling cars is no longer as profitable as it used to be, we must strictly control costs, and the best way to get leads is also the main area of throttling." ”

With the end of the epidemic and the development of automobile consumption, the survival situation of dealers has improved somewhat this year, but the current change of fuel vehicles and new energy vehicles does not seem to make traditional dealers feel optimistic, which also casts a shadow on the development of automotive vertical platforms.

Comparison of new vehicle sales revenue, cost and gross profit margin of 10 listed dealers).

On the one hand, the impact of the direct sales model brought by new energy vehicle manufacturers on the traditional automobile distribution model has further exacerbated the "hard life" of dealersOn the other hand, this year's frequent first-class battles led by new energy vehicle companies in the industry have not only driven the sales of new cars by dealers, but also caused the dilemma of increasing revenue but not increasing profits. In other words, the operating pressure of dealers is still there, and the demand for reducing costs and increasing efficiency is still there.

If you can't catch the car companies, and then you can't catch the dealers, it will mean a longer trough for the automotive vertical platform.

This is also the reason why the emperor who understands the car began to revolutionize himself, but he doesn't know when their revolution will bear the fruits of victory.