After crossing over into the automobile track, Xiaomi, which competed with Huawei again, pressed Huawei from the beginning this time.
Yu Chengdong just released the "best SUV within 10 million yuan" M9, and at the recent first press conference of Xiaomi Automobile, Lei Jun brought Xiaomi's first sedan Su7 that surpassed Porsche Taycan in a number of parameters and performance.
But Lei Jun, who was in a hurry, still lagged behind Yu Chengdong in one parameter. Xiaomi Automobile, which was originally going to be unveiled in the annual speech in August, was postponed for 4 months, and Xiaomi Su 7, which was originally known as the industry's first maximum motor speed, has been intercepted by Huawei Zhijie S7 (Xiaomi Su 7 motor maximum speed of 21000 rpm, Zhijie S7 motor maximum speed of 22000 rpm).
Not to be left behind, Lei Jun directly put on the shelves the "**V8S motor" that will be launched in 2025, with a maximum speed of 27200 rpm.
Behind the performance parameters of competing with peers, Xiaomi cars are becoming a new opportunity for Lei Jun to shape the high-end image of the brand.
Fan culture and cost performance have become important to help Xiaomi rise rapidly in the past decade. At Xiaomi's first annual meeting in January 2011, Lei Jun told all colleagues and family members: "Xiaomi wants to make the best mobile phone in the world, but ** is not 6800 yuan, it is 1800 yuan, or even 800 yuan."
ButAt the first press conference of Xiaomi Automobile, Lei Jun no longer mentioned the concept of cost performance, and deliberately gave the outside world a preventive shot, and broke the news in advance before the press conference that the pricing of Xiaomi SU7 has not been finalized, but**"It is indeed a bit expensive". At the press conference, Lei Jun made it clear that Xiaomi Su7 will not be less than 150,000 yuan, "990,000 is absolutely impossible""1490,000 don't need to talk about it anymore."
Huaan*** Xiaomi SU7 after the launch of the main opponents will be concentrated in the range of 200,000-300,000 yuan of pure electric cars, of which Huawei Zhijie S7 is expected to be the biggest competitor of Xiaomi cars.
However, compared with Lei Jun's benchmark price of 400,000 yuan, automotive industry analyst Lin Song believes that the upper limit of Xiaomi Su7** is unlikely to exceed 400,000 yuan, "Expectation management of ** has been a common means in the current new energy automobile industry: first reveal a higher pre-sale price, and then lower it when it is officially launched**, so as to break the psychological expectations of potential users, so as to create a sense of surprise." ”
Yu Chengdong did this on Huawei's Zhijie S7. The final starting price of the Chijie S7 is set at 24980,000 yuan, compared to 25 beforeThe pre-sale price of 80,000 yuan is nearly 10,000 yuan cheaper.
However, limited by the extreme cost-effective label of Xiaomi mobile phones in the past, it is still unknown whether a series of technological innovations alone can support the high-end brand recognition of Xiaomi cars.
When NIO ES8 was released in 2017, it was also equipped with a series of industry innovations, but a large part of NIO's real recognition of its high-end image is due to its Haidilao-style service.
In the face of the ** war that is about to spread to 2024, how to ensure that Xiaomi Su7 can still have the best advantages under similar configurations, it will be a new challenge for Lei Jun, who is climbing the slope of the positive high-end image.
Capital markets have taken the lead in worrying about these challenges. Before the Xiaomi car press conference, Xiaomi's share price ushered in a wave of **, with a total of **074%, which is just one step away from its 2018 listing issue price of HK$17.
However, on the day of the first press conference of Xiaomi SU7, Xiaomi's stock price did not rise but fell, and it fell slightly by 0 on the same day25%, and the decline continued into the second trading day. As of the lunch break of Hong Kong stocks on December 29, Xiaomi's share price fell 577%。
aAt the first press conference of Xiaomi Automobile, Lei Jun changed the "Internet style" when he released his mobile phone, and rarely took off his jeans and changed into a suit. Judging from the su7 positioning and software and hardware configuration announced by Lei Jun, Lei Jun may not have planned to continue the ultimate cost-effective route in the mobile phone era from the beginning.
Xiaomi SU7 is positioned as a C-class sedan, with a body size of 4997mm x 1963mm x 1440mm and a wheelbase of 3000mm.
At present, the number of experts is about 100 people, and the 21000 rpm V6 V6S motor mass-produced by Xiaomi SU7 is jointly built by Xiaomi, UMC and Inovance.
As the core of pure electric vehicles, and the most expensive part of the battery, Xiaomi has found BYD and CATL, two leading companies: the low-profile version uses 73The 6kWh battery pack is equipped with a 400V voltage platform and has a maximum range of 668kmThe high-end version uses a 101kWh battery pack of CATL's ternary lithium battery, equipped with an 800V high-voltage platform, with a maximum range of 800km, and supports super fast charging, with a range of up to 220km in 5 minutes.
In terms of intelligent driving technology that leads the future of an electric vehicle, Lei Jun shouted the goal of entering the first echelon of the industry next year as early as 2022. To this end, Lei Jun has added 1.4 billion yuan in R&D expenses, and its total investment in the first phase has increased from 3.3 billion yuan to 4.7 billion yuan, with a current team size of more than 1,000 people and more than 200 test vehicles.
In terms of hardware configuration,Lei Jun transplanted the stacking process in the mobile phone era to the car,Xiaomisu7The high-end version is equipped with two Nvidia Orin chips with a comprehensive computing power of 508TOPS,Using Snapdragon 8295Cockpit chip,Equipped with1LiDAR、11High-definition camera、3Millimeter-wave radar and12Ultrasonic radar。
Models equipped with similar configurations on the market are basically about 250,000 yuan. Tesla's cheapest Model 3 refresh version starts at more than 260,000 yuan, and the Huawei Zhijie S7, which is equipped with an 800V high-voltage platform as standard, has a starting price of 24980,000 yuan.
Chery, which has just joined Huawei's smart car, uses the same architecture as the Zhijie S7 Xingtu Star Era ES, which is more similar to the Xiaomi SU7: a low-configuration version with a 400V high-voltage platform, with a starting price of 22580,000 yuan;The high-end version of the 800V high-voltage platform is adopted, and the starting price is 26980,000 yuan.
If you want to go back to ten years ago, just like when the Xiaomi mobile phone generation was released, to create a "young man's first car" with a price of less than 200,000 yuan, the objective reality has forced Lei Jun to meet the above expectations.
In April 2021, a month after the announcement of the car, referring to the voting results of netizens, Lei Jun once said that Xiaomi's first car was priced between 100,000 and 300,000 yuan.
However, as Xiaomi cars get closer and closer to the mass production node, the possibility of replicating the extreme cost-effective route of the Xiaomi mobile phone era is becoming smaller and smaller. At the beginning of January this year, Late Auto broke the news that the starting price of Xiaomi cars will be in the range of 260,000-300,000 yuan, and the starting price of the high-end version may be set at more than 350,000 yuan.
bSubjectively, Lei Jun doesn't want to relive the lessons of the mobile phone era again. The Xiaomi mobile phone, which started with the ultimate cost performance, has repeatedly failed in the high-end and suffered from repeated defeats, Lei Jun may no longer want to experience the same experience in the car.
In order to enter the high-end mobile phone market, Lei Jun has invested tens of billions of dollars in Xiaomi mobile phones in the past three years, but has gained little, and this painful process has been described by Lei Jun as "the most painful and the biggest harvest in the past ten years." ”
After the successive defeats of the two generations of high-end models of Xiaomi 11 and Xiaomi 12, Xiaomi once fell into the disagreement of "whether to do high-end" and "whether to change to a new brand and fight for high-end". Lei Jun, who was anxious that he didn't have a good year, convened the general managers of all departments of the company on the first day after the Spring Festival holiday in 2022 and held a high-end special strategy seminar, first reaching a unified idea of being high-end at the organizational management level.
The ideological and organizational chaos brought about by the impact of the high-end in the mobile phone era has turned off a wrong path for Lei Jun in advance on how to do high-end in the car.
Yu Chengdong, who also chose not to make models below 200,000 yuan, said in an interview with CCTV's "Meet the Big Coffee" in December last year, "There are a lot of low-end cars that can be sold, but there is no meaning, no profit, and no way for us to develop." ”
This may also be one of the reasons why Lei Jun was forced to give up the 100,000-200,000 yuan** range. Judging from the realistic comparison of the current new car-making forces, if it is anchored in the range of 100,000-200,000 yuan, it is likely to "lose money and make money". Nezha and Leap, although they have both created dazzling results in monthly sales ranking first in the list of new car-making forces, but behind this achievement is a larger scale of losses.
The success of Tesla and NIO, and the failure of Weimar have repeatedly demonstrated to Yu Chengdong and Lei Jun, who have crossed over into the automotive field, what is the correct posture for building a car. The alphabet list has given an analysis in "Shen Hui Rings the Alarm for Lei Jun", believing that in the smart electric vehicle market, it must be easier to succeed from high to low than from low to high.
Tesla, which pioneered the electric vehicle industry, created a high-end personality from the beginning: first launched the ultra-performance electric sports car Roadster, and then launched the luxury model Model X Model S.
According to the financial report for the third quarter of 2023, Tesla has delivered a total of 43 electric vehicles worldwide510,000 units, of which 1 was delivered for the Model S and Model X600,000 units, Model 3 and Model Y delivered 41910,000 vehicles, the latter two accounted for more than ninety percent.
Opening up the mass market through the middle and low end, and then helping NIO achieve the goal of turning losses into profits, is also the path planned by Li Bin.
In an internal speech on NIO's eighth anniversary, Li Bin told employees that NIO will strive to break even in 2024, and one of its measures is to reduce ** to below 200,000 yuan.
Starting from 2021, facing the mass market, Li Bin began to internally plan two low-end sub-brands codenamed "Alps" and "Firefly": Alps is positioned in the range of 200,000-300,000 yuan, and "Firefly" covers the market in the range of 100,000-200,000 yuan, and the two sub-brands will be launched to the market after 2024.
cBut Xiaomi's automotive competitive environment is very different from when Tesla and NIO released their first cars.
As perhaps the last player in China to build cross-border cars, Lei Jun has lost the first-mover advantage of seizing the global electric vehicle market like Tesla and the domestic electric vehicle market like NIOAs a latecomer, Xiaomi SU7, although it has made breakthroughs in a number of technologies, it cannot be called a disruptive leading innovation in the industry.
The gap between Lei Jun's willingness to erect the high-end brand image of Xiaomi Auto with the help of technological innovation and the constantly raised expectations of the outside world is much larger than that of Musk and Li Bin at that time. This requires Lei Jun to show off technological innovation and further create some of Xiaomi's unique competitiveness to further build the outside world's awareness of the high-end image of Xiaomi cars.
Huawei, which is also a cross-border car manufacturer from mobile phones, can help brands with poor market sales and a sharp decline in survival competitiveness to improve in a short period of time**, such as Cialis with the help of Wenjie M5 and M7 The price is up to 400,000 yuan, and the price of Chery Zhijie S7 is up to 300,000 yuan, which is inseparable from the blessing of the Huawei brand.
Behind the new M7 becoming a hit in 2023, in addition to the popularity of the range extender product itself, Huawei's self-developed 5G chips brought by the Mate 60 series have also driven the number of stores and orders to a certain extent.
Ask the new M7
However, compared with Huawei, Xiaomi, which is impacting the high-end, has not yet ushered in a harvest period for its brand spillover effect from mobile phones.
What's worse is that with the gradual increase in the penetration rate of new energy vehicles, Chinese car companies that are becoming more and more homogeneous competition are spreading the first war to 2024. According to the data of the China Passenger Car Association, the domestic retail penetration rate of new energy vehicles exceeded 40 for the first time in November 20234%, an increase of 4 percentage points from 36% in the same period last year.
In order to seize the market, more car companies have joined the team of exchanging losses for sales. At the beginning of November, when the Zhijie S7 was unveiled, Yu Chengdong said that after multiple rounds of internal cost accounting, 25The pre-sale price of 80,000 yuan is still a loss, and the team's plan is to "turn losses into profits after the scale comes up".
When the products with similar configurations at the same level are getting lower and lower, how Lei Jun should make a trade-off between maintaining the high-end image of Xiaomi cars and maintaining market competitiveness will be a new problem.
In the range of 100,000-300,000 yuan** voted by netizens for Xiaomi's first car, 1Among the 20,000 netizens, nearly seventy percent hope that it will not exceed 150,000 yuan, and only nearly one percent hope that it will be more than 300,000 yuan.
Lei Jun, who no longer mentions the concept of cost performance, how to attract more rice fans to recharge Xiaomi cars, all doubts will be left at the Xiaomi Su7** press conference.