At first, no one cared about Tesla's price cut, which was just a ** adjustment, a regular means to stimulate sales;Although Wenjie and Xiaopeng have followed up, consumers still believe that this is just a struggle between new energy vehicles. It wasn't until Dongfeng fuel vehicles started a "Hubei war" that people suddenly discovered that the smoke of the "car war" had spread to every corner of the car market, whether it was a gasoline car, a new energy vehicle, a new car or a second-hand car, they could not be left alone.
Champion Edition, Facelift, Pro Version, Cut Equity ......In the past year, we have seen a variety of "price reduction" methods by new energy vehicle companiesFuel vehicles are much more direct - Camry 13480,000 yuan!
In 2023, "price reduction" is a reality that every car company must face. At the end of the year, Jiyue 01 became another bomb in this war.
One month after it was listed, the official drop of the whole system of Jiyue 01 was 30,000, and there was an additional 10,000 yuan discount for the 100 kWh battery pack. After the adjustment of the overall ** system, the ** range of this medium and large pure electric SUV has come to 21990,000-30990,000 yuan. Compared with competitors in this class, such as Zhiji LS6, Xpeng G9, Wenjie M7, and Tesla Model Y, it can be said that Jiyue has shown enough sincerity.
However, this was not the case with Jiyue 01 a month ago. On the night of the 1027 press conference, Xia Yiping, CEO of Jidu and CEO of Jiyue, announced with great ambition that the official price of Jiyue 01 was 24990,000-33990,000 yuan, would never have thought that the negative feedback from users would be so turbulent. In fact, if it was a year ago, it might not be wrong if it was such a price of Jiyue 01, but a year later, the same ** cannot be successful.
At the user communication meeting after the price reduction was announced on November 30, Xia Yiping's expression was not relaxed, "On the second day of the listing, I pulled the team to start discussing. We made a mistake in the previous pricing, and after reorganizing our ** system, we did a complete systematic thinking to have this price reduction. "Fortunately, unlike the complicated and lengthy decision-making process of traditional established car companies, the rapid response and iteration of startups can make Jiyue stop from the precipice.
Therefore, the topic word "extremely more listen to persuasion" frequently appears in the news entries of this price cut. Who is persuading?In the past month, Xia Yiping has spent a lot of time in stores in various cities every week to learn about information, listen to user feedback, and even set up a product service and quality committee within Jiyue, with Xia Yiping personally serving as the chairman of the committee.
Jiyue has been reflecting on why there was an uproar after the 1027 press conference. Later, I finally understood that at the beginning of the listing, Jiyue 01 gave a lot of rights and interests to the first users, but consumers' perception of these rights and interests is not obvious, and the flexibility of most rights and interests is not high, for example, many users are very dissatisfied with the practice of combining 21-inch wheels and comfortable packages**. The sales staff of the store also reported that the cost of explaining to users was too high, and users did not know what they were sending. In addition, overly complex equity options have also virtually raised the threshold for communication between different departments.
After a complete reorganization, Jiyue gave a price reduction of 30,000 yuan for all models, and an additional 10,000 cash discounts for 100-degree battery packs, and the high-end intelligent driving package that was free for 6 months for a limited time has also become 12 months, and there are additional 5,000 yuan replacement gifts and some limited-time discounts for optional packages. For old users, Jiyue straightforwardly compensates for the price difference of 30,000 yuan and enjoys new rights and interests.
In an hour of communication, Xia Yiping expressed the most about price reduction, and the sentence he expressed the most was "rapid iteration of startups". In his view, the ability to quickly adjust its own pace according to market feedback is the basic quality of a start-up team to deal with complex challenges. As for channel construction, intelligent driving push plan, software-defined vehicles, Jiyue 01 user portraits and other issues, Xia Yiping also gave frank answers with user representatives and **.
The following is a transcript of this interview (the author has made appropriate deletions and adjustments):
Question 1: Why is the volume of Jiyue not so loud to the outside world?After this price cut, will the new car still be profitable?
Xia Yiping: Regarding the volume of voice, the Jiyue brand has only been a little over 2 months now. As a new brand, it is already very good to have the current results in two months. It takes time for the brand to take off, and I told you a long time ago that the biggest feeling I have since I made a car is that "building a car" is on the iceberg, and the real difficulty is below.
As you know, we were not born with hundreds of stores, nor were we born with after-sales service systems, all of which were built from 0 to 1, and we needed to run through these systems for a long time. In the process of new car delivery, we found that we have a lot of problems that need to be self-iterated to ensure that our delivery will be better and better in the future.
After the listing, we faced a lot of challenges, such as getting the product announcement of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on September 19, and then we had to get landmarks in several cities, such as Shanghai, it took a lot of time, including the landmarks in Tianjin and Beijing, which were built step by step. In addition, our product is very new, users have a lot of questions, and we need to spend a lot of time educating users in the early days. We have a product service and quality committee, which is open to all the problems of all customers, I am the chairman of the committee, every day I will see the problems, even I go to communicate, the climb will be very fast.
On the issue of profit, we made some small mistakes in the previous pricing and then we reviewed every day, often meeting until 2-3 o'clock on Sunday nights. After the reply, we feel that it is wrong, obviously we have sent so many rights, why do users still think we are very expensive?
Later, I understood, because many rights users want to have their own choice. So this time, we will discount a lot of rights and interests into the price of the car, rather than doing a lot of gimmicks, it is better to really reduce the **. There will be no more optional ** today, we choose the model directly through the app, choose the optional package, each optional package has its own time-limited strategy, and the rest is the basic rights, including the increase in the rights and interests of vehicle replacement. It's very simple, and it doesn't require users to spend their brains on the math.
For old users, we will return it directly according to the market price, without any small actions. It is not a right or an invoice, and all the money is returned to the old car owner directly according to the difference in the market price.
Before, because the rights and interests are too complicated, in fact, the marketing cost is very large, including the training of product experts, you have to explain this matter clearly, users have to calculate and calculate, I don't know what to send, rather than this It is better to put the marketing cost into the car price, but it is easier, this is also the process of rapid recognition and iteration of start-ups. As for whether you say that you make money or not, you will definitely not lose money, and "volume" is not a way for everyone to roll in a way that does not make money, so it has no value. We still have the most basic requirements, to keep the baseline of the gross profit of the whole vehicle, but how to reflect the cost of marketing, this is the process of learning and Xi on the road of entrepreneurship.
Question 2: Will Jiyue reduce prices in the future?
Xia Yiping: This ** adjustment is not a simple decision of patting the head. On the second day of the listing, I pulled the team to discuss, and I also communicated with many car owners, and also communicated with ** friends, hoping to listen to everyone's opinions. This time, the pricing is a new upgrade for the organization, including the future marketing system. Cars are still a very luxurious thing, and it is impossible to reduce the price later.
Some people on the Internet said that it would drop 10,000 to 20,000, and we would drop 30,000 at one time, and adjust the ** at one time. This time, there is no mess of optional **anything, it's real gold**. If you go to the app, each option pack has a limited-time offer. We should minimize the cost of communication with car owners and reduce the cost of communication with the marketing system. Due to the complexity of the rights and interests, the cost of internal learning Xi is increased, and the cost of call center and store training is too high, and even so, sometimes it is not clear.
I spent a lot of time in stores every week for the past month, and on November 1st, I spent an afternoon in the Wuhan store and received 12 groups of users. At the same time, we are also thinking, why are there some things that we are not doing well enough?But in fact, startups are like this, if they don't do well, they iterate quickly, and we spend a little more time to solve the problem of cognitive deficiencies.
Therefore, our price reduction this time is not a simple price reduction, but a complete reconstruction from the first system to marketing internally. In the future, regardless of the competition in the market, or the release of the best products, we have very detailed thinking, and after sorting out the first system, there is today's price reduction, and there will be no price reduction in the future.
Question 3: What is the current situation of the order of Jiyue, and what is the effect of the internal expected order volume?
Xia Yiping: I can tell you that at present, we have more than 15,000 orders, and after the 919 press conference, we received 30,000 orders. The problem we faced was how to ensure that the delivery would meet the satisfaction of the user. There are a lot of problems here, after all, we are not a company of many years, and a lot of things have already been prepared. Our first product wants to give you a good product very sincerely, so we are constantly iterating in the process of doing it, including our delivery, and now we are constantly climbing and iterating, which is the most critical thing. I'm now asking for a gradual ramp-up in the weekly volume, and last week I delivered 190 units.
In the process of making this product, I have questioned myself countless times. I have asked myself countless times, is it too radical, our product is both economic and too advanced, user Xi habits change a lot, but to know that the process of changing user Xi habits, it must take time.
If I make the car very simple, I can definitely get up quickly. There is no problem with making a volume car, and it can even be lower, but we still insist on it, not only the car, but also the beauty, but also the intelligence, the handling should be good, and the battery life should not be too bad. Including after the listing, the teachers think that the steering operation is so complicated, but next year's iteration of the software will let everyone see that this is the direction of the future, and it will definitely not be wrong.
We have a function, when the door is opened, if an electric car comes from behind, and it is detected, the door cannot be opened in the car. We have two cameras that detect the direction of the electric vehicle behind us in real time. This is the pure visual ability below, why we call it a car robot, because each technology in it is built according to the technology of the robot, and a set of solutions solves all scenarios. In the next step, we will decentralize the visual ability to steering and shifting, in addition to using the PPA function, the map navigation can also be used to automatically steer, and most scenes do not need to be done manually. This way you slowly understand what a car robot is, and this is no joke.
Question 4: Intelligent driving has become pure vision, but there was still lidar before the listing, why was it removed after the listing?
Xia Yiping: Why do we want to do pure vision, we still consider the trend of the whole AI. Ultimately, the ability to provide autonomous driving will not only be provided in a few cities, or will it be able to cover a larger area.
We are in China, covering 90% of the highway and 90% of the elevated, all cities. That's why we're very careful, we users drive PPA every day, and we can't even imagine it. Of course, this has something to do with the fact that the users of our first phase are all 1-2 tier cities.
If you think of full autonomous driving as 100% driven by the car, how much mileage can the user cover in the daily process?In the past, there was only high-speed NOA, and users drove 20,000 kilometers a year, how many of them were high-speed driving?Generally speaking, high-speed mileage accounts for only 10%-15% of a user's average annual mileage. Spend so much money, but only 15% of the scenes can be used. However, once the scope is expanded to elevated roads, such as Shanghai, I go to work from Pudong to Jiading every day, there are only 4-5 kilometers of urban roads, but there are 30 kilometers of elevated roads, and the PPA coverage rate can reach 80%, which is very valuable.
After coming to the urban area, in terms of generalization ability, the way of vision must be better. It was only at the beginning of this year that we decided to get rid of the lidar. At the end of last year, we got on the BEV, and there were hundreds of cars running around, and we found that the purely visual route has a great improvement in generalization. Pure vision is relatively difficult at the beginning, and lidar can reach a very high level at once, but going backwards, lidar is difficult. The visual generalization ability is very strong, but it was weak at first, but we later found that as long as the OCC is on, the situation to be covered by the lidar can be solved with OCC. Vision was a little worse than LiDAR at first, but it quickly climbed, and at that time, Vision could do similar things to radar, so LiDAR was gone.
Question 5: What is the prediction for the automotive market in 2024, and do we have any hope of winning against other competitors?
Xia Yiping: We are not the first volume king, we want to provide the best and intelligent solutions. **It is not necessarily the king of volumes, but it must be the king of volumes in terms of intelligence. My current car is the benchmark of China's intelligent level, and the mass production function we now provide to users, you can find any one and our PK, I am not afraid at all, and it continues to iterate and upgrade.
Next year, the competition in the entire market will be more intense, and the elimination will be more intense. First of all, everyone should know that intelligence must be the core ability in next year's decisive battle, and there is no one.
Although they are now in the 800V range, I found that the biggest improvement in battery life and efficiency is silicon carbide. In addition to fast charging, 800V is not much different from ordinary charging piles. I really didn't expect that many people would come up with the 800v gimmick, and we ourselves would catch up. Next year will definitely be super rolled, not necessarily from the traditional industry, but from the Internet industry, rolled to the sky, and the marketing things are different. Next year's voice will definitely surprise you, and multimodality will be introduced. We are really doing this, not using gimmicks for marketing, and this will not be able to keep up with our technology iteration in the future.
At the same time, we still have plans to go abroad in the future, because we feel that with the intelligence of our cars, there will be a larger ecosystem overseas.
Question 6: What brands do the orders and conversions of Jiyue 01 come from?
Xia Yiping: We are now replacing models, 30% of our customers are from BBA, and 20% of our owners are from Tesla. Xpeng only has a little bit - 4%. BBA and Tesla basically account for 50%, and there are some NIO users and Volvo users. Ideal, there is none.
Question 7: Can you tell us about your store expansion plan for next year?
Xia Yiping: This year, there are more than 100, and this year it is mainly in 1-2 tier cities, and there are now more than 10 stores in Shanghai. We are investing more in the very core market, and we hope to achieve a scale of 200-300 stores next year.
Q8: What is PPA's plan for Kaesong?
Xia Yiping: This year, I promise to give you Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen. In addition, we have already done it in Guangzhou, but there was some delay in the packaging software at that time, and Guangzhou will open soon. Next year, we have to look at the schedule, there will be commuting mode on the bus, NOA may be a little more radical, and the specific press conference of intelligent driving will explain in detail. It is still related to technology iteration behind it, and the steps cannot be too big, so this logic must be explained clearly to everyone.
Q9: Do you think you have to charge for the software?
Xia Yiping: Many of you are using PPA, and you can still feel that the experience is still better in a more congested environment. We firmly believe that in the future, users will pay for products like this that can reduce human labor. Because no one doesn't want someone to help you drive, it's easy, it's just a matter of how much to pay.
We're really a software-defined car, and the next model system versions are the same. As long as this car is available, the second car will be available immediately, and the whole company will have a set of software.
Each company's strategy is different, there is no need for direct comparison, and we are confident that our products will do very well. Since I am confident that users also like my product, and I also believe that users are willing to pay for this product, and each company has its own different ideas.
The sudden price reduction of Jiyue 01 dropped a bombshell for the "** war" that seems to have subsided in 2023. From more than 1 hour of communication, Xia Yiping's worries about the future car market situation can also be perceived. However, as he said, the knockout competition in the car market will be more intense next year, but intelligence is the core ability under the decisive battle, and there is no one. Jiyue, which is based on "intelligence", can have the last laugh in the decisive battle, and see what kind of secrets Jiyue will come up with from the intelligent **library**.