Last week, Li Bin of Weilai was indeed a little busy, and first admitted his mistake, feeling that the sentence "I don't understand why people still buy gas cars now" said before was wrong;Then a record was set - the NIO ET7 equipped with a 150kWh semi-solid-state battery was measured by Li Bin, and the real range reached 1044km, which should be the most mass-produced pure electric car at present.
Actually, I'm not "cold" at all about this practice of increasing battery life by stacking batteries. Before the NIO ET7, there were also two pure electric cars in the industry that claimed to have a pure electric range of more than 1000km, namely Aion LX and ZEEKR 001, but they didn't seem to cause much of a sensation in the market, and they didn't even attract too much attention from industry insiders.
Because, they all have a very fatal drawback, that is, expensive!Very expensive!
With a range of 1008km, the Aion LX Qianli Edition is priced at a whopping 46980,000, nearly 200,000 more expensive than the entry-level version of the LX, and the configuration is nothing, not even the entry-level version;The "thousand miles plan" given by ZEEKR 001 is that the 140kWh Kirin battery can be optionally installed under the WE 100kWh version, and the optional ** is 1030,000 yuan, the total price came to 4030,000 yuan.
How much does this 150kwh battery from NIO cost?Li Bin did not say it explicitly on the live broadcast. But at the beginning of this year, Qin Lihong, co-founder and president of NIO, said at a face-to-face event that the battery pack was expensive, costing the equivalent of a NIO ET5 — the cheapest ET5 at the time was priced at 3280,000 yuan, even if the battery leasing scheme is used, it will cost 2580,000 yuan.
One of the benefits of NIO is that it can swap batteries and even flexibly upgrade battery packs. As Li Bin said, in the future, the 150kWh battery pack can also be rented on a daily basis, which is convenient for users who have temporary long-distance travel and reduces the user's use cost.
But even so, I believe that the cost of use for users will not be so cheap that it will go. At present, the monthly rental cost of NIO's two battery packs is 980 yuan for 75kwh and 1680 yuan for 100kwh, which means that the monthly rent for an additional 25kwh battery pack is 700 yuan.
Not to mention that the cost of semi-solid-state batteries is an exponential multiple of traditional liquid batteries, even if it is calculated according to a linear increase, it will cost a monthly fee of about 3,000 yuan per month, which is more than 100 yuan per day. I think that the partner of "two barrels of oil", Luxgen, may not need such a high commuting cost - a car with a commuting fuel consumption of 20L 100km, even if you add 95 gasoline and commute 50km a day, the daily commuting cost is only 85 yuan.
Therefore, NIO's 150kWh semi-solid-state battery pack may save fuel and may solve some people's range anxiety, but it may not save money.
Seeing this, don't think that we are negating NIO and semi-solid-state batteries!In fact, we are very appreciative that NIO has been able to mass-produce semi-solid-state batteries in cars at this stage. We're just denying the 150kWh battery capacity, and we feel that it's wrong to solve the range anxiety of pure electric users by increasing the battery capacity.
This semi-solid battery from NIO is very powerful. Although its battery capacity has increased by dozens of kilowatt-hours compared to the battery pack currently in use, the weight of his battery pack has not increased much, with a total weight of only 575kg and a weight energy density of 260kWh kg. The total weight of the 100kWh battery pack used by NIO is also 555kg, and the former is only 20kg heavier than the latter.
It is a waste to use such a sharp weapon to try to solve the problem of pure electric car range anxiety. The range anxiety of pure electric vehicles is not in the length of battery life, but in the inconvenience of the energy replenishment party, especially the user's energy replenishment anxiety when traveling during the week - no matter how fast the charging is, you have to queue for a few hours first.
And it is not realistic to try to skip all the charging stations with an ultra-long battery life, and "one box of electricity" directly to the home.
After all, it is impossible to travel at 90km h on holidays, and it is impossible for two people to travel lightly, and the usual situation is that it is fully loaded and has to be stuck on the highway for several hours. Therefore, the NIO ET7, which has a range of more than 1000km, wants to take an inter-provincial (more than 1000km) self-driving trip without charging halfway.
Li Bin also admitted in the live broadcast that the measured average speed is more than 110km h, and the range of this ET7 cannot reach 1000km.
Unable to solve the problem of range anxiety, NIO's semi-solid-state battery can solve another thorny problem of pure electric vehicles - the curb weight is too heavy.
Today's pure electric vehicles are generally very heavy, just like the protagonist of this endurance test - NIO ET7, a medium and large sedan, the curb weight actually exceeds 23 tons - if you replace it with a 150kwh semi-solid-state battery, it may be more than 24 tons up.
2.What is the concept of 3 tons?They are also medium and large sedans, and they are all four-wheel drive, and the curb weight of the BMW 5 Series is only 176 tons, Mercedes-Benz E-class only 181 tons, Audi's A6L is only 188 tons only. The NIO ET7 weighs 600 kilograms more than the heaviest Audi A6, which is almost the weight of 10 adult males.
How much does weight affect a car's performance?
We have done many performance tests of different vehicles in the no-load and fully loaded states before, and the results have found that the impact of full load on the performance of the vehicle is beyond our imagination: the "zero hundred acceleration" will be more than 20% slower, and the braking distance of "100km h-0" will be about 5% longer;If it is the range of a pure electric vehicle, there will be a discount of about 10% when fully loaded.
In these comparative tests, the difference between the empty load and the full load is only three or four hundred kilograms, and if it is a difference of 600 kilograms, the result is conceivable. This is why the tires of pure electric vehicles will grind faster and are more prone to punctures, which directly affects driving safety.
Weight is the essence of vehicle design!This sentence is particularly heavy in the new energy market.
With such a high-energy-density semi-solid-state battery, NIO should not increase the range while maintaining the weight of the vehicle - not only can it not completely solve the problem of users' range anxiety, but also increase a lot of costs——, and it should maintain the same range to reduce the weight of the vehicle.
If it is the latter line of thought, the NIO ET7 car can reduce weight by 250-300kg while maintaining the same range, not to mention that it can be reduced to the level of medium and large fuel cars, but it should not be a problem to make the performance go over the next level. In particular, this upgrade does not require much additional cost to the user.
There is no other way to solve the problem of electric vehicle range anxiety but to install it with a "charging treasure". Just like we are holding our mobile phones when we go out, if there is no power, we will never take the charging cable to find an outlet everywhere, we must take out a power bank, or rent a power bank.
The car is also a truth: if the car is temporarily out of power and you don't want to delay things, the best way is to use the engine to extend the range - the so-called range extension here does not specifically refer to the ideal and inquiring series hybrid, but refers to all hybrids, including but not limited to series-parallel hybrids, power shunt hybrids and P2 single-electric type hybrids.
In fact, many people have persuaded Li Bin to do hybrid technology, but he doesn't seem to be very happy, and he is not even interested in learning about this technical route. Because just last week, Li Bin also responded to "whether he will do range extension", but this response seems very amateurish, and it does not seem like what an industry insider should say.
This kind of "power bank" of NIO is a waste of time and money, not to mention, and it is not necessarily environmentally friendly.
He said that he calculated an account: "The range extender used in a high-end car can cost 25,000 or 30,000 yuan, and if it is 500,000 vehicles, it can be equipped with 5,000 battery swap stations, which do you think is cost-effective?"”
There are two places where this account is amateur.
First of all, the general range extender now, like the ideal L series, uses 15T engine. The purchase of engines of this displacement is only a few thousand yuan, and even if it is better, it is only ten thousand yuan. Twenty or thirty thousand of 1The 5T engine is sky-high, even if it is retailed to users, it will not be this **.
Secondly, if you use a range extender, the vehicle's battery doesn't need to be that big. Just like the ideal L9, the pure electric range has reached 175km (WLTC mode), but it is only a 426kwh ternary lithium battery;The most entry-level battery of the NIO ES8 of the same size also has a 75kWh battery, and the range is only 465km.
In other words, if you go up to the extended range, the battery alone can save half the cost. According to NIO's pricing system, its 100kWh NIO ES8 asks for 5560,000 yuan, the 75kwh version asks for 4980,000 yuan, the configuration of the two is the same, the power is the same, the only difference is the battery capacity. That means that the difference of 25kWh will cost a full 580,000 yuan.
Even if the NIO ES8 uses a larger battery than the ideal L9 - 50kWh, it also uses 30,000 yuan of 1The total cost of the 5T range extender is still much cheaper than the current pure electric ES8, and it can also hand over the responsibility for the construction of the energy supplement network to the "two barrels of oil", which is simply a win-win situation.
As the CEO of a car company, Li Bin's calculation of this account is either fooling the purchasing director - in this case, it seems that NIO will also have an internal anti-corruption like Xiaopeng;Either they pretend to be confused and fool a group of "pro-Wei" ** people, so that they can convey the values of "hybrid is not as cost-effective as battery swapping".
Regardless of the former or the latter, Li Bin also needs to re-understand the current market. (Text|.)Nobita).