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Text |Inside the Table, Author |Hejin."If you don't work hard, you can only open a BBA" may just be a marketing flicker.1. Zhang Ranran, Hei Yinke, edFu Xiaoling, Cao Binling.
The real situation is that in the field of luxury cars of 400,000-800,000 yuan, the penetration rate of new energy models is showing a downward trend, and the absolute right to speak is still BBA's fuel vehicles.
In 2023, BBA's sales in this ** range will be in the order of 300,000, of which BMW's sales will increase by 5% year-on-year7%, the highest monthly sales of X5 with a starting price of 600,000 are nearly 10,000 units; Audi is even more at 24The sales growth rate of 4% has been running wildly.
Mercedes-Benz executives even disdain to participate in the new energy competition below 400,000: "On the highest models, consumers still tend to buy fuel vehicles." ”
On the contrary, it is a second-tier luxury brand, and the cake is being eaten away step by step.
It can be seen that last year, Volvo's sales stagnated; Cadillac shrank directly by 147%；Lexus, the "king of price increases", began to reduce the price of **.
Contrary to their sluggish sales, the penetration rate of domestic new energy models in the range of less than 400,000** continues to rise.
The facts are clear at a glanceDomestic new energy may not replace BBA, but second-tier luxury brands.
Such a situation is obviously very different from the theory of "not working hard to open a BBA".
Reviewing the relevant information, we believe that the class segregation attribute of the first-line luxury BBA, and the new forces such as the question world and the ideal have not yet been broken. Lexus, Cadillac, Volvo and other second-tier luxury, their differentiated competitive barriers, have been caught up or collapsed.
In April 2021, a Volvo XC60 safety evaluation** became popular on the Chinese Internet.
* During the display, Yuan Xiaolin, President and CEO of Volvo Asia Pacific, calmly sat in the XC60 with 6 cars stacked on top of his head for several minutes, using more than 100 pounds of flesh to stand for the hardness of the XC60.
Such a test made ** "tremble", eye-opening domestic car owners, for a while Volvo safety admiration.
However, the effect of this "life-dependent" marketing has now been achieved by the new M7 "with mouth".
At the press conference of the new M7, Yu Chengdong personally came to the scene to shout for the safety of Huawei's AEB (automatic emergency braking system) installed in the car.
The various evaluations of the automobiles also unanimously point to the fact that Volvo is the best way to take the initiative to be safe. Taking braking speed as an example, the test shows that the maximum braking speed of the new M7 is 90km h; In comparison, the Volvo XC60 has a maximum braking limit of around 60 km h.
And not only Volvo, the second-tier luxury people have suffered from "stealing homes" as a whole.
For example, the specialty of the Lexus LS400 - the champagne tower stacked on the hood to test the driving stability, was copied by the NIO ET9, and it was shown off at the 2023 NIO Day, and it was in the limelight for a while.
The reason why this is so,Electrification has subverted the definition of "luxury" in fuel vehicles, and the new "luxury" story happens to overlap with the history of the old second-tier luxury
In the era of fuel vehicles, the engine, chassis and gearbox are the fundamental factors that determine the quality of a car, because they determine fuel consumption, push back feeling and smoothness.
As a result, BBAs, founded more than a century ago, have firmly established a first-line luxury position by relying on strong product barriers - various V12 and W12 engines, excellent gearboxes, excellent chassis texture, etc.
And the first-line "luxury road" they occupy is difficult for other players to get through.
For example, the original BMW 7 originally applied a double-ball joint design to the suspension, breaking the suspension law of "MacPherson for grocery cars, and double wishbones for high-end", which greatly increased the stability of the vehicle.
With the positioning of "technology + sports + luxury", the original BMW 7 sold 280,000 units from its birth to 1986, making BMW's influence as a luxury brand spread around the world.
But this "handling" technology, patented by BMW, has been held in its hands for 30 years, and other players have no chance to "cross the river by touching its technology".
It is also unrealistic to bypass them to engage in new technologies: on the one hand, technology research and development is not to plant vegetables in the field, and "work hard" to harvest fruits on schedule; On the other hand, many players, such as Lexus and Infiniti, have been established for a short time and cannot support breakthroughs in technology catch-up.
The technical "road" did not work, and other players turned around and made a fuss elsewhere.
For example, Volvo aimed at "car safety" and made the "president" test an ancestral skill
To prove the safety of the automatic braking system, let the CEO stand in front of the car and wait for the vehicle to "automatically brake"; In order to highlight the ground clearance of his truck, he buried the president in the desert, exposing only one head, and let the truck whizz overhead.
Relying on the personal testing marketing of a group of CEOs who "risked their lives", Volvo has set a safety benchmark in the automotive industry.
Lexus focuses on a "kneeling" type of service, and you feel at home. For example, in the early days in the North American market, when a customer went to a Lexus store to buy a car, Lexus salespeople would kneel on the ground, pat the customer's foot with their hands, and thank the customer for the purchase, in order to show that the customer is valued.
More than just a "personalized" experienceThe challengers are also very bold in terms of pricing
Taking a mid-size sedan as an example, with the money to buy a BBA 34C "rough house", you can buy a larger and top-of-the-line Cadillac CT5, and even seat heating, ventilation, massage and other functions are standard.
Lexus's first LS400 is also full of various indicators as soon as it comes up, but the price is only about half of that of similar Mercedes-Benz W126 and BMW E32.
The unique "exclusive experience superimposed on the cost-effective play" has not only won the love of "niche groups who think BBA is too vulgar and want to be different", but also captured a group of groups who want to take care of both "face and inside", so that each family has achieved their own "brilliance" in the second-tier luxury car level outside BBA.
However, in the new energy era, luxury brands are competing again.
The power of the electric motor can easily exceed that of the Bugatti with a 16-cylinder engine; And when the rear-wheel drive sinks to less than 200,000 new energy vehicles, the longitudinal rear-wheel drive, which was once a luxury car moat, is no longer stable.
In other words, electrification has made the technical barriers of BBA (fuel vehicles) "unbreakable". The posture of new energy vehicle companies, which have no technical shackles, to impact the luxury market coincides with the original second-tier luxury.
It can be seen that it is not only the new M7 that is eyeing the Volvo safety label. He Xiaopeng shouted "Friends talk about AEB, I think 99% of it is fake", but in fact, he is engaged in AEB optimization in OTA upgrades; Ideal quietly did the same.
Even under the involution of the industry, the security function has changed from a second-line luxury personalized label to a common label of new energy.
The same goes for the price-performance ratio. Seat heating, ventilation, massage, electric suction doors and other luxury configurations are almost standard for models with more than 200,000 yuan; Cross-level competition is even more commonplace.
For example, in the past, 30-400,000 yuan could only buy a medium-sized SUV. Now in the same range, new energy vehicle companies have launched medium and large SUVs and even MPVs.
The route of replicating second-tier luxury cars is more capable of marketing and stacking materials than them, and the impact is inevitable. As shown in the figure below, the sales of mainstream mid-size SUVs of second-tier luxury brands have declined significantly in the past two years.
In the face of such a situation, second-tier luxury cars have successively become "butchers" to resist the impact of competition. For example, Lexus, the former "king of price increases", even the ace model ES has dropped by 60,000.
However, users do not fully accept the low profile of second-tier luxury cars.
As shown in the figure below, Cadillac, which frequently cuts prices, will still show a downward trend in sales in 2023 except for the main model CT5.
On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz, which has also been cutting prices endlessly, except for the Mercedes-Benz GLC, which was affected by the product remodel, and the sales of other main models in 2023 have increased.
The core reason for the completely different market response lies in the brand's ability to pay a premium.
A year ago, when asked about the "luxury of Chinese brands" at NIO Day of NIO, Li Bin said in a rare low-key manner, "We really don't call ourselves a luxury brand, we don't think we have luxury and ultra-luxury, we still have to be objective." ”
The reason for the sudden "modesty" is simple, the creation of a luxury brand is never achieved overnight.
Taking Mercedes-Benz as an example, the first generation of S-class sedan Mercedes-Benz 220 in 1951 subversively achieved a balance between power and vehicle comfort, but a stunning impression did not let it establish a luxury car cognition. It can be seen that at that time, most of the courtesy cars of heads of state were American cars (such as Rolls-Royce).
After many models and technical iterations, it was not until 1963 that the Mercedes-Benz 600 was born, and its reputation spread far and wide - the Mercedes-Benz 600 was used as a courtesy car by more than 100 countries around the world, and Queen Elizabeth II and King Hussein also used it as a special car.
Since then, Mercedes-Benz has been a manifestation of identity, and there is no shortage of owners of every luxury car.
For example, in the early 90s, when W140 Tiger Head Ben entered the domestic market, the price was as high as more than 3 million, and the owners were Li Ka-shing, Stanley Ho, Wang Jianlin and other bigwigs.
In short,In the long process of development, BBA has made the brand have a strong premium power through a variety of luxury models with unique technical advantages, coupled with continuous brand story accumulation
These unique luxury models remain strong and continue to underpin the brand position of BBAs. For example, the annual import sales volume of Mai**S still maintains 1About 50,000 units.
After all, the current new energy industry, although they are all piling up to launch 800,000-level models, but the homogeneous technology, piled up of the first model, can hardly be called luxury, and to achieve the brand recognition of BBA, it takes a long cycle.
But the second-tier luxury, which follows the BBA, is not the case.
It can be seen that Cadillac and Volvo rarely have more than 800,000 models; Although Lexus and Lincoln have ** models, they have fewer sales in China.
There is no top-level luxury model that highlights the product power and status symbol, and the weak brand premium formed by personalized labels and "stacking" alone is "not worthwhile" in the face of the "new luxury" established by new energy.
In the words of one user: "Today, with the rise of new energy vehicles in China, we look back, and some luxury cars in the past are what rotten melons and rotten dates dare to charge me hundreds of thousands."
Under the different premium ability of the brand, in the face of the impact of the new energy market, the price reduction of the first and second line luxury at the same time releases a diametrically opposite signal in the eyes of consumers:
The price reduction of the BBAs is a rare "opportunity", and you can buy a "support scene" mark by tiptoeing, and you must run to enter it quickly; And those Lexus who are already "not very worthwhile" in the eyes of users, the more they fall, the more "worthless" they appear, and the more reluctant consumers are to buy.
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why the price reduction of second-tier luxury cars will have less and less stimulating effect on sales. On the consumer side, "price reduction is difficult to change volume" has become a burden that the channel cannot bear.
* When the war starts, it is often the dealers who charge on the front line. It can be seen that the current luxury brands have generally been inverted between wholesale and retail. Among them, the second-tier luxury dealers, who do not have luxury models to cover sales and profits, and almost all of them have reduced their prices, have suffered more severe losses.
Moreover, in this round of price cuts, the second-tier luxury dealers are not like BBA dealers, who have subsidies from wealthy OEMs, and they rely on their own toughness, and the continuous bleeding situation is not optimistic.
The dealer's loss may be just the beginning, and if the situation deteriorates further, it may eventually evolve into a wave of withdrawal, which will further affect the brand's potential energy. Previously, the second-tier luxury brands DS and Infiniti gradually declined in this way.
Taking Infiniti as an example, at its peak, it had a good sales of nearly 50,000 units in China, but since 2018, sales have been declining year after year, and by 2021, the terminal sales will only be about 10,000 units.
Store losses, loss of sales personnel, continued deterioration of sales, and worsening losses ......The channel side has entered a dead cycle step by step, triggering a large-scale withdrawal of dealers from the network - as of January 16, there are only 58 Infiniti dealer stores left nationwide, a decrease of nearly half.
In fact, the current signs of second-tier luxury personnel attrition are intensifying. According to a survey, the sales consultants of a number of second-tier luxury brand 4S stores have jumped to new energy brands, and many of them have the top sales.
Domestic new energy and BBA are not a life-and-death relationship.
Just like the birth of the Apple Watch, which did not shake the status of Patek Philippe and Rolex, but made them more and more expensive, the first-line luxury with profound heritage and top luxury models will not be easily subverted by new technologies in the short term.
On the contrary, those second-tier luxury brands that rely on differentiation and cost-effectiveness are as thin as cicada yarn and are easily crushed by new technologies. Just like the Swiss low-end watch represented by the Swatch, after the advent of the Apple Watch, it was deeply impacted.
There's still a lot of time left for the BBA, and there's probably really not much time left for the Lexus.