** Bohufn
Author |Chen Ping'an.
In the hit TV series "Flowers" in the finale not long ago, although Miss Wang regards her second-hand Xiali as a Cadillac, Santana, who carries Mr. Bao from Fengyue Field every night, is the minimum standard of Huanghe Road.
Forty years ago, the Germans instructed us to assemble the first Santana on the outskirts of Shanghai. Under the guidance of the idea of "market for technology", a vigorous tide of joint venture cars has been set off in China. For a long time in the past, the top three sales in the domestic automobile market were basically FAW-Volkswagen, SAIC-Volkswagen and SAIC-GM, and the second echelon could not even see their exhaust.
But this year is different. According to the latest data released by the China Passenger Car Association, three of the top four domestic passenger car manufacturers in retail sales in 2023 are independent brands. In addition to the soaring BYD occupying the top spot, Geely and Changan also won 14120,000 and 138The 30,000 units ranked third and fourth.
It is difficult to say that such changes have nothing to do with the development of new energy vehicles in full swing in China. In 2023, in addition to BYD, which has long been fully switched to new energy, Geely and Changan's new energy sales will also come to 48760,000 and 470,000 units. In the past year, the domestic retail sales of new energy passenger vehicles were 77360,000 units, a year-on-year increase of 362%, with an annual penetration rate of 357%, an increase of 81 percentage point.
However, the rapid development of the industry does not mean that players can eat and drink spicy. At the beginning of last year, Shen Hui, the founder of Weimar, posted a Weibo: "Live like an animal", but all that followed was sales that were no longer released and a succession of bad news. It is not easy for those who survive, so many new forces, only ideals and questions have completed their goals at the beginning of the year.
In January this year, the sales of most car companies fell sharply. Xpeng, Weilai, and Ideal fell by % respectively in January; VOYAH and ZEEKR fell by %. At the same time, seven new energy brands such as Li Auto and Tesla announced price cuts.
The battle in 2023 will continue to be fought by car companies in 2024.
In 2023, Tesla will take the lead in starting the ** war. In 2024, the ** battle is more ferocious.
On January 11, Ideal officially announced a price cut. Depending on the model version, the price reduction range is 330,000-360,000 yuan. The starting price of the ideal L7 for the volume model has dropped to 28690,000 yuan. Subsequently, Tesla also announced a price cut, and the price of the new version of Tesla Model 3 rear-wheel drive was reduced by 1550,000 yuan to 24590,000 yuan, the price of the Model 3 long-range refreshed version was reduced by 1150,000 yuan to 28590,000 yuan; The Model Y rear-wheel drive version was lowered by 7,500 yuan to 25890,000 yuan; The price of the Model Y long-range version was reduced by 6500 yuan to 29990,000 yuan.
According to incomplete statistics, many brands, including NIO, AVATAR, Leap, Nezha, ZEEKR, etc., have launched limited-time car purchase rights, with a discount of 130,000-370,000 yuan.
* The war is of course not something that the manufacturers want to fight, but that they have to fight. Although it has entered the season of "software definition", at the moment when intelligent driving has not yet been transformed into real receivables, the background color of new energy vehicles is still manufacturing, selling cars is the most important income, and scale is the lifeline of car companies.
The price reduction is to sell more cars. In 2023, Tesla's global deliveries will increase by 36% year-on-year after Tesla China has played the price reduction card4%；In February last year, BYD's main model Qin plus** directly dropped to less than 100,000 yuan, using the advantage of "the same price of oil and electricity" to grab more share.
Due to the fact that the current products do not form enough differentiation, almost every segment is facing full competition. For example, in the market of medium and large pure electric SUVs of 20-300,000 yuan, there are many highly competitive products such as Jiyue 01, Zhiji LS6 and Xiaopeng G9. Therefore, it has become the most important dimension of competition, and Ping An's research report predicts that in 2024, the "first war" dominated by the head new energy vehicle companies will continue, especially in the mainstream ** belt of 100,000-200,000 yuan.
In this context, the first war has also accelerated the clearing of the industry, and the trend of industry polarization has further intensified. The battle itself is for more sales, but when the head is also involved in the war, the essence of the test is the all-round ability of the car company, the most typical is the cost control ability.
For example, relying on fewer models and leading in the first chain and advanced manufacturing, Tesla can stabilize the cost of sales per car at 3About $60,000. BYD, which is vertically integrated, is even better in this regard, and Li Xiang, the founder of Li Auto, also posted on Weibo last year to praise, "The gross profit margin of the car in the fourth quarter was 22."8% (dealer system), assuming the cost of merging into the dealer system, BYD's gross margin in the fourth quarter and Tesla's gross margin in the fourth quarter is 25The 9% gross profit margin (direct sales system) is comparable or even better. ”
In comparison, the smaller players are obviously a little overwhelmed. Aiming at the high-end market, the gross profit of a bicycle has dropped from a maximum of nearly 80,000 yuan to less than 20,000 yuan, and the gross profit of Xpeng has dropped from 120,000 yuan was directly reduced to the negative number, and Weimar, Gaohe, and Hengchi were all on the verge of "falling behind".
Lin Jinwen, vice president of ZEEKR Intelligent Technology, once said in an interview, "As long as there are enough players, the industry will be enough to roll up, and the number of players will gradually decrease." In the next 2-3 years, volume is the norm, and all competing products and brands will soon be out of the market if they do not have the ability to roll and afford it. ”
If price reduction is a short-term battle that has to be involved, then intelligent driving is a long-term battle that has to be participated.
For a long time in the past, although it is generally believed that the industry has entered the second half, intelligence has become the most important dimension of competition, but in the actual market competition, intelligent driving has not become the competitiveness of manufacturers. At the beginning of last year, BYD founder Wang Chuanfu's sentence "intelligent driving is all flickering" pushed the discussion about intelligent driving to a climax, attracting many peers to speak out.
However, after the introduction of the Transformer-based BEV perception solution at AI Day in 2021, domestic manufacturers began to abandon the past scheme of collecting and using high-precision maps in advance, and instead chose BEV solutions that do not rely on high-definition maps.
In mid-2023, Xpeng, Huawei, and Li all announced a very aggressive plan for the opening of the city in the year NOA and 100, and today, more and more manufacturers are beginning to join the ranks. On January 23, Zhiji Auto City NOA took the lead in pushing in Shanghai, and the city NOA opening plan is gradually advancing, and in June, it will launch a noa city without a map to further accelerate the opening of the city. The DENZA N7 high-speed pilot function was officially launched on January 18, and DENZA will launch the city pilot function in the first quarter.
BYD, which has always been cautious about intelligent driving, has also chosen to invest significantly. According to a report by Late Auto, starting from the second half of 2023, BYD has been looking for high-level talents for intelligent driving chips, and the highest-level positions report directly to Han Bing, head of BYD's intelligent driving business and director of the intelligent driving R&D center.
According to Wang Chuanfu's speech in January this year, BYD's intelligent driving team currently has more than 3,000 software engineers and more than 1,000 algorithm and hardware engineers. This scale is more than many car companies that focus on intelligent driving. The comparable peers are that by the end of 2023, Huawei's scale will be about 3,000 people, Xpeng will have about 1,200 people, and Ideal will have about 900 people.
The reason for this change is, on the one hand, because the help of intelligent driving for sales is becoming more and more obvious. According to reports, there are about 3 of the more than 50,000 orders for the M730,000 units are the intelligent driving version; Xpeng facelifted the G9 150,000 Dadingzhong, with dual lidar and dual Orinx computing chips, the proportion of the MAX version that supports urban NGP exceeds 80%. Even if it is not the first echelon of intelligent driving, the proportion of Leap C10 lidar intelligent driving version has approached 45%.
On the other hand, in the second half of intelligence, science and technology is the key to the upward movement of domestic brands.
According to the monitoring data of the Gaogong Intelligent Vehicle Research Institute, the NOA standard installation rate of new energy passenger vehicles in the Chinese market in 2023 will be 863%, of which the standard allocation rate of more than 200,000 yuan has exceeded 20%. *In 2024, the adoption rate of NOA, including hardware standard equipment (software payment), will exceed 10%.
Some users told Bohu Finance that a relative of his, who did not trust new energy vehicles, placed an order with almost no hesitation after feeling the facelift M7.
However, at present, intelligent driving is still in the process of exploration. Not so long ago, Tesla FSD v12 (FSD v121.2) Start officially pushing to users. The selling point of this update is end-to-end.
In the past, Tesla's intelligent driving mode mainly relied on engineer coding, and the new version of the entire algorithm is almost entirely built with neural networks. Trained on data from more than 1 million vehicles, the system uses artificial intelligence to influence vehicle controls, such as steering wheels, pedals, indicators, etc., rather than hard-coding every driving behavior. In Tesla's view, V12 marks a new era on the road to full autonomy.
This has also triggered a new round of competition for intelligent driving in China. On January 30, He Xiaopeng, chairman of Xpeng Motors, said that Xpeng's end-to-end model will be fully launched in the next step. NIO will launch an end-to-end active security feature in the first half of this year.
Last year, Great Wall Motors, which had been complained about for a long time on social **, achieved good results. From January to December 2023, Great Wall Motor sold a total of 1230704 units, a year-on-year increase of 1529%。Among them, the cumulative overseas sales were 316018, a year-on-year increase of 8248%。
Also relying on the overseas market to fight a turnaround battle is Chery. In 2023, Chery Group will sell a total of 188 vehicles10,000 units, a year-on-year increase of 526%, and its ** mouth car 9370,000 units, a year-on-year increase of 1011%, accounting for nearly 50% of its total sales.
Selling cars overseas is indeed something that many car companies want to do. After the high intensity of market competition in the Chinese market, for Chinese car companies that have occupied the technological highland, the huge overseas market is a better place to dig gold.
However, with more and more car companies going overseas, the competition is bound to become more and more fierce. In overseas markets, Chinese car companies are also forbidden to be tested by the first rules, the first chain and localization.
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