The Volkswagen Group has invested huge resources in China and is looking for many partners to shorten the time to market by 30 percent, but many say it is not fast enough.
According to Roland Berger, 165 new models will be launched on the market in 2023, but more than 300 models will sell less than 10,000 units per year.
The automotive industry is running at a speed of "the back wave beats the front wave", even if the direction is not clear enough, but everyone seems to understand that if you run slowly, you will have no chance.
When we reverse the sales list in December last year, we will find that the Zhiji L7, which sold 2 units, was launched in April 2022, the Nezha X, which sold 10 units, was launched in October 2023, and the HiPhi X, which sold 25 units, was launched in April 2021.
Perhaps the PPT of "launching xx new cars in the next X years" seems encouraging enough, but when the "shelf life" of a new car becomes shorter and shorter, in fact, it may be that the R&D cost investment cannot be recovered, or the value retention rate of the "out-of-print" model terminal market declines.
At the new car launch conference of multinational car companies, they always like to take the generations of models accumulated in the past decades, lined up at the gate, not to say that this approach is "higher than the Chinese brand", after all, they have the advantage of time, but you can't deny that the sense of time and history is solidified and accumulated.
This kind of continuation requires long-term goals, and of course, it also needs to make timely adjustments and changes in the current market.
We have heard Geely talk about why it gave up naming "FX11" as "Xingyao" and chose "Boyue L"; I have also seen the Great Wall Haval experience the naming of "let go of yourself", and gradually began to find the inheritance and continuation of the car series.
At a time when new power brands have become "fast-moving consumer goods" in most people's impressions, there is also a car that will return to the spotlight of the market at the beginning of 2024.
Looking at P7 after 4 years, what are the surprises? At the 2019 Guangzhou Auto Show, the Xpeng P7 was officially pre-sold, and it took only 114 days from the start of delivery to the delivery of the 10,000th vehicle.
In 2021, Xpeng Motors topped the sales of new power brands, with P7 contributing more than 6% of the share; In 2022, Xpeng P7 will take the lead in reaching 100,000 units off the assembly line among the new power brand pure electric vehicles.
This speed is not surprising in today's involution market.
But even in 2023, under the highlights of G6, G9 and X9, P7 P7i also contributed to Xpeng's sales share of more than 1 3, and Xpeng can adjust smoothly in twists and turns and challenges, and it is inseparable from P7's consistent stable performance in the past 4 years.
Of course, the intensity of competition has increased visibly in the past 4 years, and in 2024, Xpeng has given a new preferential policy for the P7i, of which the Pengyi version has a huge discount of 50,000 yuan, and the starting price of all models has come to 20390,000 yuan.
On the one hand, this is Xpeng's rapid response to market competition, but on the other hand, we should also think about why the P7, which has been on the market for 4 years, still has strong competitiveness.
Today, Xpeng P7i is the cheapest pure electric intelligent driving coupe equipped with "scissor door" that users can buy on the market, and it also has the high-end intelligent driving ability of the first echelon of the current industry, and the 000 acceleration at the level of 3 seconds is not lost to the "a little expensive" Xiaomi Su7 too much.
This was almost impossible in the old days of fuel vehicles.
For example, "smart Pengyi door".
It may have been a design for more than half a century since 1968, when the Alfa Romeo Carabo concept was first equipped with scissor doors, but in the past it was almost exclusive to the top sports cars. For example, the first scissor door production car, the Lamborghini Countach, and more "deformed" styles such as the McLaren F1, the "butterfly door" of the BMW i8, the "gullwing door" of the Mercedes 300 SL, ......
The Alfa Romeo Carabo Concept was designed in 1968.
The reason why it is difficult to popularize is not only because of its complex structure and high cost, but also because it belongs to the typical example of "practicality giving way to aesthetics".
However, Xpeng P7i has added the word "intelligence" to the scissor door, which combines the 508TOPS computing power of the NVIDIA Drive Orin chip, which is mainly used for intelligent driving systems, as well as ultrasonic radar, visual perception and other up to 6 kinds of perception fusion, which are used to perceive obstacles on both sides in the whole scene, so as to realize the intelligent opening of the door.
This is not simple, on the one hand, the computing power of the dual Orin-X intelligent driving chips it calls is equivalent to 20 times the computing power of ordinary intelligent assisted driving cars; On the other hand, the scissor door is equipped with ultrasonic radar that detects up to 50 times per second and visual monitoring up to 5 times per second.
Compared with the previous mechanical opening and closing of the scissor door, which is not elegant, Xpeng P7i provides more than 16 opening and closing methods, including voice, screen touch, and NFC, making the sense of ceremony more pure.
The blessing of intelligence makes the "scissor door" easy to use.
You will find that the "scissor door" is no longer a separate scissor door, but integrated into the intelligent system of the whole vehicle, which realizes the "sharing" of costs while upgrading the experience.
This is also the reason why consumers can get a luxury car-level "scissor door" experience at the lowest cost on the market.
In the same way, there is also XNGP high-level intelligent driving.
The dual Orin-X chips continue to shine, and there are 31 perception hardware in the whole car, including 2 lidars, so that the XNGP available in 243 cities across the country owned by Xpeng's latest model X9 can also be enjoyed by P7i users.
The word "equal rights" is not a slogan, but through technological innovation and intelligent capabilities, users can enjoy the most advanced technology at a lower cost.
Behind "equal rights" is the basic law of automobile manufacturingAlthough every new entrant in the automotive industry is inseparable from "disruption", it must eventually face some basic rules of the automotive industry.
For example, the performance and safety attributes of the "car" itself.
The Xpeng P7i, which has played an intelligent signboard, has not lost the attributes of the "car" itself, such as the full mid-mounted motor design, such as the front double wishbone rear five-link suspension, which are common designs in past performance cars and sports cars.
And 33The braking distance of 100 kilometers of 3 meters is comparable to the powerful torque and 39s zero hundred acceleration, these "will not be outdated" performance parameters.
These capabilities are made up of Brembo brake calipers, Bosch braking systems, SACHS shock absorbers, as well as top companies in the automotive industry such as Infineon, Magna, NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, Suteng Chuangju, China Innovation Airlines, EVE Lithium Energy, Michelin and so on.
It's not cheap.
The ** of two NVIDIA Orin-X chips is more than 6,000 yuan, the single LiDAR of Suteng Chuangju is nearly 9,000 yuan, and even a Michelin PS4 tire is priced at 1,300 yuan.
Behind Xiaopeng's choice to benefit users is an objective law that has been verified by the company for a hundred years.
On the one hand, the ownership of 200,000 vehicles allows the P7 series to have more large-scale effects, which not only dilutes the cost of R&D and manufacturing, but also has stronger bargaining power on the first chain.
On the other hand, forward-looking technologies represented by OTA also make iteration and upgrade itself "cheaper".
The latest P7 XMART OS 213.0, added the traffic light countdown function of the navigation interface, the speeding prompt blessed by big data, and the further optimization of 360 image and sentry mode, as well as the "NetEase Cloud**" and wireless screen projection online.
Relying on Xpeng's growing user base, the cost of these OTA upgrades can be reduced without additional hardware expenses. Behind the launch of third-party applications like "NetEase Cloud**", it is also inseparable from the gradually growing "confidence" of Xiaopeng in business negotiations.
In fact, Musk's emphasis on the "cost pricing" model has its own reason, P7i can come up with preferential confidence in the current involution market, behind which is also inseparable from Xiaopeng's efforts to reduce the cost of the ** chain in the past year, as well as the scale effect brought by the expansion of the overall base.
Large corporate perspectiveAt a recent communication meeting with Dongfeng Motor, a leader joked: "Why is Xiaomi's first car called SU 7, and later I understood that it means to 'lose' to E 007." ”
This reminds me of BMW's launch conference of the new 7 Series held in Chengdu a few years ago, when a flag with only the number "7" was fluttering outside the huge West Expo City, and a huge poster with "the 7" printed on it.
At that time, I sighed that it was worthy of BMW, and a "THE 7" was already full of aura.
I don't know when "7" has become one of the hottest numbers in China's auto market, Xiaomi Su7, Wenjie M7, Zhijie S7, Zeekrypton 007, Yangwang U7, Weilai ET7, Volkswagen ID7……
And Xpeng P7 stepped on this outlet in advance 4 years ago.
Of course, this is a bit of a joke, but if we look back at the success of the Xpeng P7, you will find that this is the first product on the market to make the pure electric coupe market bigger and stronger, and it is also a key product for Xpeng's transformation.
This time, Xpeng lowered the price of the P7i Pengyi version by 50,000 yuan, so that technology, performance and luxury can be equalized, which is essentially the epitome of Xiaopeng's transformation again, and also carries the upward expectations of the Xpeng brand.
But more importantly, from the four years of growth of the P7 model, we have seen how a new power brand can make the life of a car continue to rejuvenate under the persistence of long-termism.
This must be of great significance in the current Chinese auto market.