On March 1, new automakers announced their February delivery results. February is the biggest off-season of the year, because there is a full Spring Festival, and there are usually not many people buying cars during the Spring Festival. Except for Wenjie, Ideal, and some brands with a particularly small sales base last year, most companies saw a decline in sales in February. Wenjie delivered 21,142 vehicles, continuing to rank first among new forces; Ideal delivery of 20,251 units, this is the second time it has been asked to surpass; Big brother BYD also delivered only 122311 vehicles, more than 70,000 fewer than the same period last year. Among the remaining brands, except for Aion, the others are basically less than 10,000. NIO delivered 8,132 vehicles, while XPeng only had 4,545 units. 
This February, a new round of ** war officially began. "Volume King" BYD intensively released 8 models in 12 days, and the price was greatly reduced in the name of "Glory Edition", of which the starting price of Qin Plus was reduced to 7980,000 yuan. A number of car brands can only grit their teeth and follow up. He Xiaopeng said in the all-staff letter at the beginning of the year that this year is the first year for Chinese auto brands to enter the sea of blood competition, that is, the first year of the knockout competition. At the same time as he sent the internal letter, Gaohe Automobile held an internal meeting and announced that it would suspend production for six months. This is the start of the 2024 playoffs. 
The duel of the "top students".Let's talk about a few top students first. Both Wenjie and Li delivered more than 20,000 units in February, but Wenjie delivered 891 more vehicles than Li Li. Don't underestimate these more than 800 vehicles, it shows that Wenjie is not a surprise delivery, and the advantage can be continued. 
Of the 21,142 new cars delivered, 18,479 were new M7s, accounting for 87%. Relying on this car, the world turned over, and it was a high ideal for two consecutive months. According to the latest data released by Wenjie, the cumulative number of new M7 Dading exceeded 150,000 units, and this data was 140,000 units on February 1, which means that about 10,000 new orders were added in February. Although the amount is not small, butThe growth rate has declined significantly. The new M7 will be launched in September 2023, and most of the orders will come from the early stage - 100,000 orders in the first three months, only 50,000 in the second three months, and 10,000 in February. With total deliveries exceeding 100,000, it will be a test how long the new M7 will last as hot as it gets. Regardless of incremental orders, the remaining 50,000 orders will be delivered in two months. However, it has launched the M9 and has received orders for 50,000 units so far, and deliveries have begun on February 26. Deliveries of the M9 and the new M7 are stacked together, and the results will continue to be impressive for at least the next two months, and it is not impossible to continue to exceed the ideal. Of course, Ideal has its own countermeasures - a facelift and upgrade of the L series (L9, L8, L7) models. The 2024 Ideal L series models will be officially launched on March 1, with little change in appearance, mainly in terms of battery life, cockpit chips, and comfort. For example, the cockpit chips will all be upgraded to Qualcomm 8295, the ideal L7 and L8 will also have a car refrigerator, and the ideal L8 will be equipped with a second-row small table as standard. More than 1 month ago, Ideal was cutting the price of the old L series models and clearing the inventory to meet **. After superimposing various discounts, the ideal L7 can be reduced by more than 40,000 yuan at most, and the transaction price is less than 300,000 yuan. After the product update transition, sales should be maintained in the next few months. According to Li Xiang, the founder of Ideal, 50,000 vehicles will be delivered in March. After the hard match, who is higher in the ideal and the question world will be a major attraction in March. On March 1, Ideal also released the long-awaited Ideal MEGA in the industry - Ideal's first pure electric model, MPV, priced at 55980,000 yuan. Deliveries of the car will begin on March 11, and this positioning will not be a particularly high-volume model. BYD delivered 122311 vehicles in February, and the position of the big brother is still unchallenged, butThis is not a good result. In the off-season of January and February last year, BYD's sales were 151341 and 193655 respectively, and since then, it has basically exceeded 200,000 units per month, once exceeding 300,000 units. The sales volume of more than 100,000 is still a bit small for BYD at this current size. This is also one of the reasons why BYD has cut prices like crazy after the start of the year. Aion, the former champion of new power, has been lagging behind since being overtaken by Ideal for the first time in December last year. In February, Aion delivered 16,676 vehicles, which was further widened by the ideal and the world. The current Aion is very contradictory, on the one hand, to maintain sales, on the other hand, to improve the brand. It sells the best models of hundreds of thousands, and the ** models that are vigorously promoted sell very little. In the past year, Aion has been promoting the new brand Haobo and launched three cars, the most expensive of which sells for more than 1 million yuan, but the contribution to sales is negligible. The former top student is no longer top-notch, and Aion is playing the numbers game again. On the February sales poster, Aion highlighted the "cumulative sales at home and abroad from January to February" - 41,623 units, "ranking among the top three mainstream pure electric vehicles". It's just a matter of adding a definite sentence before the sales volume, and putting the data for January and February together to make it seem like a lot. Previously, Aion had also mixed "sales" and "deliveries" to make the data look better. So,The showdown of top students is not only about sales, but also about marketing. 
Resistance of the "second echelon".The "second echelon" did not deliver more than 10,000 in February. Several brands, which are hitting 20,000 units, delivered an average of only six or seven thousand units in February. NIO delivered 8,132 vehicles, down year-on-year and month-on-month. In a live broadcast in late February, Li Bin, the founder of Weilai, "sold miserably", saying that his annual salary was less than one million, and the travel expenses of all the people in the company were the same"I'm pretty miserable with cash right now." In the past few months, NIO has cut some unnecessary expenses and shrunk some unprofitable businesses, but the response from the market has been mediocre. JPMorgan Chase has lowered the price target of NIO twice in the past two months, just from 8$50 to $5. Today, the ideal market capitalization is 4 times that of NIO. In the coming months, NIO's sales are pinned on model redesigns. In January, it announced that it would update the configuration of existing models, reduce prices and clear inventory, and in February, it will start pre-ordering seven 2024 models, including the ET5T and the all-new ES8, and deliver 2024 models in early March. 
Image source The performance of the 2024 model on Weilai's official Weibo has been upgraded, the experience has been improved, and the price has not changed, which may play a certain role in driving NIO's sales. The first model of the Alps, a sub-brand of NIO, which is expected to be expected to be delivered in the second half of the year. This car owner attacks the new energy vehicle market of 20-300,000 yuan, and it is a model that can go in volume. However, no further information has been released yet. Xpeng delivered 4,545 vehicles in February, and only 8,250 vehicles in January, which is a bit lacking in stamina. Previously, Xpeng delivered more than 30,000 vehicles for 3 consecutive months, which was very exciting, but it just happened to cross the line, and there was a suspicion of surprise delivery. After the orders in hand are consumed, there must be incremental orders to make the data look good. Now Xpeng will announce the delivery volume of X9 separately every month, which shows how much attention it attaches to it. There were 1,448 units of the X9 in February, all of which were backlogged from before. P7, the former pillar of sales, has seen a serious decline in sales. The P5 has been tepid, and the G3 has not sold much anymore. Next, Xiaopeng will tell the story of going to sea. In late February, the company announced that it had reached a partnership with Ali&sons, a UAE dealer group, and a number of Xpeng models will be launched and delivered in five countries in the Middle East and Africa from the second quarter. Nezha and Leap delivered 6,085 and 6,566 vehicles respectively in February, which were in a position of neither up nor down. Nezha's sales pillar is still a model priced at about 100,000 yuan, which used to be called Nezha U, and now it is renamed Nezha X. **The more expensive Nezha S can now deliver about 2,000 vehicles per month, and if it can be further improved in the future, it will help Nezha's brand to improve. Nezha recently reached a strategic cooperation with 360 Company to jointly release the large-scale model product Neta GPT, 360 intelligent brain, search and digital human and other technologies will be applied to the cockpit, first on the Nezha L that will be launched in April. 360 is a shareholder of Nezha, and it is very active in the large model track, and the technical effect is specific, and the real chapter can only be seen after the vehicle is delivered. ZEEKR delivered 7,510 vehicles, and at the same time as announcing the delivery volume, it was announced that the new ZEEKR 001 had officially started delivery. **ZEEKR 001 is also a facelifted model,**Compared with the old model, it will continue to play the role of a pillar of sales in the future. ZEEKR 007, which began to be delivered in batches in January, delivered more than 5,000 units that month, which is off to a good start. However, the ZEEKR 007 and the upcoming Xiaomi SU7 are direct competitors, and the Xiaomi car may put pressure on ZEEKR after delivery. In short, the delivery volume of the second echelon in February has declined a lot, and their goal is to stand at the threshold of 20,000 deliveries last month before they can get the ticket to the knockout round. 
The knockout round has officially begunThe biggest event in the auto circle in February was the ** war, in which most new energy vehicle companies and many fuel car companies were involved. The fuse was that BYD announced the launch of the Qin plus and destroyer 05 "Glory Edition" on February 19, the day after the Spring Festival, which was 20,000 and 2 more than the "Champion Edition".20,000 yuan, with a starting price as low as 7980,000 yuan. This move shocked the entire industry and was rated by netizens as "not leaving a way for friends to live". The most important thing is that this ** is already lower than the same level of fuel vehiclesBYD officially played the slogan of "electricity is lower than oil" to replace the previous "oil and electricity at the same price". There is a paragraph that vividly reflects the ruthlessness of BYD's price reduction: a year ago, 140,000 bought BYD Qin Ran Didi, and earned 70,000 yuan throughout the year, and this year, BYD Qin directly dropped to 70,000, which is equivalent to working for a year in vain, and the Qin configuration of 70,000 is higher. BYD Qin's price reduction is just the beginning, and then, BYD Dolphin, Han, Tang, Song, Seal and other series of models have launched the "Glory Edition", with an overall price reduction of 10,000-40,000 yuan. In the 12 days from February 19 to March 1, BYD released a total of eight models, collectively known as the "Honor Edition", as the 2024 facelifted model, all of which will be updated and reduced. BYD takes fuel vehicles as a target, but it is a new energy car company that lies down. 
Image source After BYD Auto's official Weibo BYD "flipped the table", SAIC-GM-Wuling, Changan Qiyuan, Nezha, Geely and other car companies quickly followed up and lowered their **. For example, the Wuling Starlight Plus of the benchmark Qin PLUS has reduced the ** of the 150km advanced version to 9980,000 yuan. The starting price of Changan Qiyuan A05 has dropped to 7890,000 yuan, and also imitated BYD to release a poster of "electricity is lower than oil", and it is 900 yuan cheaper than BYD Qin; Nezha Aya and Nezha S have all reduced their prices, and they have also launched a value-preserving exchange policy, which will be exchanged for new cars at a seven-fold discount within two years. In this process, fuel vehicles fought back,-for-tat played the slogan "oil is stronger than electricity". Beijing Hyundai has lowered the starting price of the Elantra to 7580,000 yuan, FAW-Volkswagen's new Bora only 680,000 yuan. This means that people who have bought cars in the past two years, whether they buy new energy vehicles or fuel vehicles, have lost money. In late January this year, Lin Jinwen, vice president of ZEEKR Intelligent Technology, made it clear that he would not follow up on the first battle. Now, ZEEKR also has to reduce the price of a number of models, Lin Jinwen said, since the beginning of this year, the market situation is not very friendly, the industry is very "volume", so at the beginning of this year, we have to rivet to do it. Many CEOs of car companies regard this year's wave of first-class battles as the beginning of the knockout round. According to Li Xiang's judgment, the new energy vehicle market of more than 200,000 will show the result that the top three brands will eat up 70% of the market share in the fourth quarter of this year, which is more concentrated than fuel vehicles, and is no different from smartphones. The impact of this wave of ** battles on sales will not be reflected until the report card in March. But until then, some car companies can't hold on. On the first day of construction this year, Gaohe Automobile announced that it would suspend production for six months, after postponing the payment of January wages, canceling the year-end bonus and reducing the salary of all employees. Subsequently, some employees were dismissed or voluntarily resigned, and the service of the charging station, charging pile installation, and APP charging function was suspended. The founder, Ding Lei, appeared at the Shanghai headquarters on February 22 and told the employees that the window period for the company's turnaround was at most 3 months, and he would do everything he could to save the company. In the live broadcast the next day, the executives of Gaohe Company admitted that the company's capital chain was tight and apologized to the car owner and colleagues, but emphasized that the senior management did not run away. Now, Gaohe is still trying to save itself by all means, including negotiating with Changan Automobile for acquisition. The competition is brutal and even pathetic. For those companies that are serious about building cars, temporary difficulties may bring them down, but they deserve respect, and we hope that they can survive them. In addition, it was recently announced that Apple will abandon a car building project that has been explored for more than a decade and shift the team to generative AI. No one would have thought that the first to come out of the game this year would be the Apple Car. Xiaomi's CEO Lei Jun said he was "very shocked", while Li Xiang thought it was an "absolutely correct strategic choice". At a meeting on February 18, Wang Chuanfu, chairman of BYD, said that China's new energy vehicle production and sales have been the world's first for 9 consecutive years, accounting for more than 60% of the world's total, and it is expected that the monthly penetration rate of new energy vehicles will exceed 50% this year. Judging from the macro data, this achievement is indeed eye-catching, but the cruelty of competition can only be experienced by the car companies involved. The wheels of history are rolling forward, the knockout game is bound to come, and car companies have no choice but to give it a go.