Obviously, the turmoil of Gaohe Automobile does not stop because the attention of the people who eat melons has dissipated.
Just after the interaction on the official Weibo of AVATAR, which triggered countless conjectures that "Gaohe ushered in a turnaround and may be absorbed by Chang'an AVATAR", a thunderbolt was thrown from the other side of the ocean.
Jia Yueting's Faraday Future filed a complaint with the Intermediate People's Court of Shenzhen, Guangdong, against Ding Lei and Human Horizons Gaohe Automobile and other affiliated companies.
On the other side, there is a scene of ants on a hot pot in the Gaohe employee rights protection group.
Many people said that they had not yet received approval to leave their jobs, and even changing jobs had become a problem. It is also reported that the treatment of employees in Yancheng and Shanghai is different, and the former has a local monthly salary and social security.
But the most important message is, "This week, we will handle the resignation and wait for the notice." ”
Perhaps, this play is not far from the curtain call.
Shelling from the old club
From the industry to consumers, the evaluation of Gaohe is extremely torn.
But if you want to say who has the lowest evaluation, I'm afraid it's Ding Lei's old club, Jia Yueting's Faraday FF.
In the complaint, Faraday FF accused Human Horizons of infringing trade secrets related to FF91, including but not limited to design, development, production, sales and after-sales, which was "unfair competition".
In fact, this is just Faraday FF's official declaration of war against Gao He, and there have been foreshadows before.
Just after Gaohe stopped work and production, Wang Jiawei, the former vice president of Faraday Future FF Capital (alleged to be Jia Yueting's nephew), posted a Weibo bombardment of Gaohe: Thief + ** and**Ti ** about "Ding Lei got a full set of FF91 design data" report.
Ding Lei served as Fara's second-in-command, and after leaving his job, he founded Gaohe, and the first car, the Hiphi X, was similar to Faraday FF91. Putting these together, even people who don't know the inside story can easily make this association.
So, how should we view the connection between Gaohe and FF91?
Judging by the similarity between FF91 and HiPhi X in terms of body shape and suspension structure, it is indeed difficult to avoid suspicion, so it is impossible to rule out the possibility of Gaohe adopting FF91 technology from the outside.
But even so, judging from the FF91 that debuted in 2017, it has been 7 years since then. Although Li Xiang praised "the best electric vehicle design that Chinese can come up with", it is obvious that the progress of smart electric vehicles is much faster than that of fuel vehicles, and 7 years is enough to iterate two or three generations of products.
Today, HiPhi products have formed a pedigree, derived from the HiPhi Z sedan, HiPhi A sports car, HiPhi Y midsize SUV and AN1 entry-level car. These models are not only different in terms of external dimensions, but also in terms of internal changes.
In terms of intelligent driving ability alone, Hiphi X, the first car of HiPhi, adopts the Bosch + Aptiv intelligent driving solution, but does not use lidar, so it cannot achieve high-end intelligent driving. When HiPhi Z and Y came out, the sensor lineup was 13 cameras, 5 millimeter-wave radars, and 1 lidar, with the NVIDIA Orin X chip, forming a generation gap with Hiphi X.
This means that if high-end intelligent driving is to reach the ideal level, Gaohe needs to take a big leap in the dimension of body electronic and electrical architecture in order to better adapt to advanced electronic components and achieve higher electrical consistency.
Therefore,It cannot be ruled out that Gaohe has adopted Faraday FF91 data to build a mechanical platform, but the electronic and electrical architecture, which is more important for intelligent electric vehicles, cannot be inherited based on the design of 7 years ago.
In fact, Hi-Tech has achieved quite good research and development results in chassis, body, domain control and other aspects. Gaohe R&D department personnel said to the automobile commune.
Just like many independent car companies in China, they were inseparable from reverse development or so-called copycat in the early years, and then carried out platform magic reform, and then independently developed platforms and electronic and electrical architecture. If Gaohe does misappropriate FF information, then it will naturally be difficult to escape the punishment of the law, but it cannot be erased because of its efforts in research and development.
Three direct causes, one root cause
At the beginning of its birth, Gaohe had a multi-layered halo on its head: the state-owned background of the three places, the unique resources, the founder with a bright resume, and the luxurious and complete founding team.
Coming to this point, reviewing the change trajectory of Gaohe, it can be summarized into three direct reasons and one fundamental reason.
The first is positioning bias.
The first two cars, Hiphi X and Z, are both 60.8 million yuan, which is comparable to the K50 of Qiantu Automobile, while the scale of production and sales of the latter has not improved, and it cannot be seen in the same amount as Gaohe.
"Fighting high and low" is the usual method of new car-making forces, which can be seen from Tesla's Roadster - Model S X - Model 3 Y - future Model 2 Q route, first establish a brand height, and then expand the scale of production and sales.
This line of thinking has its validity, but it only applies to the early stages of entrepreneurship. The second step is to fight the bayonet that is indispensable in the automobile manufacturing industry - to scale. Only by achieving scale can we dilute costs, improve production proficiency and improve quality levels.
For Tesla, if it weren't for the 2010 Toyota stake in the funds to let it sell the NUMMI factory at a low price, the Model S would not be able to bring it into the real mass production stage, if it were not for Musk in 2017 with the cover into the production line, desperately using the tent production line to pull the gigabit factory production, then the Model 3 could not be brought into the mainstream ** band range, nor could it achieve annual production and sales of six or seven figures, then Tesla's success would not be able to talk about.
This is linked to the second direct cause: misrhythmic errors.
HiPhi's first product, the HiPhi X, was unveiled in July 2019 and officially launched at the Beijing Auto Show in September 2020. At that time, NIO had launched ES8, ES6, and EC6 products in addition to EP9, occupying the ecological niche when BBA was not transformed in time, forcing HiPhi X to benchmark against Porsche.
The second product, the Hiphi Z, was officially unveiled in November 2021, the price was announced in August 2022, and deliveries will be in January 2023.
The third product, the Hiphi Y, was unveiled at the Shanghai Auto Show in April 2023, and deliveries will begin in August.
The high-end Hiphi Y came a little late, and the AN1 entry-level car has not been mass-produced so far.
Why is it slow? This is related to the third direct cause: the lack of resources, which is also related to the root cause below.
At the beginning of this year, Gaohe was exposed to arrears of goods, which led to the breakdown of business cooperation, and internal sources said that the entry car AN1 project was stalled because of this.
In the Gaohe rights protection group, many employees are complaining about Qingdao, and as one of the shareholders, Qingdao is regarded as one of the reasons for excluding other funds in the eyes of Gaohe people. Tracing back to the source, the reason for Gaohe's "ischemia" lies in the lack of self-hematopoietic ability and financing ability, and the poor management of the founder's funds.
Due to the opaque sales data of Gaohe, the monthly sales data of Gaohe published by different platforms are different. However, both the retail sales and the number of insurance companies show that the sales volume of Gaohe in 2023 will be about 7,000 units, and it is obvious that the contribution of selling cars to Gaohe's revenue is minimal.
The founder Ding Lei does not have the financing ability of the founder of the head new force, and in the past 6 years since the establishment of Gaohe, the cumulative amount of funds has only been more than 20 billion, which is not as good as the loss of NIO in a year.
The fundamental reason is that the founder Ding Lei and the company's corporate culture are too "old car people", which leads to slow progress and cognitive inability to keep up with the new stage.
From the perspective of product development, Ding Lei lacked proper cognition of intelligence, and at first attached importance to vehicle-road collaboration and ignored vehicle-end intelligence, and even Ding Lei and senior executives did not know the role of lidar at the beginning, and the number of R&D staff and funds allocated to intelligent driving were an order of magnitude lower than that of their peers.
On the one hand, this makes Gaohe products lack cool functions and a sense of technology in addition to the door, which is not conducive to subsequent sales growth, and on the other hand, it also makes potential investors unable to be optimistic about the growth space of Gaohe.
It is precisely because of Ding Lei's conservatism and tradition that it has imposed restrictions on funds, and has not opened the door to popular capital and restricted the flow of funds.
Zhao Ning, a senior employee of Gaohe, told Auto Commune: "The most important financing for our company should come from Qingdao City Investment, and some central enterprise investment, such as Chinese Life and Chinese People's Insurance should have invested, as well as credit loans from Shanghai Bank of Communications." ”
It is true that Ding Lei's traditional old car man has laid the foundation for the superiority of Gaohe automobile products in terms of quality, reliability and chassis handling, which is also the reason why Gaohe car owners are still willing to speak out, but all this is difficult to support in the face of the general trend of defeat.
Who needs Gaohe?
With the advancement of the pace of "unified resignation this week" for employees of Gaohe Automobile, in the past few months, various car companies have also carved up the Gaohe team, from R&D, sales to other departments have been frantically poached.
This recognition is also a kind of black humor. "There is quite a lot of panic in the middle of the road.
With the passage of time, there are fewer and fewer employees left, which has a positive and negative impact on potential receivers. On the one hand, it is true that the cost burden can be reduced, but on the other hand, the talent that can be taken over is also lost.
So, the savior who can make Gaohe "reincarnate" in**?
From the perspective of homologous, SAIC may be an option, and it has also been speculated by many people. However, judging from the different attitudes of Shanghai and Yancheng towards Gaohe employees, I am afraid that SAIC Motor is more focused on its own high-end new energy brand Zhiji.
Car companies that need Gaohe either lack high-end new energy brands, or their own high-end new energy brands need to be supplemented by Gaohe's assets.
At present, high-end new energy brands have begun to have small car companies, as well as BYD Denza, Geely Krypton, Changan AVA, Dongfeng Lantu, GAC Haobo, BAIC Polar Fox, etc., especially the sales scale of the first four has been relatively impressive. BAIC, JAC and Huawei Hongmeng Zhixing are also building new brands, and the grade is even no less than the first two cars of Gaohe, so they have little demand for the acquisition of Gaohe.
With the return of the mecha dragon to Ora, perhaps the Great Wall will upgrade the brand positioning of Ora. FAW has some appeals to high-end new power brands, and the Hongqi brand is special and cannot replace the completely market-oriented new forces, so FAW once set out to acquire Byton, but it was not successfully integrated.
At present, the contact between Chang'an and the interaction of AVATR mean that good things are about to happen to both sides? Or is it a polite greeting that can't be hand-in-hand? From some news channels, we learned that AVATR is interested in Gaohe's channels and service team, which is conducive to forming a differentiation from other Huawei brands, after all, it has converged in terms of intelligence.
When the employees of Gaohe in the rights protection group no longer have expectations for "resurrection", Gaohe may have no way to find a way to recover, so if it can be "reincarnated", it is not the best outcome.