Of course, this is not a Tesla soft article, but my thoughts on the current automotive industry.
Elephant turned around, it was too late
I believe that for ordinary domestic consumers, the name Tesla has only been heard and met in recent years. For car companies, they have professional information teams, perhaps they have received the news at the beginning of Tesla's establishment and have touched Tesla's various information to the sky.
You can look at the time point. Tesla was founded in 2003. A year later, the current leader Elon Musk entered the company and led the A round of financing. The first car product, Roadster, was released in 2008, and is a two-door sports car. Something interesting happened at that time.
When the first batch of Tesla Roadsters were offline and started delivery, Elon Musk found that the actual cost of Roadster, which was originally planned to be sold for 100,000 was as high as 120,000, which was far from the established cost of 70,000, and Musk had to increase the price to 110,000. This move attracted great dissatisfaction from the reservation customers, and the angry buyer almost fainted from besieging Musk.
I believe that traditional car companies at that time secretly mocked Tesla.
Then in 2009, the government saw the future trend and issued the "Rules for the Management of Access for New Energy Vehicle Manufacturing Enterprises and Products" to start subsidies for the purchase of new energy vehicles.
However, at that time, domestic brands were still striving to catch up with foreign car companies in fuel vehicles and did not have the extra energy to build electric cars. Among them, only BYD began to manufacture power batteries. So it is natural that we now see that BYD's pure electric vehicle sales rank first in China.
What were foreign car companies doing at that time? I am still proud of my own technological advantages for many years and I am very happy to sell in the fuel vehicle market. Electric car? Forget it or not.
Volkswagen In 2008, it began installing emission cheating software on diesel models sold in the UK, and it remains the same today. The release of its electric vehicle strategy "Roadmap E" was also in 2017. Later, 2018 and 2019 began to make progress gradually.
The century-old Ford is also facing the dilemma of transformation. At the end of 2017, it released the "Ford 2025 Plan" and began to focus on electric vehicles. Just yesterday, we officially signed a strategic alliance agreement with Volkswagen to develop in the fields of medium-sized pickup trucks, commercial vehicles and electric vehicles.
Toyota, which has been deeply engaged in the hybrid field, can be said to be the number one player in the world. But it also seems difficult to electrify. In the past two years, Toyota, which has come back to its senses, has also begun to focus on the pure electric market. Whether it is Toyota's frequent appearances in China or the establishment of a joint venture with BYD, it is not difficult to see Toyota's anxiousness.
So, was Tesla the first to build electric cars? Obviously not. As early as 1991, General Motors developed the first mass-produced electric vehicle EV-1 and put it on the market. However, because this car is not good-looking and has a range of only 140 kilometers. With the essential interests of capital, GM announced that it would give up in 2002 after producing more than 2,000 EV-1, which has a low investment-to-output ratio. This incident also made General Motors famous, and a documentary called "Who Killed Electric Vehicles" made the incident widely circulated.
Seeing these century-old car companies panic in the face of electrification, the author finds it ridiculous.The biggest challenge facing traditional car companies now is that they lack the expertise they need to compete in the software automobile era. On June 9, Volkswagen Group CEO Dis lost the position of Volkswagen brand CEO due to Volkswagen's eighth-generation golf and ID.3 software problems.
The new forces in car manufacturing are also a little less expensive
Of course, in the face of the transformation of electrification, there are still companies worthy of praise. For example, many new car-making forces in China have reached their peak in PPT. Although it has fallen by more than half, car companies like , NIO , and Xiaopeng that have been mass-produced and delivered are still worthy of praise.
is similar to Tesla's IT entrepreneurial team, and the founding teams of NIO and Xiaopeng are all from various Internet industries. It abandoned the idea of traditional car manufacturing companies and injected the latest technological concept of the Internet into car manufacturing. It is worth mentioning that their intelligent networking technology has surpassed many traditional car companies.
Similarly, they also have a common opponent - Tesla.
Although the product strength and intelligent networking technology of pure electric vehicles under NIO and Xiaopeng have the ability to compete with traditional car companies, compared with that of Tesla's Autopilot autonomous driving, OTA cloud, FSD chips, battery BMS fields, and component modularity have continuous core competitiveness.
At present, the new forces are still not at the same time as these Teslas can give in software.
Before Tesla was domestically produced, independent brands and new car-making forces had certain price advantages. However, as Tesla builds a factory in Shanghai, this price advantage has gradually narrowed. Now, the price subsidy of domestic Model 3 has been as low as 271,600 yuan. Judging from the recent sales data, 11,095 domestic Model 3 sold in May, an increase of 205% month-on-month, accounting for 15.8% of the overall sales of new energy in China in May.
Last
In fact, from the perspective of technological development, Tesla has become a technology company, and its innovation is comparable to that of the current Internet giants. The transformation of traditional car companies in electrification is like an elephant turning around, extremely slow, and their application capabilities in software are even more incomparable to Tesla.
This reminds me of when Apple subverted the mobile phone industry. Although cars did not have extremely fast iteration speed like mobile phones, the gap between traditional car companies and Tesla is already obvious.
