Text | Sina Technology Huazijian
Editor | Han Dapeng
Shen Yanan, co-founder and president of LI, talked about going to sea in a recent conversation, and at the same time insinuated his competitors: "We won’t go to Europe first and then think about how to survive like them. If we don’t think of how to win, we won’t go out."
Among these competitors who were swept away by him, Wei Lai and Xpeng Motors, which set off for Europe in 2021, are naturally included.
This is slightly different from his mild attitude towards going to sea when interviewed after the release of the new Li ONE in 2021. In May 2021, he slightly revealed LI’s overseas progress. "There are indeed overseas market layout plans, and a team responsible for overseas markets has been established to study overseas market channels and other issues."
These subtle changes are just a microcosm of the changes in the relationship between Wei Lai, LI and Xpeng Motors, the three new forces who were once called "Wei Xiaoli" or "making cars and being stupid". They are no longer he is my brother, and may even be friends.
Insisting constantly.
It’s hard to know when the relationship between the three new forces began to change, but the innuendo between Li Xiang and Li Bin, the founder of Weilai, must be the most.
In December 2021, Weilai released the new model ET5 at NIO Day in Suzhou, which is the second car of Weilai after ET7. The highlight is that it is equipped with a panoramic digital cockpit based on VR/AR technology. Li Bin didn’t specify it at the time, but he emphasized that "in fact, there is no need for such a big screen in the car."
LI, who takes "super large screen" as one of the selling points, chose to sit in the right place. Before long, Li Xiang, who has always been outspoken, countered on his personal Weibo: "Don’t easily define products that you have never used. "He also advised Li Bin from a distance:" Before defining the product, please make sure that you have the most basic knowledge of VR theory and enough experience. Don’t easily mislead consumers with concepts. "
He has never given the media, users and peers a good face in Weibo and in various public occasions, but it is not often that he retaliates against his former "brothers" in such a targeted way.
Perhaps it can be said that their last entrepreneurial experience was their rivals-car home and Yiche, which were once the top automotive information aggregation platforms in China. But that period of history has been a long time.
In 2014, when Li Bin decided to be a new energy vehicle, she once worked with Qin Lihong to win over Li. But the two were rejected by the latter, because at that time, Li Xiang began to have the idea of making a car. When the partnership failed, Li wanted to invest a sum of money in Li Bin’s project. In December, 2017, Weilai ES8 made its debut, and Li Xiang also appeared at the scene to give the Li Bin platform, and the two exchanged business on the stage.
Generally speaking, Li Xiang is optimistic about Weilai’s "product+service" model. In 2020, Li wants to take Tesla and Weilai as examples in his personal circle of friends. He thinks that Tesla’s self-built super charging station and Weilai’s self-built power station/charging station will promote sales.
However, the senior executives of Weilai are not optimistic about LI’s product technology. Also in 2020, a Li ONE car caught fire and burned in August. At that time, Shen Fei, vice president of Weilai, expressed "firm disapproval of the extended range technology". He believes that the cost and complexity will increase and the failure rate will also increase when the extended-range car adopts two systems of oil and electricity. Shen Fei’s conclusion is that the extended range technology only benefits from the pain point caused by the imperfect charging infrastructure in the short term, not the long-term technical route.
Perhaps since 2022, especially after the release of ET5, Li Xiang has been voicing more and more about Wei Lai. In June 2022, compared with Weilai ES7 released not long ago, the appearance of Ideal L9 was a great success. In an interview with the media, Li Xiang talked about the high-end of making cars.
"According to our research, in the market of more than 200,000 yuan, 89% of users buy cars as family cars, so we have always emphasized family, not high-end. If we only emphasize high-end, the product R&D team will only brush the sense of existence and easily lose its goal. We emphasize the family just to understand this market thoroughly. " For a long time, the label of Weilai, a new force in car making, is "high-end", so many people think that Li Xiang’s remarks are suspected of insinuating Weilai.
Also after the release of Ideal L9, He Xiaopeng, the chairman of Xpeng Motors, who is far away from Guangzhou, raised a question in Weibo. The core is which good products can gain advantages or barriers in the medium or long term by accurate positioning.
A netizen named "Ideal _ONE" in Weibo replied that "short-term accurate positioning is a necessary condition for gaining advantages or barriers in the medium and long term … Being able to continuously and accurately position itself is also a kind of ability and barrier." Then Li wanted to switch to this comment and made a comment under this Weibo in He Xiaopeng with a caring expression.
He Xiaopeng "went to war" or just had to. In June, Weilai ES7 and Ideal L9 were released successively. The pricing range of the former is 468,000 yuan to 526,000 yuan. If the battery rental scheme is adopted, the price will be as low as 400,000 yuan. The latter was regarded by Li Xiang as "the best home flagship SUV with an experience comparable to Cullinan, within 5 million", with a price of 459,800 yuan. Both new cars should be delivered before the end of August.
Just a week after He Xiaopeng’s question, Xpeng Motors also took the initiative to spoil the progress of Tucki G9 on social media-the first large SUV owned by Xpeng Motors, which was originally planned to be released in June 2022, but it was repeatedly postponed. According to official information, Tucki G9 is expected to launch its reservation in August and go public in September. He Xiaopeng claimed that "this is the best SUV within 500,000."
It is certain that Weilai, LI and Xpeng Motors will compete in the same price range for the first time in the sub-category of household SUVs. Tucki G9, which was thrown out as early as November 2021, was listed later than Weilai ES7 and Ideal L9, and competed in almost the same price range. It is not surprising that He Xiaopeng will personally leave the stage and embarrass the former he is my brother.
Between Xpeng Motors and Wei Lai, it is inevitable that there will be bad blood slowly. In March, 2022, Xin Huang, the former director of self-driving products in Xpeng Motors, joined Weilai. He was the key figure of NGP and Memory Parking in Tucki. Xpeng Motors was quite dissatisfied with this. At that time, he once claimed to solve this violation of the non-competition agreement through legal means.
Back in 2019, the three new forces still have their own difficulties. The only thing that is the same is that they all need money. Li Bin, whose listing financing is unsatisfactory, has never stopped the pace of financing. On a business trip, she met He Xiaopeng and cried to the latter, "Wei Lai is like lying in the ICU." When He Xiaopeng comforted Li Bin, it seemed like complaining. "Don’t worry, brother, I’m sitting at the door of the ICU. Maybe I’ll hang up next."
He Xiaopeng had a lot of troubles at that time. In July, 2019, Xpeng Motors released the 2020 G3, but the price was lower when the configuration and battery life were improved than the previous one, which triggered protests from old car owners. After this matter was solved, He Xiaopeng took the initiative to make an appointment with Li Xiang to impart experience. LI, who started to deliver vehicles at the latest, decided to skip the 2019 model and delivered the 2020 Li ONE directly to the first batch of car owners after a delay of one month.
In June 2020, Li Bin, Li Xiang and He Xiaopeng all posted the same photo on their personal social media. He Xiaopeng’s essay was "Three Bitterness, Remembering Hard." It is said that at that time, the three people also formed a WeChat group, and they all admitted that the three people communicated very frequently in the group, including complaining, spitting and helping each other. "I often say something that can’t be said outside."
Nowadays, when there are more than 40 billion and 50 billion dollars in cash lying on each family’s account, the hard days have almost passed, and it seems that there is less harmony between them.
One of the details is that Weilai was short-sold by a grizzly bear, and both He Xiaopeng and Li Xiang kept silent about it-the latter once talked about the promotion of sales by Weilai’s self-built charging and replacing service system. Turning around, Li wants to argue with prospective car owners at any time in society that "it’s okay to use iron without aluminum", and he can also ridicule luxury brands for selling expensive only with branded stereos, and by the way, he boasted that LI paid a lot of money under stereos but still came standard.
From unity to game
Before 2021, the new car-making forces, including Weilai, Xpeng Motors and LI, are basically in the first stage of development. In the initial stage, the main goal of each new force is to survive by financing and ensure production and delivery.
After more than seven years, as the head enterprises of the new forces, the three new forces have unique advantages-Weilai is the highest-paid enterprise among the three, and the power exchange service system is unique; LI has made profits intermittently and maintained the best profit level. The extended range technology is regarded as an important means to avoid the current mileage anxiety of pure electric vehicles. Xpeng Motors emphasized self-research technology, NGP rapid landing iteration and full-stack self-research to help Xpeng Motors have the strength to compete with Tesla in China.
The year 2021 can be seen as a watershed in the development of the three new car-making forces. Weilai, which lacks new models, is weak in succession. The annual delivery volume is not only surpassed by Xpeng Motors, but also has a very small lead over LI behind it. In the more than two years since the latter was delivered, there is only ONE model in Li ONE.
Both Li Bin and Qin Lihong, co-founder and president of Weilai, admitted in an interview that for the new car-making forces, they are not rivals for the time being, because fuel vehicles still account for a large share, and new energy has not yet reached the stage of zero-sum game. The common opponent of new energy vehicles is fuel vehicles. Based on its own high-end brand positioning, almost every new car benchmarking product of Weilai belongs to BBA.
This view is also recognized by He Xiaopeng, who once said that new energy vehicles are still a fast-growing market with enough room for more players.
However, the infinite imagination of the future can’t alleviate the worries about the present, which is also a common problem that new car-making forces need to face-how to face the "catfish" Tesla and those traditional car companies that accelerate the transformation of electrification. Li Bin, He Xiaopeng and Li Xiang all mentioned a key time node, and 2025 is another window period for the development of new energy automobile industry-those who get the tickets will be eliminated.
To this end, Li Xiang’s "2025 Strategy" for LI aims to gain 20% market share, while Xpeng Motors aims to gain 10% market share with 50% penetration rate of new energy vehicles. Li Bin’s "2025 Plan" is even more ambitious-more than 4,000 power stations will be built around the world, entering 25 national markets, and the total revenue from 2020 to 2025 will exceed 420 billion yuan.
But for the three new forces making cars, how to solve the problem of "living well" is a more difficult problem after solving the problem of surviving in the first stage. Externally, traditional car companies are accelerating the transformation of electrification and intelligence. From the perspective of sales in 2021, BYD’s sales of new energy vehicles have been at least six times that of the three new car-making forces, and it is expected to hit the million-vehicle mark in 2022, and the sales of brands such as GAC Ai ‘an, Great Wall Euler and Wuling Hongguang have easily surpassed them.
However, from the perspective of new car-making companies, Tesla’s delivery in the China market is nearly twice the sum of the three new car-making forces. In other words, the scale of the new energy vehicle market is growing rapidly, but the Matthew effect is becoming more and more obvious. The head enterprises remain strong in both sales volume and growth rate, while the three new forces of making cars have just approached the annual sales threshold of 100,000 vehicles in 2021, and there is still a distance from 200,000 vehicles in 2022.
If this continues, the "2025 strategy" of the three new forces of building cars may eventually fail. When Weilai, LI and Xpeng Motors will all have a flagship product in the same price range, it is no longer unusual to throw a shoe at each other at the moment of grabbing the same users.
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