Weima Shenhui: We need Huawei and Xiaomi in the automotive industry and are not afraid of the powerful Tesla

On the afternoon of December 13, the second re-election meeting of the South China University of Technology Shanghai Alumni Association was held in Shanghai. You may wonder why we pay attention to a local alumni association meeting, because this meeting is not only the alumni association meeting, but also has another name: New Energy Smart Vehicle Summit Forum. Many authoritative experts and scholars came to this meeting, including, of course, WM Motor CEO Shen Hui, who is an alumnus of Huagong University of Technology.

At the re-election meeting, Shen Hui was elected as the new chairman of the Shanghai Alumni Association of Hunan University of Technology. In his public speech, we clearly read a lot of key information. Some of the information is quite intriguing.

The explosion of new energy vehicles has begun

In Shen Hui’s speech, he mentioned that according to the information in the national “New Energy Vehicle Industry Development Plan (2021-2025)”, By 2025, the sales of new energy vehicles will account for 20% of total sales. At present, my country, as the world's largest single automobile market, sells about 30 million new cars every year, which means that in five years, the annual sales of new energy vehicles will reach 5 million. Considering that the general estimates for policy formulation are very conservative, it is actually estimated that the annual sales volume of new energy vehicles in 2025 will definitely exceed 5 million units.

Compared with 2019, this number is only 1.2 million vehicles. This means that the turning point of the new energy vehicle market is about to come. In the next few years, we will definitely see a blowout development of the new energy vehicle market (the blowout process has already begun). Indeed, judging from the two international auto shows (Beijing and Guangzhou) that I participated in and reported this year, almost all car companies have placed new energy vehicles, especially pure electric vehicles, in the center of the booth. New cars and new technologies are all new energy sources. This is of course a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for domestic car companies, especially new forces. Didn’t you see that the stock prices of NIO and Xpeng, which were listed on the market, have soared sharply in the past two months? NIO has even risen to the top of the world The fifth car company.

The domestic new energy vehicle market still lacks companies like Huawei and Xiaomi.

Whether it is capital, policy or market, the trend of new energy vehicles is unstoppable. However, Shen Hui pointed out a problem in his speech: Although the new energy vehicle market is large and the potential is unlimited, as the most important force in our country, there is still a lack of a similar company in the domestic pure electric vehicle camp. Companies like Huawei and Xiaomi in the mobile phone industry.

In fact, whether it is Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, or Vivo, the reason why these four domestic mobile phone giants are able to kill everyone around the world today, including Samsung, Sony, HTC and many other powerful competitors do not rely on cost-effectiveness or low prices. It is the technical barrier of "no one has it but I have it". For example, Huawei's camera capabilities dominate the world, Xiaomi's integration capabilities and channel capabilities include its AioT layout, which ranks first in the world, and Oppo and Vivo's fast charging technology leads the world for at least a year. These are core advantages that others cannot learn and cannot be followed up in a short period of time.

To be honest, as Shen Hui said, our current domestic pure electric vehicle camp really lacks such companies. We have BYD, which can develop and manufacture its own batteries and IGBT chips. It is the company closest to "Huawei and Xiaomi in the automotive industry". However, BYD still lags far behind other domestic new energy brands in terms of intelligence, human-vehicle delivery, and autonomous driving.

Weilai performs well in terms of quality and luxury, but it does not have the core technology of "I have what others don't have". Xpeng has always focused on autonomous driving. It is now close to Tesla, but it still cannot surpass it. Moreover, Xpeng’s autonomous driving technology does not have a technological monopoly, because in the field of autonomous driving, at least in terms of technological accumulation, it has already Weimar, which has launched L4, is not inferior to Xpeng. As for Ideal, although its programmable architecture is novel and its price-performance ratio is high enough, there is no such thing as "no one has it but I have it".

Because of this, domestic pure electric vehicles are still unable to form a decisive competitive advantage, which is why most domestic car companies are relatively passive when facing competition from Tesla. It’s not that our price/performance ratio isn’t high enough, it’s that we haven’t come up with a product that can truly compete head-on with Tesla.

Such a powerful Tesla is actually a good thing for us

Speaking of Tesla, Shen Hui also had his views on the world's largest car company by market value in his speech . Shen Hui believes that Tesla is very powerful. If Huawei and Xiaomi have not yet been born in the automotive industry, then Tesla is now equivalent to Apple in the automotive industry. Although such a powerful Tesla will pose a certain threat to the survival of domestic pure electric vehicles, this is actually a good thing.

Indeed, if we look back at the rise of Xiaomi and Huawei, we will find that the rise of these two companies basically followed Apple's footsteps step by step. Whether it is multiple cameras or computational photography, whether it is the texture and craftsmanship of mobile phones, Huawei and Xiaomi have learned a lot of experience from Apple’s iPhones every year.

Similarly, my country's pure electric vehicles are actually trying to cross the river by following Tesla.

Tesla’s autonomous driving and intelligence are very strong, but this strength is not about being strong alone, not about a certain piece of hardware being great, or a certain feature being outstanding, but about Tesla’s ability to integrate everything. It forms a highly complete whole. This is just like the iPhone and domestic Android phones in previous years.

If you take any single thing out of the iPhone, it is very likely that it will not be able to compete with domestic Android phones, but they have the ability to integrate these things into an almost perfect product, and the domestic Android phones of the past few years have , although it has powerful hardware, it just can’t achieve the integration of iPhone.

This is the real comparison between Tesla and domestic pure electric vehicles today. If we want to catch up with Tesla, what is missing is not the hardware and software, but the integration step. And this step is the most difficult. Catching up and surpassing the most powerful rivals in the most difficult places is currently the most difficult problem facing all domestic pure electric vehicle companies.

This article comes from the author of Autohome Chejiahao and does not represent the views and positions of Autohome.