Author | Chai Xuchen Editor | Zhou Zhiyu Faced with the trend of new energy electrification and the loss of market share under price wars, joint venture car companies have been "Renovating" their famous cars in an attempt to mount a strong counterattack. On May 30, SAIC Volkswagen's Touareg L Pro was launched. The car, which is said to be "the smartest gasoline car", had been preheated for nearly two months prior to its launch. The launch invited representatives from DJI Car and Tencent Travel, as well as the person in charge of iFLYTEK, all of whom attended in person to demonstrate the strength of its smart driving and smart cabin. As a "meritorious model" of SAIC Volkswagen, Touareg has been synonymous with Volkswagen SUVs for the past 15 years and was once the best-selling joint venture SUV. With a monthly sales volume of nearly 20,000 units for a long time, it occupies a 20% share of SAIC Volkswagen. SAIC Volkswagen hopes that the new Touareg will become a disruptor in the current market, from gasoline car intelligence to a stable price system with value-added buyback policy. In the view of Yu Jingmin, Vice President of Sales and Marketing of SAIC Volkswagen, new energy vehicles still have range anxiety and gasoline cars have an advantage that needs no explanation, but the biggest difference between them and electric vehicles lies mainly in their appearance and intelligence. After fulfilling the core needs of contemporary consumers, this once "famous car" seems to be reborn. Thus, from DJI's advanced intelligent driving solution to iFLYTEK's smart cabin voice assistant, this 200,000 yuan-level SUV brings together the strengths of various parties, aiming to break through the industry's perception that gasoline cars are less intelligent than electric vehicles. The launch of the new Touareg marks the beginning of SAIC Volkswagen's counterattack. In a post-event interview, Yu Jingmin mentioned several times that due to external cooperation and the accumulation of joint venture partners, SAIC Volkswagen's technology center is actually ahead of many independent brands, but unfortunately the rhythm is too slow. The company will now accelerate its efforts to catch up and even surpass in electric, hybrid or gasoline cars. Yu Jingmin revealed to Wall Street News that the new Touareg is the first gasoline car product in the Pro series, which is focused on intelligence, and that the Passat and Touareg Pro versions will also be introduced within the year. While polishing its technology, it is also preparing for the intelligence of its A-class cars. A counteroffensive war ignited by a gasoline fueled chariot seems to be brewing rapidly. But to be fair, SAIC Volkswagen's intelligence still lags far behind new forces such as Huawei, Xiaopeng, and Ideal. At the same time, in the current context where BBA is crazy about price cuts and the BMW electric car at over 180,000 yuan is setting a new industry low price, the 236,800 yuan Touareg L Pro seems somewhat out of step and the counterattack is difficult to achieve. In response to the challenge, SAIC Volkswagen has given a three-year 20% discount buyback plan. Users no longer need to worry about the fluctuation of vehicle purchase costs and second-hand car prices. SAIC Volkswagen locks in the difference between the purchase and final selling prices of users' vehicles, in a move to crack the price war. This also buys precious time for SAIC Volkswagen to speed up product and intelligence catch-up. This is the backdrop of the efforts to win back the former "king" of the Chinese car market.

In today's weather is good. Today's weather is good.

With the stabilization and recovery of sales volume, Li Bin, who is full of confidence, plans to expand the charging business to various districts and counties in the country.

On August 20th, at the NIO Power Day, Li Bin, the chairman of NIO, launched an ambitious infrastructure plan called "County-Wide Charging". His ambition is to cover the whole country with NIO's "Ace Moat" of charging and swapping facilities in the next two to three years.

Among them, the charging stations will achieve full coverage of all counties by June 30, 2025.

The deployment of swapping stations will be phased in three stages: by June 30, 2025, covering over 1,200 county-level administrative regions in 14 provinces; by the end of 2025, covering over 2,300 counties in 27 provinces. If the plan progresses smoothly, NIO's swapping stations will exceed 5,000. Starting from 2026, NIO will focus on building swapping stations in the remaining provincial administrative regions.

Currently, there are 2,480 battery swap stations and 0.023 million charging piles. Nio's energy network has indeed outlined its preliminary profile. Nio President Qin Lihong frankly stated that Nio's infrastructure construction for energy replenishment has completed phase 0-1, and the next "electrification for every county" marks the beginning of phase 1-10. "We will not focus more on the first-tier cities because many people will compete with you for business."

Li Bin said that Nio is willing to sink and do the thankless 'foolish things.' 'In places where no one else is building charging stations, Nio is foolishly building them.' Because these projects, which were previously mocked by investors and the industry for 'losing money but making noise,' have been deployed in first- and second-tier cities and have truly brought sales to Nio.

'We are patiently and vigorously building battery swap stations and infrastructure, and the first phase is definitely to sell our own vehicles, which has a very significant effect. Why do we have a market share of over 60% in the high-end pure electric market above 0.3 million vehicles? The market has already provided the answer,' Li Bin said in a competitive manner.

In the past three months, Nio has continuously crossed the threshold of 0.02 million units. The total delivery volume for the first seven months of this year reached 0.108 million units, a nearly 50% year-on-year increase. This has given Li Bin great confidence.

Behind the focus on charging and swapping, Li Bin's real 'strategy' is to stimulate the purchasing potential of the market and lay the groundwork for the explosive growth of the next two sub-brands. He revealed, 'After researching the users of Le Diao, we found that the proportion of orders placed due to battery swaps is very high, even higher than for the Nio brand.'

The reason behind this is not complicated. Li Bin mentioned that only 30% of users in China can install charging piles at home. There is a huge hidden demand, and the construction of the energy replenishment network has the opportunity to capture the potential gold mine of sales volume.

'When we talk about electrification for every county, everyone understands that we want car owners to truly feel that they can go anywhere,' Li Bin said, 'Without the service of charging and swapping 0.1 million times per day, it is difficult for users to perceive and form a network effect. Tesla also laid out in advance in the United States, using free charging services in the early stages to open up the market and cultivate user habits.'

And in his opinion, this is more cost-effective than doing range extension halfway. 'Assuming that Nio now adds range extenders to every vehicle, the cost per unit is over 0.02 million yuan. For one million vehicles, that's over 20 billion yuan, which is enough for me to establish ten thousand battery swap stations.'

In fact, this has become a sexy story. In addition to attracting sales, nio inc's battery swapping stations have also begun to gradually become self-sufficient. Qin Lihong said that with the withdrawal of free battery swaps this year, the proportion of paid charging and swapping is gradually increasing, and now nearly 20% of the stations nationwide are profitable.

Capital markets are also voting with their feet. In May of this year, nio inc's energy subsidiary received a strategic investment of 1.5 billion yuan from wuhan.

It seems that nio inc's energy business is gradually entering a positive cycle. Under the call of William Li, there are currently more than 3,000 companies co-building charging and swapping stations with nio inc's energy. In terms of battery swapping, strategic cooperation has been established with 7 car manufacturers. But this is not enough to support nio inc's ambitious plan to spread battery swapping nationwide.

At this event, Qin Lihong opportunistically launched the 'charging partner' plan, opening cooperation to the entire society to build charging and swapping stations, hoping that everyone will contribute idle space, power capacity, and unused photovoltaics to expand the energy supplement cake, and provided multiple cooperation plans. Li Bin revealed that the largest charging partner, Zhongan Energy, is planning to build one thousand stations with nio inc within a few years.

This grand and beautiful vision of energy supplementation has raised market expectations, but before it becomes a reality, there are many uncertainties waiting for nio inc to resolve.

In a post-event interview, Shen Fei, head of nio inc's energy subsidiary, admitted that this year's 'thousand station plan' deployment progress is somewhat delayed because the R&D and production progress of the fourth-generation stations is two months behind schedule, and there are some limitations in the production capacity of lidars used for the transformation of third-generation stations.

In addition, Li Bin also pointed out that the new energy infrastructure plan is based on its sub-brand and was deployed two years in advance. And all of this is built on the premise of pure electric becoming the major trend in the market. This means that nio inc cannot afford a misjudgment.

Regarding these two points, Li Bin stated that the climbing production of battery swapping stations does take some time. With the commencement of the nio inc wuhan battery swapping station factory in September, production capacity will ramp up in the fourth quarter, with the factory's annual target capacity exceeding 1,000 battery swapping stations; as for the future market direction, he firmly believes that pure electric vehicles will break out, and battery swapping will also become mainstream, attracting more car manufacturers and partners to join.

After determining the direction, Li Bin and his Nio Inc pressed the "accelerator" to the maximum and overtaking all the way towards the other shore. Perhaps, the outcome of this bold gamble will be revealed in two years.