When it comes to Tesla, the world seems to know only Musk, but little is known about Tesla's real founders, Martin Martin Eberhard and Mark Pentanin.

In 2003, the two M-born middle-aged people founded Tesla Automobile in the Silicon Valley mecca Palo Alto, serving as CEO and CFO, respectively. Martin is a tech savvy, and it was his idea to replace lead-acid batteries in old electric cars with lithium batteries. A year after Tesla was founded, they welcomed the company's first investor, post-70s billionaire Musk.

Musk was so excited when he discovered Tesla that he immediately decided to invest 7.5 million US dollars first, but only if he became the chairman of the company and had the final decision on all matters of the company. Martin thought about it and signed it, according to his words, "you took someone else's money." So Musk successfully became Tesla's fifth employee and pitched four rounds in a row.

It is said that Musk once regarded Martin as a brother, but the two men obviously have different understandings on the question of who can best represent the image of Tesla.

Unfortunately, while Martin stressed the question of "who are the founders and who are the early investors", Tesla's first sports car, the Roadster, overturned, soaring from an estimated $70, 000 to $140000, and the offline time was repeatedly delayed. Martin, who lost investor support, was neatly kicked out of the company by Musk's joint board at the end of 2007.

Since leaving Tesla, Martin has complained that the sports car is difficult to give birth because Musk is too stingy in details, he is a scapegoat, and sued Musk in 2009 for libel and breach of contract (finally settled in private). Later, Martin took a trip to Volkswagen, Germany, and then founded a battery technology company called InEVit, which disappeared from the wave of Silicon Valley.

Until 2016, a rich second generation in Chongqing named Zhang Zhengping knocked on his door.

Born in 1989, Zhang Zhengping is the son of Zhang Xinghai, chairman of A-share well-off shares. Xiaokang shares started as a spring and successively moved to shock absorbers, motorcycles, automobiles, and other fields. Dongfeng Xiaokang also made popular style products, but pushed by his son, Xiaokang entered the field of new energy and went to Silicon Valley at the same time as Jia Yueting to build a car.

Zhang Zhengping first became a company called SF Motors in Silicon Valley, and then took a fancy to InEVit founded by Martin Eberhard. Zhang Zhengping not only invited Martin to build the car, but also promised to buy his company: $33 million, of which $19.8 million in cash and the remaining 13.2 million converted into shares. Martin would gladly sign if he could cash out close to $20 million.

SFMotors later changed its name to Cyrus, and in addition to looking for people in Silicon Valley, Selis also built a factory with a planned capacity of 150000 acres and launched its main model: the Selis SF5. However, only 729 cars were sold in 2020, while Xiaokang made a net loss of 1.7 billion yuan that year. Martin Eberhard doesn't seem to be able to save Cyrus.

The turning point came on April 20 this year. On this day, Huawei's flagship store on Nanjing East Road welcomed another post-60s man, Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei Terminal, who appeared in the store with three Cyrus SF5 cars.

Yu Chengdong personally brought goods to Selis SF5, and orders immediately rolled in, which is said to have exceeded 6000 in a week, close to the sales of the new car-building force in a month. At this time, people found that Huawei provided SF5 cars with everything from driving systems to front-drive motors and even on-board air conditioners. Saying that it was not a "Huawei brand" was like saying that you arrested Zhou Shuren and had anything to do with me, Lu Xun.

Cyrus is not the only car to be stamped by Huawei. BAIC's polar fox has also released a "Huawei Inside" BAIC polar fox alpha, which has built-in Huawei's intelligent driving components. Coupled with Changan Automobile, which is ready to work with Huawei, Huawei has turned from a consumer electronics and communications equipment maker into an automobile mentor.

As the auto industry, which is naturally related to the electronics industry, "xxxinside", a word that appears frequently in the fields of PC and mobile phones, has passed a shadow in the hearts of many automakers. While fuel truck manufacturers are facing the "Nokia moment", the seemingly glorious new energy manufacturers have ushered in a turning point that is destined to frighten them: the "MediaTek moment".

From Musk's former comrade Martin Eberhard to Yu Chengdong, the savior of Cyrus, a dark line was strung together. On its extension line, the killing and showdown have only just begun.

01 centralization on wheels

To understand what MediaTek moment is, we must first explain another question: what is the biggest change from fuel cars to new energy vehicles?

At the end of 2019, time magazine ranked the top 10 electronic products of the past decade. Apple killed Apple with three products, and Tesla's Model S ranked second. The reason given by time is: "Tesla Model S has software updates, a huge touch screen and an advanced autopilot system, which makes it feel like it came from 2022, not 2012. "

Musk himself said in 2015 that when designing the Model S, it was actually a "computer on wheels." Whether it is to update the OTA (aerial download technology) of the car with software, or to control the various components of the car with a touch screen, there is actually a "struggle between central and local governments" in the car-the power struggle between the central and local governments.

In traditional fuel-fired vehicles, a body function is performed by "a mechanical part + a matching chip + a special software", which constitute an independent closed loop. Behind each mechanical part, there is an independent set of chips and software. their relationship with the car center console is like an enfeoffment country-- mechanical parts can only fulfill established obligations for the central government, but if the central government wants to assign new tasks, it is an interference in the internal affairs of the fief.

Because of this, each additional function of the fuel body adds a subsystem made up of independent chips and software, and as the car has more and more auxiliary functions, there are more and more subsystems. the whole car has become a bloated empire inlaid by fragmented vassal states: it seems to be fully functional, but it is actually difficult to coordinate.

Under such a complex architecture, it is almost impossible for a car to adjust its hardware functions through software. At the beginning of his establishment, Tesla prepared a set of car version of the "big plan to cut the fan", which is simply divided into three steps: the same track, the same book, and the county system.

1. The car is on the same track: the greatest feature of Tesla is that a large part of the functions originally completed by the mechanical structure on the car are completely replaced with an "electronically controlled structure." In this way, the instructions of the on-board computer can direct the car body without hindrance through the electrical signal. For example, the mechanical structure of the car door into the electric door, the mechanical structure of the seat into the electric seat, these used to be the "local princes" parts, now listen to the instructions of the car computer (central).

More importantly, Tesla replaced the mechanical brake parts with Bosch's iBooster kit. Once upon a time, the brake was a pure mechanical transmission of the brake pads driven by hydraulic pressure, like a domino. After changing to iBooster, the mechanical braking process of stepping on the brake will also add the electrical signal sent by the on-board computer to affect the braking strength and speed.

This also means that when the on-board computer receives an emergency from the car camera or radar, it can issue and execute active braking orders, which greatly reduces the difficulty of various road-assisted driving functions. Even if Tesla wants to change the pedal feeling and braking distance of the car, he only needs to modify the parameters of the control software.

Tesla's ultimate goal is also obvious: from the steering wheel to the suspension, from the car door to the trunk, each component is connected to a "highway" to the car computer, which is used to receive administrative orders from the car's brain (central). Instead of letting the instructions hesitate in front of some mechanical transmission structure (local power). There is no doubt that this is the "car on the same track" on the car.

two。 In the architecture of fuel-fueled vehicles, hardware suppliers deliver closed subsystems of "hardware + chip + embedded software". What the whole car factory gets is actually a black box that performs a single function. In 2020, Herbert Diess, then the CEO of Volkswagen, had no choice but to admit that there was "hardly a single line of software code written by us" in a Volkswagen. "

In fact, Volkswagen estimates that only 10% of the software on its cars is self-developed. The remaining 90% come from dozens of suppliers.

What Musk did was to break the black box and put most of the hardware under Tesla's unified software. This means that Tesla can directly rewrite the software running on the hardware, thus changing the function of the hardware.

One example is: in October 2019, the famous British automobile media Top Gear compared Tesla Model S Performance with Porsche Taycan Turbo S and found that Taycan Turbo S's 100km acceleration performance was better. Musk said it must be unbearable, first accusing the game of unfair play, claiming that Top Gear should be renamed "Low Gear".

Then Makefa said that he had found a way to optimize motor control and would rewrite the software algorithm for controlling Tesla motor through OTA (Over-the-Air remote upgrade) to increase the maximum power of Tesla Model S by 50 horsepower, so as to turn defeat into victory. If you can't do the "same book" of internal software systems, OTA is obviously out of the question (which is why it is difficult for traditional automakers to OTA).

3. County system: in traditional car manufacturing, each function corresponds to a chip, each chip needs a wire to connect with the corresponding hardware, and the wire on a car is enough to be several kilometers long. Tesla's plan is to let a chip with stronger computing power be in charge of a number of different functions, which reduces the number of chips (ECU) for control functions on Tesla's car from hundreds of traditional chips to more than a dozen, which is greatly reduced.

In fact, the ultimate goal of reducing the number of chips is to seize power from the local authorities and establish a set of leadership around the central controller, including a series of high-authority chips, such as FSD (self-driving chips), processing chips for vehicle central control screens, and so on. The car body is handed over to two prime ministers, the left body control domain and the right body control domain, who lead other chips on the car body, quickly handle local affairs, report to the central controller and receive instructions from the central government.

Through this unique structure, Tesla built a strict car body power system, so that the entire car body parts can be obeyed by the core of the central controller. And the core of this power system is the FSD (autopilot) chip developed by Tesla. In other words, no matter how many suppliers are involved, the core power of the car is always in the hands of Tesla.

When these three steps are completed, the chip and software can directly command the hardware, and users can choose whether to drive in sports mode or robust mode in the intelligent cockpit, whether the suspension is hard or soft, and the app at home can start seat heating, and even allocate the front and rear wheel power ratio to improve drift performance, and update the system from generation to generation.

At this time, the car essentially changed from a mechanical product to a digital product. Therefore, the historical process of digital products is bound to be repeated in the electric car industry.

02 the arrival of MediaTek time

The development trajectory of digital products such as computers and mobile phones often has two key time points:

The first node can be called "Apple moment". For example, Apple launched iPhone, IBM created a fully functional IBM PC, Tesla's Model S, Sony's Play Station, Nintendo's Switch. Its essence is that a player creates a set of new digital products based on systems and chips, and relies on the first-mover advantage to get high growth and bargaining space.

The second node, which can be called the "MediaTek moment", is that a player conquers the core of digital products: systems and chips, but chooses to turn the chips and technologies into a platform, open up standardized interfaces, and become an ecological trader. The most important impact that followed is that the threshold for production of products has been greatly reduced. This inflection point can also be named after MediaTek because it has single-handedly detonated China's shanzhai mobile phone market.

This "MediaTek moment" has been repeated from generation to generation of digital products:

In the field of PC, Microsoft's system + Intel's chipset makes the production threshold greatly reduced. You only need to buy the motherboard, power supply, graphics card, memory and other components supported by the chip to assemble a computer, which also leads to the rapid transfer of computer production and brands to East Asia. Instead, it is IBM, the founder of PC, that eventually sold the PC business to Lenovo.

In the field of functional machines, MediaTek's "turn key" (turnkey) scheme integrates various types of chips (such as audio, video decoding, signal processing) into one chip, and provides a system and development platform, creating a wealth-building myth in Huaqiang North. Manufacturers in Huaqiangbei only need to buy a MediaTek plan and match it with their own case and camera to build a mobile phone that will make copycat phones sweep the country at the beginning of the century.

In the field of smartphones, the dual A camp, made up of Android + ARM architecture chips (such as Qualcomm chips), also plays a role in lowering the threshold. Newcomers do not need to design complex operating systems or stack hundreds of millions of transistor chips, they only need to buy a Soc (system-on-chip), which has already laid out functional modules such as CPU, baseband, DSP, ISP, GPU, and so on, and then attached to Android, 90% of the core problems will be solved.

In other words, the most important role of MediaTek is to change the logic of the development of the industry as a whole: the threshold for the delivery of industry end products (such as mobile phones, computers, headphones) has shifted from technical capabilities to marketing capabilities + supply chain management capabilities.

Of course, the side effect is that the turnkey scheme ostensibly lowers the threshold of the industry and is bound to make many unrelated companies have the illusion that "I can do it." This is bound to lead to a large influx of capital that wants to give it a try, and the number of industry participants will increase significantly, and according to the laws of the industry, only a small number of companies must survive in the end.

On the other hand, for digital products that accept the "turnkey scheme", product differentiation is no longer determined by themselves, but often depends on third-party systems and chip vendors. So many brands of digital products will take great pains to promote the use of the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon chip or Intel chip, and even the "first Snapdragon chip" promotion. Behind this is a kind of helplessness.

This is more vividly shown on PC-- Microsoft's system, Intel's CPU and AMD/ Nvidia graphics cards are used by everyone, in which case people can only compete for price, turnover, and distribution channels, thus requiring higher supply chain management capabilities.

In the automotive field, fuel vehicles have a lot of room for differentiation, which is in the hands of the terminal manufacturers themselves. One is assembly and body design, which has a lot of Knowhow accumulation: for example, for parts purchased from the same supplier, some brands can make the parts run more stably through the adjustment of mechanical technology; the other is to develop their own core components: for example, Toyota's engine is fuel-efficient, Nissan's engine is stable, and BMW's engine performance is strong.

Tesla's role is very similar to that of iPhone: using chip + system to turn electric vehicles from industrial products into digital products, then the core differentiation ability of electric vehicles is focused on chips and systems. It's just that Tesla's chip and system can only be used by himself. If you want to lower the threshold of building a car to the level that even a cat or dog can build a mobile phone, someone needs to stand up and play the role of MediaTek.

So there's only one question left: who is MediaTek for new energy vehicles?

03 the person who handed the key

The core of new energy vehicle intelligence can be summarized into four aspects: chip, system, algorithm, human-vehicle interaction.

The characteristic of these four aspects is that only when the design is unified in the hands of a company or a camp, can it exert the greatest power, and the reason is very simple: only when you know the algorithm of intelligent driving, can you design the chip pertinently, know the user's interaction habits, and design the interactive interface and system that users like.

This is also a river that Tesla has crossed: as the core intelligent driving chip of new energy vehicles, Tesla has also changed ownership several times. Before self-developing FSD chips, Israel's Mobileye (later acquired by Intel) and Nvidia have supplied Tesla with self-driving chips. Tesla's evaluation of the two partners is also relatively unified: too lame.

As for Mobileye, a backbone member of Tesla's autopilot department once said: when we were testing with Mobileye chips, we found that the algorithm could not be changed and could not achieve fast iteration. We hope to peel off the chip and algorithm and use a programmable chip to develop the algorithm on this chip and combine it with the scene.

And the cooperation with Nvidia, Musk once made a mockery of: "the performance of the same performance, higher power consumption, similar performance weak chicken."

Although he scolded others, Tesla did not contribute much technical strength in the cooperation with Nvidia. Nvidia has already provided the computing platform needed for all aspects of autopilot. In order to solve this situation, in 2016, Tesla poached the former AMD architecture god, known as "Silicon Fairy" Jim Keller personally led the team to attack the fortifications.

As a living legend in Silicon Valley, Jim Keller presided over the research and development of the AMD Athlon series of processors in the late 1990s, and made AMD and Intel equal on his own, which once made Intel abandon the development plan of 4GHz Pentium 4. Intel CEO Craig Barrett at that time jokingly knelt and apologized at an industry forum.

After moving to Apple (PA Semiconductor, acquired by Apple in 2008), Jim Keller created the first A-series processor, the A4, and a second-generation A5 chip. In 2012, Jim Keller returned to AMD and led the development of Zen architecture processors that successfully counterattacked Intel. Brother Gigi has been in the chip industry for more than 20 years, with ministerial-level titles and vice-state treatment among all the giants in Silicon Valley. Joining Tesla at that time was equivalent to Tsai Chongxin's entry into Ali.

In 2018, Tesla's own chip was officially launched. On the conference call, Musk said publicly that the chip work in the past two or three years has been "semi-stealthmode" (secretly), and now it is finally possible to "letthe cat come out of bag" (enter the village aboveboard).

On the self-developed chip, Tesla greatly increased the proportion of modules used for computing vision, which greatly enhanced its ability to focus on camera visual perception. The supercomputer Dojo, which is used to support algorithm iterations in the cloud, even ranks fifth in the world, on a par with China's Shenwei Taihu Lake Light.

In addition to the autonomy of the chip, Tesla also showed an immortal mentality of capitalism at the system level: unlike other manufacturers who directly moved BlackBerry QNX and Google Android to cars, Tesla chose to use Linux as the basis for system development. In fact, the core reason is also very simple: to control the iterative rhythm of the system in their own hands.

Tesla, who grasps chips, systems, algorithms and interactions with one hand, has created the "Apple moment" of new energy vehicles. But this four-in-one play is still too difficult for other car companies. In 2020, an automotive engineer blog denounced German carmakers' software as "There Will Be Blood" and was wildly liked by Peter Mertens, a former CTO who left Audi for two years.

But it is not that Comrade Peter is unfounded. The German financial media Manager Magazine once published a report on the showdown in Hall 74, claiming that there were a large number of software problems in Volkswagen's new energy vehicle ID.3. Hundreds of software testers find 300 software vulnerabilities every day, and more than 10000 technicians are trying to solve these problems. Even Volkswagen engineers need to manually connect to the computer and update the software for each new car that goes offline one by one.

Although Volkswagen denied the report, ID.3 actually delayed delivery from the summer to the fall, and the first owners even had to go back to the factory and upgrade the software to the ID2.1 version in order to have a system version that upgraded the OTA function.

Similarly, the Nikkei Asia Review organized a dismantling of the electronic and electrical architecture of Model 3 at the beginning of last year, and Toyota engineers involved in the dismantling said they could not understand it but were shocked: "Tesla has been technologically ahead of our competitors for six years, and we are far from being able to do so."

The shortcomings of the whole car factory in chips, algorithms and systems are the new market space created by new energy vehicles, and a large number of solution vendors have emerged, such as Qualcomm and AMD for smart cockpit chips, Nvidia and Mobileye for self-driving, BlackBerry and Google for operating systems. But the problem is that different suppliers have their own ideas on car building, and the tinkering system is obviously not enough to compete with the four-in-one Tesla. At this time, an all-embracing plan was born.

There is no doubt that the most conspicuous one is Huawei, which has repeatedly refuted the rumor that it will never build a car.

Huawei not only offers intelligent cockpit solutions, intelligent driving solutions and vehicle control solutions, but even provides two of the three major parts of trams (motors, electric controls and batteries). It also sells car air conditioners and car stereos, as well as channels for sales. In a sense, Huawei has begun to play the role of a turnkey butler, taking it a step further.

It is precisely to see this, Wang Xingcai will comment on this: "Tesla finally met an opponent with equal technical strength and ability to cheat."

No wonder traditional manufacturers are under great pressure. When asked by investors at the SAIC shareholders' meeting on June 30 whether they would consider working with Huawei and other third-party companies on autopilot, Chen Hong, chairman, said, "in this way, it has become the soul. SAIC has become a body." for such a result, SAIC can not accept, to control the soul in their own hands. "

But whether it is willing to change souls or not, a signal is that suppliers who can supply car souls in bulk are already on their way. Huawei is just the beginning, and it is believed that in the next few years, we will see different chip and system camps gradually huddle together, and eventually several turnkey camps will emerge.

Handing over keys is not a kind of "handing over knives"-- it can castrate oneself and stab others. The extreme volume of the new energy automobile industry has not really arrived.

The four schools of 04 electric cars

If we look at the rivers and lakes of new energy vehicles, they have been divided into four distinct schools: the consumer electronics school, the Internet school, the traditional fuel car school and the new car-building school.

1) Consumer electronics faction. Its representative manufacturers are Huawei and Xiaomi. The advantages of this school are: the advantages of channels, the interactive design of electronic products, and the level of financing is not poor.

In order to promote the new feature highlights to the public, electric cars and smart cars often move their product display points from 4S stores in the suburbs to shopping malls closer to consumers, a channel that consumer electronics manufacturers have been ploughing for a long time.

Huawei, for example, says it will sell cars in 200 experience stores by the end of July, expanding to more than 1000 by the end of the year. On Xiaomi's side, at the end of the first quarter of this year, Xiaomi House officially opened its 5000th store in the country, and these stores can also follow the example of Huawei's transformation.

In contrast, the new power three families, the leading Ulai Automobile, the number of stores has reached 288, Xiaopeng and ideal are hovering around 100, while the Internet faction has not yet begun to lay out the channels, the traditional fuel car school also faces the dilemma of fighting between the left and right sides of the traditional 4S store channel.

If the store transformation goes well, the channel is likely to become a strange way to overtake in consumer electronics corners.

In terms of financing, Xiaomi claimed that it had been prepared to invest $10 billion in cars over the past 10 years. Of course, this money is not enough to burn, not to mention the fact that companies like Toyota have annual capital expenditure of US $30 billion, and even Xilai Motor has spent no less than 10 billion yuan over the past few years.

But given that Xiaomi has more than 100 billion yuan in cash on its books and listed companies with a market capitalization of 700 billion Hong Kong dollars as financing platforms, if they are really sure to join the battle, financing will not become a deficiency, and the same applies to Huawei and OPPO and VIVO.

2) Internet pie. The delegation is represented by Google and Baidu. The greatest strength of the Internet faction is the technical strength of intelligent driving.

In the final analysis, intelligent driving also means playing with artificial intelligence algorithms, networking cars and playing big data, such as machine vision for intelligent driving, voice recognition for in-car interaction, the deep learning framework needed to upgrade the algorithm, the huge computational power required for data collection and post-processing, and even the reserve of music, film and television content needed in the intelligent cockpit.

These requirements, the Internet company said with a pat on the thigh: I may not be able to talk about hardware, but I won't be sleepy to talk about it!

For example, Baidu's Apollo intelligent driving platform has an autopilot mileage of more than 10 million kilometers and a simulation mileage of more than one billion kilometers. whether it is useful or not, the data can still bluff people. And Internet companies often have deep pockets, and the cash flow generated by the main industry is enough to support tens of billions of annual self-driving R & D spending.

Of course, the shortcomings of Internet companies are also obvious: they have no experience in supply chain management and mass manufacturing.

This problem has already been reflected in the era of smartphones. Facebook has failed to build mobile phones, Google mobile phones are lukewarm, and 360th mobile phones have not brought many surprises, among which supply chain management is a difficult problem. How to design products according to the process that suppliers are good at to facilitate mass production, how to reasonably arrange materials to reduce inventory, and how manufacturers encounter difficulties to jointly research and develop technology. Are Internet companies have never encountered.

In contrast, consumer electronics such as Xiaomi has managed the supply chain for more than 10 years. OPPO and VIVO are all self-built factories, purchasing and manufacturing on their own, and even their original supply chain partners have cut into the supply chain.

For example, Lance Technology, which makes mobile phone panels, is ready to invest 4 billion to build car glass and large-size panels for cars. The veteran mobile phone ODM company Wentai Technology smashed 12 billion to build a specification-level fab. Fruit chain leader Lixun Precision said that the car wire harness and electronic modules were ready, and established suppliers such as Lianchuang Electronics and Goyle shares also said that they wanted to cut into the automobile supply chain.

Referring to the experience of building mobile phones, Internet car building may be "bad luck". The endowment of the traditional fuel school is exactly the opposite of the Internet school.

3) traditional fuel car school. The shortcomings of this group have been discussed before, but mass manufacturing capacity is clearly their trump card. For example, Geely's vast platform pure electric car factory with 300000 capacity in Zhejiang and Volkswagen's 300000 capacity MEB platform pure electric car factory in Shanghai are undoubtedly the trump card of traditional car companies compared with new players who come to hell from time to time.

In addition, the accumulation of manufacturing technology of traditional car companies is still a sharp weapon in the new era. For example, in order to increase the range of new energy vehicles, using all-aluminum body weight loss is a common means, but Audi has accumulated in all-aluminum body materials and welding technology for a long time. Audi A8 adopted 14 welding processes on all-aluminum body in 2017. among them, the new technology of remote laser welding reduces the risk of cracks in production and saves 95% of the cost of mass production.

But as mentioned earlier, the traditional fuel school must quickly build a strong software team and adapt to the product development cycle closer to digital products in order to give full play to the internal skills of their own manufacturing, otherwise they risk becoming a giant with mud feet.

4) the last group is the new car-building force represented by Weilai, Xiaopeng and ideal. In fact, in theory, the new forces of car building do not have any advantages, and countless mountains such as financing, manufacturing, software, marketing and so on are waiting for them. Their greatest advantage lies in a blank sheet of paper, which can choose the most appropriate organization form according to the needs of building smart cars, and will not be restricted by the old department.

As a result, there are actually a lot of new forces in building cars, but only a few survived the first round of reshuffle. In terms of financing, these companies all "eight Immortals cross the sea, each showing their powers" (the founders themselves are also rich). All the way to a market capitalization of more than tens of billions of dollars. In terms of manufacturing, the new forces have also passed through the hell of production capacity by means of contract manufacturing, taking over old factories and building their own factories.

When Lulai signed a contract with Jianghuai in 2015, it had a production capacity of only 50, 000 vehicles. In May this year, under the new cooperation agreement, the annual production capacity has been expanded to 240000 vehicles. In the same period, Xiaopeng also completed a self-built production capacity of 100000 vehicles in Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province. And it is planned to build 100000 vehicles each in Guangzhou, Zhengzhou and Wuhan. After achieving the ideal production capacity of 100000 vehicles in Changzhou, it began to talk about taking over Hyundai's No. 1 plant in Beijing, which used to produce 600000 cars a year.

There is no denying that the new forces with no historical accumulation but no historical burden have crossed the first threshold. But frankly speaking, in the past few years, Weilai, Xiaopeng and ideals have only won tickets to participate in the next cruel competition.

05 ending

Every school of car-building has special skills and magical powers, but the problem is that eventually some people will be eliminated from the game.

Although there is no complete analogy between the mobile phone industry and the automobile industry, automakers are frightened by its history: after the initial stage of intelligence in full bloom, the market concentration of the mobile phone market has increased dramatically in the past decade, and the tide has receded. Huawei, Samsung, Apple, Xiaomi, OPPO, VIVO finally ate more than 90% of the market share.

The reason is very simple: when the supply chain becomes a development type, most of the core components of the mobile phone can be purchased, and any mobile phone manufacturer can build a mobile phone with good parameters in all aspects, and the ability of differentiation is greatly reduced.

At this time, the ability to generate mobile phone differentiation began to break away from the phone itself and rise to an even more terrifying dimension, in which Apple and Huawei, which developed their own chips and systems, Samsung, which invested tens of billions of dollars in its own chip and panel factories, and a three-step offline channel store, opened 2, 300000 stores across China.

Under this intense competition, in the previous functional machine era, Nokia's "technology is shell-based", and the super-large batteries and super-large loudspeakers of fake phones were innovated, such as rifles and grenades, which were easily run over by the mechanized forces of the giants.

With the rise of batteries, motors, electric controls, as well as third parties of intelligent cockpits and intelligent driving systems, it is no longer difficult for car factories to use self-developed engines and a large number of models to create differentiation. From the perspective of electronic products, the electric cars in the next ten years are likely to become a PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS that they have never seen before after various schools have entered the arena one after another.

For those companies that are unable to establish differentiation, the lesson of PC and mobile phones is at hand: for example, on a laptop, users will see if your chip is the latest generation of Intel, whether your graphics card is 3060 or 3070 of Nvidia's, and whether your memory is 16 gigabytes or 32 gigabytes. As long as the same configuration is 500 yuan more expensive than other manufacturers, most consumers will turn around and leave without nostalgia.

As a result, Lenovo, the world's number one, has a market capitalization of HK $100 billion, equivalent to only one-sixteen cents of Intel, one-36th of Nvidia and one-third of Microsoft. In the mobile phone field, those manufacturers who like to promote the "first xx chip" are also struggling. To sum up with a very vulgar sentence is: all the gifts printed with the word "xxx Inside" in fate have been secretly marked with prices.

Similarly, if new energy manufacturers fail to hand in their homework in terms of "chips, systems, algorithms, and human-car interaction," they will either be forced to accept other people's "turnkey solutions" or gradually lose out under the pressure of competition from all kinds of players-- when your car is repeatedly tortured by consumers, "is it Mobileye's chip or NVIDIA's chip, Huawei's algorithm or Tesla's algorithm?" the death knell is not far away.

Tesla is also taking advantage of his first-mover advantage, launching blitz attacks on pursuers to prevent the emergence of the turnkey camp and delay their emergence (as Apple did against the Android camp). This morning, Tesla Model Y once again fiercely cut prices, which will undoubtedly further squeeze the living space of the rival camp.

In the "MediaTek moment" of new energy vehicles, some people can change their fate against heaven, while others can only accept fate. The auto industry, the world's largest manufacturing industry, will usher in an epic battle.

The full text is over. Thank you for your patience in reading.