Produced by Tiger Sniff Automobile Group
Author丨Thoughtful, Zhang Bowen
Editor丨Zhang Bowen
Head picture丨Tiger Sniffing
From the establishment of the NIO German company in June 2015 to the release of the NIO brand in the UK in November 2016, Li Bin has returned to his faithful Europe.
At 0:00 on October 8th Beijing time, and at 18:00 on October 7th local time in Berlin, NIO held the NIO Berlin conference in Berlin, Germany. At this event, NIO launched the European debut of EL7 (that is, domestic ES7), ET7 and ET5, and released product prices. It should be noted that Weilai adopts a monthly payment business model in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark. At present, users in these regions can only use the three NIO vehicles by subscription. The current subscription prices for the three vehicles in the above four regions are as follows:
Subscription price based on a 36-month continuous subscription user.
Initial price for a monthly subscription
For the latter chart, Weilai said that as the age of the car increases and more models and scales arrive one after another, they will adjust the subscription price appropriately according to the vehicle condition and supply and demand relationship. According to Huxiu’s simple communication with Qin Lihong after the press conference, the price is reduced month by month.
Compared with domestic car owners who can choose different prices and vehicle configurations, the flexibility of users in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark is relatively low at present. The author saw on the German page of Weilai’s official website that users can only subscribe based on the models that Weilai has already arrived in Hong Kong. However, the advantage is that users can cancel the subscription more than 14 days in advance, or switch to other vehicles in the next month.
In addition to watching the press conference remotely in Beijing, Zhang Bowen, the author of Tiger Sniffing Cars, also communicated with NIO executives and European media at the press conference in Berlin. To many people’s surprise, our European counterparts gave quite positive comments on the release of NIO’s mass-produced models based on the second-generation platform.
“I am shocked by Chinese cars”
This sentence in the subtitle comes from a German media person we met at the scene. The media person who has worked in the BMW Group said that he “likes Weilai very much”. He believes that the design of EL7, ET7 and ET5 is “extremely advanced”, so that it has changed his previous inherent impression of Chinese car brand products. “I know BYD sells well, but its cars don’t look ‘not that good’. And NIO looks good to me, surprisingly good.”
In fact, his evaluation of NIO’s three cars was so complimenting that he compared it with the old owner’s products. “I understand very well why Chinese consumers don’t like German luxury cars more and more, because the final presentation of BMW’s cars is too ‘cheap’ and not high enough. And Weilai looks very luxurious.” Here, he used “luxury” ” rather than “premium” to describe.
In addition to the appearance and interior design, he also said that what attracted him most to NIO was the introduction of product reliability and service system at the press conference. As a Fiat car owner, he bluntly said, “Italian cars have too many minor problems and always need to be repaired.” In developed countries like Germany, repairing a car is not only expensive, but also takes too long.
At the scene, two media from Sweden also gave positive comments on NIO’s design. They said that these three cars, especially the ET5 and ET7, looked very cool, and the product parameters also reached the evaluation of performance cars. However, they also complained about Weilai’s business model and appearance details. First, they admitted that European users prefer to buy a car rather than rent a car. Weilai currently only has a subscription model, which is not enough. In addition, the radar and camera protruding from the top of the second-generation model of Weilai “are too much and seem to interfere with the line of sight.”
“It would be nice if these sensors were hidden inside the body. Of course, I am not against this state now.” At the same time, these foreign media also gave positive comments to the voice assistant NOMI and the large screen in the car. Especially for local European models such as Volkswagen and BMW, they believe that users have been able to accept Weilai’s large-size central control screen, because “users’ habits are also changing.”
It can be speculated that the shock of these three cars to the author’s European counterparts has exceeded the author’s feelings for the first NIO Day in 2017. Today, Chinese auto brands are entering Europe with a new look, especially Germany, the heart of the European and even global auto industry.
In a group interview with Kris Tomasson, vice president of design of NIO, earlier than the conference, as the only automotive technology media in China to appear at the event, the author also witnessed the European media’s praise for NIO’s physical voice assistant NOMI.
However, compared with the German counterparts who met Weilai for the first time, Huxiu Automobile is more concerned about whether Weilai’s business model in Europe can work. In fact, Weilai is not the first Chinese car company to launch a subscription leasing model in Europe. Lynk & Co launched its “mobile subscription” service in Europe two years ago in September 2020. The company provides users with the Lynk & Co 01 PHEV through an on-demand subscription + purchase method, and has already brought this compact SUV to major cities in Europe.
Monthly subscription, good for luxury cars?
To understand the effect of the monthly subscription model of Chinese cars in Europe, we can refer to the model performance of the Lynk & Co 01 PHEV. On the official website pages of Lynk & Co in many European countries, the subscription model is the first for users, followed by purchase. According to sources, 99% of the 11,012 Lynk & Co 01 PHEVs sold in Europe are company license plates based on sales data through July this year. That said, the vast majority of users opted for a mobile subscription model that pays €550 a month to get access to the car. Of course, the price, like Weilai, includes insurance and a service plan for regular maintenance.
From the official website page, Lynk & Co’s mobile subscription plan is quite simple. Users can choose only two configurations: color and tow hook. Others are standard. By comparison, the car is 267 euros cheaper per month than the Volkswagen I.D4 of the same class, which is more than 30% cheaper, while also being well below the industry average.
However, the price behind all these achievements is that Lynk & Co 01 PHEV’s earnings report in Europe is quite ugly. The source told Tiger Sniff that it is speculated that the Lynk & Co 01 PHEV will deliver nearly 30,000 units in Europe by the end of this year.
In contrast, Weilai’s subscription prices in the four European countries are basically at the industry average level. However, compared with traditional car companies that provide services based on 4S shop dealers, NIO also operates its own sales, power exchange, service network and other systems in Europe, which all require NIO to pay a lot of real money for construction.
More importantly, compared to the Lynk & Co 01 PHEV with only 4 configurations, each NIO vehicle has more than 10 exterior + interior color schemes, and the EL7 and ET5 can also be equipped with a tow hook. Therefore, how to reasonably simplify its own subscription SKU scheme while meeting the personalized subscription needs of users is the core issue facing NIO.
Although, for the European market, where new car registrations fell by 14% year-on-year in the first half of 2022, the subscription model seems to “look good everywhere” to users. However, the heavy asset burden brought by this model and the high customer acquisition cost that the brand needs to invest in the early stage are the most important challenges for NIO.
More importantly, the users who subscribe to the Lynk & Co 01 PHEV are more price-sensitive consumers. For a high-end brand like NIO, it will take time to test whether the monthly subscription model can be recognized by luxury car users. After all, the European media in the previous article raised their doubts. However, for this business model, Weilai has conducted research for up to 10 months. So what the final result will be, we still need time.
The European Narrative of the NIO Story
At the end of this article, the author would like to say a few words about NIO’s thinking on the narrative level of its own story in the European market. Frankly, I think this is the biggest advantage of NIO compared to other Chinese auto brands.
A foreign executive of NIO said at the press conference that the company’s values of “sincere, caring, vision, and action” were discussed in Europe in 2015 long before it was determined, and the overseas team also participated in the decision-making. At the Berlin press conference, these eight-character mottos also ran through the entire event, and were accompanied by NIO’s speeches on entrepreneurial stories, brand image, product introduction, and user services.
This narrative structure is critical for a new brand to European users who are more concerned with values. In fact, Li Bin’s opening speech also introduced his original intention of founding Weilai. In short, he “decided to create NIO in February 2014, one month before the birth of the first child, looking at the severe smog in Beijing.” Around this “vision”, he also introduced the company’s new energy projects in national parks in Denmark and Norway.
At present, our country has been emphasizing the importance of telling Chinese stories well to the Chinese government and enterprises. But the author also wants to go a step further along this line of thought: the premise of telling a good story is that the story itself is attractive.
After all, in the author’s past work and interview experience, too many stories of our car companies and technology companies were “spit out” like printing paper from the “decision-making black box” of the bosses. Marketing, PR and marketing teams need to package stories based on their own understanding and user needs.
To use an inappropriate analogy, it’s like one has to go to great lengths to compliment the child of the next-door neighbor. Although this child “doesn’t get out of the gate, but doesn’t take the second door”, he doesn’t know why he looks like this.
In contrast, the reason why the story of NIO in Europe can be clearly told is that this Chinese car brand has European blood at the beginning of its establishment. It is obviously false to talk about “aristocratic genes”, but it obviously has a positive effect on Europeans’ better understanding of Weilai’s story.
For all Chinese auto brands that are determined to go overseas, instead of focusing on packaging existing stories, it is better to open the door at the stage of “making up” stories and absorb opinions and value systems from all over the world, especially the target market. . Only in this way can the story of one’s own company appear “flesh and blood” in the global market.
Taking ten thousand steps back, it can also relieve the work pressure of the marketing public relations team.
Finally, I expect NIO and all Chinese auto brands to gain the favor of European consumers just like in China.
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event tracking
- 2022-10-07In Berlin, we chatted with Europeans about Weilai
- 2022-07-31 We have collected 4 years of data to analyze what will happen if Weilai does not make mobile phones
- 2022-06-16Audi files a trademark lawsuit against NIO, alleging that the model names are similar
- 2022-06-01NIO delivered 7,024 vehicles in May
- 2022-02-15NIO will release a new five-seat pure electric SUV named ES7 in April
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