Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1624
There is no coffee, ice cream, only tea and Chinese snacks. At the Shanghai Auto Show, Lantu built a Chinese-style booth. Lu Fang, CEO of Lantu Automobile, dressed in new Chinese-style clothing, announced the rejuvenation of the Lantu brand. At the same time, the third new model of Lantu was officially launched.
Whether it is the Lantu booth, the new Lantu brand or the Lantu chasing light, you can capture a kind of Chinese aesthetics in many details. “Chinese automobiles are rising around the world, and the world’s automobile field should have a voice belonging to the East and China,” said Lu Fang.
Lu Fang told “LatePost” that he led the team to revise the speech at the press conference word by word, and it is a concentrated presentation of Lantu’s brand and product concept. Lu Fang has experienced the lively years of “Sino-foreign joint ventures”. He still remembers that at that time, speeches would emphasize “German manufacturing and British origin”, and the Chinese spokesperson was only a communicator of foreign technology. It was decent and common to find foreigners for the booth. thing. At this auto show, he received more than a dozen waves of overseas dealers, and the booth of China’s new energy vehicles was very popular.
Lu Fang “has dealt with cars all his life.” Born in 1976, he was the first generation to witness the rise of China’s auto industry. In 1999, he graduated from Tongji University majoring in automobiles and became an automaker, witnessing the transition from joint ventures to autonomy. In 2018, he came to Wuhan again and became the No. 1 employee of Dongfeng’s “h Division”, personally participating in the historical process of fuel oil to new energy transformation.
Compared with the new car-making forces, Lantu carries the mission of Dongfeng’s “brand improvement”. With the blessing of Dongfeng’s resources and technology, Lantu, which “releases three cars in three years”, runs very fast. But right now, China has become the most competitive new energy market in the world.
“In the future, half of the 20 million vehicles in the Chinese market will be new energy vehicles,” Lu Fang judged. He is soberly aware that “the knockout round will also begin.” But facing a new round of brutal competition, the new generation of Lantu people are ready.
Fight like a startup
At the Shanghai Auto Show in 2023, new energy is an established trend. Among the more than 1,500 vehicles on display, new energy accounted for more than half. But going back five years ago, when Dongfeng Group planned to brew a high-end brand internally, there were many internal doubts.
“Is the time ripe? Can Dongfeng make high-end all at once? New cars are losing money, so can central enterprises do it?” An old Dongfeng employee recalled the controversy at that time to LatePost. Even so, Dongfeng’s management still tried its best to lay out high-end new energy. “Dongfeng’s idea at the time was: new energy must be done; high-end must be done; under the current sequence, it is very difficult to do high-end new energy. In order to improve efficiency, Dongfeng has to start anew.” He said.
In July 2018, 42-year-old Lu Fang received the most important phone call in his career. The leader of Dongfeng asked him if he was interested in developing a car in a short time and creating a new high-end brand. Lu Fang agreed without hesitation, “I am willing to bet all my career reputation on this to participate in building a national auto brand.”
As Lantu’s No. 1 employee, after joining Lantu, Lu Fang develops technology, builds a system, and is responsible for recruiting people. In the following three years, Lantu’s staff grew from one person to more than 4,000. People from all corners of the country come to Lantu with different backgrounds and diverse cultures.
Among these people are not only from joint venture car companies such as Volkswagen and Nissan, but also from independent car companies such as Geely and Changan, as well as Internet companies such as Ali and Banma, and new car manufacturers such as Wei Xiaoli, covering automobiles, retail, Household appliances, IT and other industries.
For example, Lantu COO Jiang Tao once worked for Dongfeng Nissan. He once upgraded the Dalian factory that produced mid-to-low-end cars into a high-end brand Infiniti factory, and has rich experience in manufacturing and quality. Dr. Huang Min, who is responsible for the research and development of three electric technologies in Lantu, has work experience in FAW-Volkswagen and Dongfeng. He is the first group of people who developed new energy vehicles in my country.
“Lantu is a piece of soil, a brand built by collective wisdom, and continues the entrepreneurial spirit of the Second Automobile Group that opened up territories.” Lu Fang concluded. Another person from Lantu said that Lantu’s core requirement for employees is to “work hard and never forget the original intention”.
In addition to forming a team, Lantu’s overall process, concept, model, and decision-making mechanism are also rebuilt.
“There is no traditional enterprise, only traditional thinking and people.” Lu Fang believes. Therefore, he borrowed from the management model of Internet companies – the OKR model, to make the goals more unified from top to bottom.
Compared with the layer-by-layer reporting of central enterprises, Lantu’s management style is flatter. In Lantu, only 5 people have independent offices, and the others work in large open rooms. From the company’s management to grassroots employees, there are no more than four levels, and most of them are three levels.
“Faster and more energetic,” commented an automaker who joined Lantu from an independent car company. Even with many years of experience, he still needs to personally go to the front line after arriving in Lantu; while in traditional car companies, he only needs to follow the process step by step.
Lantu Auto CTO Wang Junjun
Wang Junjun also changed when his identity changed from a typical technical controller in the technical center of Dongfeng Company to CTO of Lantu.
In the past, he seldom faced users directly when doing technical research and development, but in a “users go home” event, a user directly complained to him about the functions to be improved in Lantu, which made him “unaccustomed” at first. But he soon began to enjoy the changes. “Any function made by the team can get feedback at the first time, whether positive or negative, it will help the improvement and iteration of the function.”
In Lantu, accounts are calculated independently, not tied to Dongfeng. After arriving at Lantu, Wang Junjun’s biggest feeling is that “Dongfeng Group requires Lantu to be independently responsible for the income” and “to be responsible for the results, it is necessary to horizontally connect the procurement, project, manufacturing, marketing and other teams.”
In order to ensure independence, the management and core management team invested real money to hold shares in Lantu, tying their wealth to the fate of the company. As an independent company, Lantu can raise funds independently. In November last year, Lantu completed the A-round financing of 4.55 billion yuan, which was the largest first-round financing in China’s new energy vehicle industry at that time.
“Lantu has the ‘maximum autonomy’ within the Dongfeng system,” Lu Fang said. Dongfeng Group will carry out “guidance”, “assessment” and “supervision” through the Economic Management Committee. “It’s like parents asking children to learn. The requirements are very strict, but they will not participate too much in daily management and operation.”
With the support of Dongfeng, Lantu has been able to venture boldly in key technologies, equity structure, sales model, management methods, internationalization and other aspects, which not only accelerated its own development, but also provided a reference for Dongfeng’s next reform.
The “longboard” of mature car companies
Different from the Internet background of the heads of new car-making forces, the founding team of Lantu, including Lu Fang, is an automaker who grew up in the era of “Sino-foreign joint ventures”. They have a deeper understanding of mastering independent research and development capabilities.
When working at FAW-Volkswagen, due to technical and trust issues, Lu Fang’s Chinese colleagues and German colleagues often quarreled. Once, FAW-Volkswagen and German Volkswagen negotiated a transfer fee for a luxury car, and German Volkswagen asked for several billion yuan. In the long-term cooperation and competition with the Germans, Lu Fang understood a truth, “ability determines power”. Only by strengthening one’s own research and development capabilities can the structure of the joint venture company be changed, which is the right to speak in exchange for technology. “Insist on keeping the core technology firmly in your own hands” is also the principle that Lu Fang repeatedly emphasized after coming to Lantu.
After Wang Junjun joined the job, the focus of work assigned to him by Lu Fang was to “deeply penetrate every underlying technology”. “The advantage of this is that the three aspects that users pay most attention to are easy driving, safety, and comfort, all of which are directly related to the underlying technical capabilities. Lantu’s products have the underlying guarantee in terms of cost and replacement speed.” Wang Junjun said.
Lantu centralized SOA electronic and electrical architecture
Wang Junjun led the team to develop the SOA electrical and electronic architecture. In order to concentrate the four domains (vehicle control, intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, and power) on the central controller, the R&D team added a lot of development work, such as developing voice control by themselves. In the past, traditional car companies only needed to find suppliers for control functions and then integrate them.
“In the traditional distributed architecture, if a car company wants to modify a certain requirement, it needs to coordinate a large number of supplier resources, and the response is very slow. Through the centralized SOA electronic and electrical architecture, we can greatly reduce resource allocation.” Wang Junjun said.
Lantu also self-developed the ESSA smart native electric architecture. This architecture is compatible with B-class to E-class cars, and produces different types of bodies such as sedans, MPVs, and SUVs. “The ESSA architecture has 63 sub-modules and 13 single module units. Under this modular design, the product iteration speed will be very fast.” A researcher said.
In terms of the support of the underlying architecture, since the brand was released in July 2020, Lantu has launched three models in three years——Lantu FREE, Dreamer, and Chasing Light, covering three categories: SUV, MPV and sedan. This speed is beyond the reach of new car-making forces. From its establishment at the end of 2014 to the delivery of EC6 in 2020, it took 6 years to develop and launch the first three models of NIO.
In Wang Junjun’s view, the accumulation of traditional car companies’ engineering capabilities such as chassis capabilities and powertrain capabilities is not a one-day achievement, but a process of repeatedly experiencing “falling down and getting up again”.
What impressed Wang Junjun was that once, a certain car developed by their team encountered a problem with a very low probability. “After running hundreds of cars, only one car had a small problem”, but they were worried about the safety of users. Potentially dangerous, their team overthrew all existing plans and made a new set of design and development. “The price of around 300,000 yuan, in many cases, the cost is very important, but the core is to provide users with a good product.” Lu Fang believes.
In the industry, the thermal efficiency of the range extender is 30% – 35%. Wang Junjun said that the efficiency of Lantu’s range extender has increased from 37% to 41%, and the goal is to increase it to 45%. In order to reduce the abnormal noise, the design of the shockproof structure of the battery in the electrical system and the accuracy of the control technology also need to be accumulated and iterated repeatedly.
What new forces should learn is not only the engineering capabilities of traditional car companies, but also the supply chain management capabilities.
After joining Lantu, Jiang Tao carried out a flexible transformation of Lantu Wuhan factory. The original factory produced 4 models, and after the transformation, it can produce 6 models at the same time. The welding workshop has only 22,000 square meters, and the automation rate has reached 99% after the transformation. Jiang Tao also carried out 5G digital transformation, opened up the systems of sales plan, material plan, production plan, and shipping plan, and changed the original series plan to parallel connection, which greatly shortened the delivery time.
In the past period of time, a large number of voices believed that traditional car companies should learn from new forces. But in Lu Fang’s view, mature car companies have a deeper understanding of cars, “No matter how intelligent a car is, it is essentially a means of transportation. The supply chain, quality, control system, and manufacturing system of a complete car are all mature cars. company’s strengths.”
Do not exaggerate marketing, return to the essence of the car
When the competition became more and more fierce, in order to sell cars, new forces began to frequently promote marketing. “The best family SUV within 5 million”, “the best luxury SUV within 10 million” and “smart driving are far ahead”. consumer perspective.
In Lu Fang’s view, irrational competition will lead to misunderstandings in car marketing. “Everyone is focusing on eyeballs and short-term benefits, imposing a lot of useless things on users, and finally users pay the bill, resulting in a waste of resources.” He believes that car companies should restore the original things of cars. “Safety and reliability are The most basic requirements, rather than cover up with some bells and whistles.”
In order to ensure safety, Lantu’s safety includes four dimensions: active safety, passive safety, health safety, and information safety.
For example, in terms of passive safety, Lantu’s door anti-collision beam has been chosen among various schemes, and finally chooses a 2000 MPa aluminum-silicon coating thermoforming scheme. This kind of rigidity is similar to “one fingernail, standing on four elephants”. . In terms of health and safety, Lantu uses water-based materials to eliminate the root causes of various harmful gases to the body. All seat materials are baby-grade skin-friendly materials. The new car can achieve “no smell after 8 hours of exposure”.
News of spontaneous combustion of electric vehicles occurs from time to time. In the thermal diffusion test of the battery system conducted according to the new national standard, Lantu’s amber and mica battery system technologies, after thermal runaway of the battery cells, not only achieved “no fire in 5 minutes” , and further achieve “no fire, no explosion” for 30 minutes or even 50 days.
Lantu is also very cautious about the “smart driving” that major new forces care about.
In the industry, some car companies automatically park their cars once, thinking that they have mastered the technology of automatic parking, and use “automatic parking” for marketing. But in Lu Fang’s view, the success rate of automatic parking reaches 90%, or even 100%, before they think they have mastered this technology.
Lantu FREE is equipped with L2+ intelligent driving assistance system as standard. The second car, Lantu Dreamer, is equipped with L2+ intelligent driving assistance system, which can realize 26 advanced driving assistance functions. Lantu light tracking can reach the level of L2.9 automatic driving, and supports more than 30 intelligent assisted driving functions.
“The more functions of smart driving and smart cockpit, the better,” Wang Junjun said. He has experienced many competing cars. Intervention, the user’s personal experience will decline. “When encountering one or two dangerous road sections, users may no longer use this function.” He said.
In his opinion, it is necessary to do a good job in the functions that users use frequently, such as the user experience lane change function, which does not require people to repeatedly intervene, making users feel “comfortable and safe”; navigation, voice, car control, etc. that users care about The function is solid. “On top of the basic functions, let’s add the icing on the cake.”
For this reason, Lantu Auto’s OTA has pre-embedded hardware interfaces instead of hardware pre-embedded, which can realize the same function opening time and hardware on-board time. If the function is not used, there will be no corresponding hardware on-board, which reduces the Consumer purchase costs. In contrast, since October 2016, all new Tesla products have pre-embedded AutoPilot hardware, but users have paid for AutoPilot hardware.
But this does not mean that Lantu doesn’t care about software functions. Wang Junjun told “LatePost” that there are now 12 people reporting directly to him, including the heads of the smart driving, smart cockpit, and electronic and electrical teams. He spends time communicating with the software team every day. “The ability of new car-making forces to rapidly iterate on intelligent driving and the ability to quickly solve problems also requires Lantu to learn hard.” Wang Junjun said frankly.
Cars were born in the West and landed in China
At this Shanghai Auto Show, domestic new energy vehicles have become the absolute protagonists. Executives from BMW, Mercedes-Benz and other foreign auto companies have chartered planes to come to Shanghai to study.
When the world starts to pay attention to the East, what we present should not be electric vehicles that look more and more similar: monotonous large screens, similar battery life, and exaggerated Western-style designs. These similar product design elements are still unifying Chinese electric vehicles. aesthetic.
Referring to the history of automobile development, after dozens or even hundreds of years of development, cold steel automobiles are integrated with local culture and national character, forming a diversification of consumption concepts, life interests and aesthetic trends, thus creating automobile culture in various regions. Therefore, in terms of defining luxury, American, German and Japanese cars all have their own distinct labels.
Cars were born in the West and landed in China. In international competition, Chinese cars also need to have individual labels.
Lantu develops a new brand color system from Chinese aesthetics
From Lu Fang’s answer in the interview with the media, we can see Lantu’s idea of solving the problem—combining Chinese cultural heritage into product design and service, using Chinese aesthetics for product design, and using elegant hospitality To treat every user well.
From LOGO, products to brand concept, we can capture the wisdom of Chinese philosophy and the artistic conception of landscape in Lantu. The design philosophy of “Heaven and Earth Kunpeng”, the LOGO of “Kunpeng Spreading Wings”, the brand concept of “light, quiet and elegant”, the color system with cyan as the main body, “Du Ruobai” and “Qingyun Gray” from the Songs of Chu, Tang Poetry and Song Ci, etc. Color, Lantu has been trying to break the monopoly of the traditional western monopoly on “beauty” and “luxury” in the field of automobiles since its birth.
In Lantu’s internal letter at the beginning of this year, Lu Fang shared three sets of data:
- The current penetration rate of domestic brands of luxury cars is less than 10%. Whether it is domestic or international, foreign brands represented by BBA are still the main force. Domestic luxury brands still have room for growth;
- Today, the proportion of first-time car buyers has dropped to about 30%, and Chinese consumers have ushered in a large-scale consumption upgrade;
- A set of global research data shows that ordinary people’s satisfaction with the status quo of social development is much higher in China than in developed countries in Europe and the United States.
From the Forbidden City, Tongrentang, to Huili and Pechoin, in the field of consumption, Chinese people’s recognition of Chinese culture has returned to the rational stage. In the field of automobiles, integrating traditional culture into modern industrial civilization to create products, brand tonality and services is a brand-new innovation revolution no less than technological reform. Lantu believes that Chinese brands with aggressiveness and sense of responsibility should seize this rare time window to tell the outside world about China’s aesthetic taste.
“After years of hard work, China’s auto industry has entered a new stage of independent innovation from the stage of original drawing processing and imitation. With the accumulation of core technology and the blessing of traditional culture, we have the confidence and confidence to participate in the world’s Competition in the auto market.” Lu Fang said.
Right now, Lantu Motors has gone abroad. At the end of September 2022, Lantu Auto’s first model, Lantu FREE, was officially sent to Norway. In January 2023, Lantu will release the brand in Israel. Next, Lantu also plans to enter Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark and other countries, increase the layout of overseas stores, and continue to expand the lineup of overseas models. “Lantu wants to tell the Chinese story to more overseas users, and bring high-end new energy vehicle products intelligently made in China.” Lu Fang said.
A generation of Autobots has the long march and mission of a generation of Autobots. The previous generation of Dongfeng people were poor and poor, relying on the determination and tenacity of reform, they built factories and cars from scratch. When entering the era of joint ventures, in order to break through the technological blockade of foreign capital, they independently researched and developed, and strived to keep their technological strength in China.
This generation of Lantu people is shouldering the mission of Dongfeng. They are the “vanguards” of Dongfeng’s reform. Facing the more brutal new energy competition, Lantu people will implement Dongfeng’s 54-year technology into products, and compete in domestic and international competitions. Fight for a place.
Title picture source: Lantu Automobile
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