Welcome to the WeChat subscription number of “Sina Technology”: techsina
Original title: Lantu “lost voice”
Written | Edited by Leng Zelin | Wang Pan
Source: Photon Travel
A few days ago, Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei Smart Car Solutions BU, and Li Ruifeng, CEO of Wei brand, had a heated argument, and the power model of “extended program” was also brought to the peak of the topic. The media, big V, car critics and even experts Scholars have all come out to express their views.
When it comes to extending the program, the ideal car that made its reputation and the Huawei Wenjie that came first, but people seem to have forgotten that there is also a “internal beta” player on this track – Lantu.
Lantu is a new energy brand under Dongfeng. The first model, Lantu FREE, was unveiled at the end of 2020, even earlier than the first model SF5 that Huawei and Celis cooperated with.
Dongfeng Group has high hopes and strong confidence. When Dading has only 3,689 vehicles, it has early launched the slogan of “promising to become” the fastest electric brand to achieve sales of 10,000 vehicles.
However, in the five-month delivery period as of the end of last year, the total delivery volume of Lantu FREE was 6,791 units. Obviously the title of “fastest” is not so easy to obtain.
Fortunately, the overall delivery data of Lantu last year showed an upward trend, and the monthly delivery volume in December has successfully exceeded 3,000. When the outside world thought that this was just the beginning of Lantu, they did not expect to become the pinnacle.
After entering 2022, the sales volume of Lantu FREE has not improved, and the official public account has not talked about the delivery volume. According to the data of the Automobile Dealers Association, the cumulative sales volume of Lantu FREE from January to June this year is about 6,000, which is basically the same as that of the car dealer. Deliveries were flat for five months last year.
Compared with the equally popular extended-range models, the Ideal ONE, Wenjie M5 and the upcoming M7, the sound volume of Lantu is shrinking day by day. Because at the moment when the new energy infiltration car market is becoming more and more prosperous, no progress is the biggest regression.
Asking the world and Lantu, the same origin but different fates
In October 1970, 21 pieces of hand-made cars set off from the Second Automobile Group in Shiyan to participate in the parade celebrating the 20th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
In 2022, Lantu Dreamer will start the delivery and put out a 101-style number. Dongfeng and Lantu seem to have always liked to put the word “national team” in their propaganda, which may provide them with a strong endorsement, but it has also become a shackle for their further development.
The difference is that in the past, the Second Automobile Group assumed the task of leading China’s auto industry and needed to share honor and disgrace with the country, but now it is more like taking the initiative to put a protective film on itself.
As mentioned above, Lantu is the product of Dongfeng Group’s new energy transformation; while it is also a player on the extended program track, behind Wenjie is the Xiaokang Group, which is also an automobile industry group established in the last century.
As comrades-in-arms of the previous era, the two also have many years of “friendship”.
In 2003, when Dongfeng headquarters was officially relocated from Shiyan to Wuhan, Dongfeng Xiaokang Automobile Co., Ltd., which was established by Chongqing Xiaokang Industrial Group and Dongfeng Motor Corporation, each held 50% of the shares, was also formally established. Until 2020, Xiaokang shares will be issued to Dongfeng by about 3.27%. After acquiring 100 million shares and acquiring 50% of its shares, Dongfeng Xiaokang completely became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Xiaokang.
It was also this year that Dongfeng and Xiaokang’s new energy models also completed their debuts one after another.
At the Chongqing Shanghai Auto Show in June 2020, the high-performance version of the SF5 four-wheel drive was officially launched, and the Lantu FREE was officially released at the end of the year. .
But in fact, Seris, which was launched earlier, only achieved sales of less than 800 units in that year, and the Lantu has not been delivered yet, so you can sit on the sidelines and study for the time being. The reason is that people may know Xiaokang, but they don’t know much about its new energy brands, not to mention the span from micro to mid-to-high-end SUVs is beyond most people’s cognition.
The new energy brands from traditional car companies all have similar problems and are not good at promoting themselves.
Under Wei Xiaoli’s “sugar-coated cannonballs” and the “fancy car-making” of the new mid-waist forces, a new energy product that does not have much bright spots can easily be submerged in this wave.
Seris officially entered the consumer’s field of vision, relying on Yu Chengdong’s spared no effort in publicity and platform.
Of course, the Celis SF5 that Huawei took over did not change its fate immediately. The two also experienced team integration and running-in last year. From the Huawei team’s entry into the Celis factory to take over data such as R&D, procurement, and production, to renaming, replacing offline channels, ceding publishing rights, and more.
The well-off has gradually moved towards “laying flat”, in exchange for the monthly sales of Wenjie M5 breaking 7,000. Although the two are essentially the same car, the poor sales of the SF5 seems to have nothing to do with the M5.
What’s more interesting is that the sales of the Lantu FREE extended range version of the Lantu that some of the technologies also come from Jinconsailis have been declining all the way, and the Wenjie M7, which has many similarities with the appearance of Dongfeng Fengguang ix7, is now open for pre-sale. Orders easily exceeded 40,000 within 4 hours.
Xiaokang has really borrowed the “Dongfeng”, but the “blueprint” of Dongfeng is becoming more and more blurred.
want to talk
Xiaokang gave up his “soul” and went to Huawei’s “thigh”, and Lantu may have to choose to rub the heat of his ideal car at most because of his identity.
Although Lu Fang, CEO of Lantu Automobile, insisted that “we are not competitors with ideals”, its first car has an ambiguous relationship with ideal ONE inside and out.
Since the earliest news of Lantu FREE has just been released, and before the facelift of the Ideal ONE has not yet been launched, an ideal potential car owner told Photon Travel that he immediately included it in the candidate list when he saw this car.
The reason is that some car owners who choose the ideal ONE do not necessarily need a 6/7-seat layout. Instead, they can get a green card if they want to have an extra program for mileage anxiety, and the layout of Lantu FREE’s big five-seat is obviously a direct hit. The pain points of this group of users.
From the 1.5T range extender, the triple screen that can be raised and lowered, to the slogan “The ideal future is Lantu”, “Better than ideal” seems to be one of the important competitiveness of Lantu to enter this market.
At the beginning of this year, an ideal ONE was in the off-road holy land “Chengfo Slope” in Shimen County, Changde City, Hunan Province. When one side of the tire was idling, the mechanical parts were damaged and some liquid leaked. Pull it down the mountain.
So soon after, Lantu Automobile released a poster titled “Changing Buddha Po, Let’s Live Together”, and in the poster, in addition to the figure of Lantu FREE, there is obviously a vague ideal ONE hidden.
The inside and outside of the painting are all about “pulling and stepping on” the ideal, but they want to create an atmosphere of unity, which really makes people feel a bit inconsistent. After that, Lantu officials quickly deleted this tweet.
But the fact is that no matter how the ideal is broken and broken down, the final sales volume is always rising. In terms of marketing, only the physically honest Lantu is not ideal.
Li Xiang, CEO of Lixiang Auto, was once the founder of a car vertical website, and naturally knows how to spread the word. Whether it is swearing from time to time, fighting with executives of traditional car companies, or labeling his new car with 5 million yuan, this kind of strong The way of expressing opinions is actually trying to create a personal IP in order to achieve the purpose of warming up for the ideal.
And Lu Fang worked for FAW and Dongfeng successively. He was born under the “red flag” and grew up in the “Dongfeng”. For the traditional car people who are rooted in Miaohong, some words that violate the basic common sense of the auto market but attract consumers are obviously It’s hard to blurt out.
The marketing method of Lantu Auto also prefers to spread through speeches, Spring Festival Gala and variety shows.
In fact, if you look closely, it is not difficult to find that the controversial topics in the new energy market are always brought by “laymen”, but these words can often bring them huge traffic and sales.
And “moving flowers and connecting trees” has become one of the ways for traditional car companies to obtain traffic. In the past, Li Ruifeng and Feng Sihan’s remarks on program extension were not without this meaning, but for Lantu, there was always some “here to talk.”
Lantu builds cars for “leaders”
At the beginning of the project, Ideal ONE actually expected two versions of pure electric and extended range, but did not choose pure electric in the end. In addition to Li Xiang’s cost control, which is proficient in calculation, the compatibility of extended range and pure electric in the chassis is also one of the reasons.
For pure electric models, a flat large battery pack should be arranged on the bottom of the vehicle to ensure battery life and interior space, while the range extension system includes multiple components such as motors and engines, which will occupy more front space. Therefore, compared with the Tang EV, ID.6, Mache-E and other models listed in the same period, the maximum battery life of the Lantu FREE pure electric version of 505km can only be regarded as medium.
Blindly following the trend of the triple screen and adding the lifting function seems to have become a “vase”-like decoration. The hardware configuration of the NXP i.MX8 chip cannot provide enough smoothness of the car, and the software optimization ability cannot keep up with it in time. Less car owners complain.
Before 2016, the smart cockpit SoC chip market was monopolized by the i.MX series of NXP (NXP). The SA8155P with better performance has been installed one after another.
So, in May this year, Lantu released a service package for upgrading the 8155 cockpit chip, but like a few days ago, it “spends money like dirt” and took out 200 million yuan to replace the 8155 cockpit chip for the car owner. It did not happen in Lantu. On the body, the owner still needs to spend 12,999 yuan.
Lantu FREE is clear in entering the market, but it seems a little vague in entering the group, and the brand tone is also inconsistent.
Recently, Lantu Dreamer has officially started delivery. As the second model of the brand, Dreamer has not continued the FREE SUV market nor entered the broader sedan market, but instead chose the MPV market.
Overall, the MPV market has started a five-year continuous decline since its sales peaked at 2.497 million units in 2016, and the first half of this year also maintained a year-on-year downward trend.
Indeed, many SUVs and sedan models have been launched in the new energy market, and new energy is considered to be the most suitable power model for MPV vehicle scenarios, that is, there are many urban short-distance vehicle scenarios, and energy replenishment is convenient.
However, it seems that the MPV market is a blue ocean, but it is also an extremely uncertain market, and the competition is also particularly fierce. In addition to the famous GL8, Senna, Trumpchi M8, Odyssey and other models, Hongqi, Weipai, BYD, Denza and other car companies have also deployed here.
A new brand like Lantu with a weak connection between the front and rear product lines may not necessarily be able to occupy a place in the limited market. What did the dreamer get out of the game? The answer given by Lantu is the B-end market.
In July, the signing ceremony of the procurement of Lantu Dreamer among central enterprises, state-owned enterprises and major customers was held in Wuhan. According to reports, a total of 97 central and state-owned enterprises signed orders for 6,000 Lantu Dreamers. A few days later, Lantu delivered 12 Dreamers to Mango TV as special vehicles for program recording.
Obviously, Lantu knows more about what kind of car leaders need than what kind of car consumers need. Lantu didn’t lose his voice, he just misunderstood who was speaking.
(Disclaimer: This article only represents the author’s point of view and does not represent the position of Sina.com.)
This article is reproduced from: http://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/csj/2022-07-22/doc-imizirav5001336.shtml
This site is for inclusion only, and the copyright belongs to the original author.