In the era of the same price for petrol and electricity, how can power batteries reduce costs and increase efficiency?

At the beginning of the year, Tesla's price cuts for domestically produced models took the lead in breaking the calmness of the new energy market at the beginning of the new year. Then, domestic car companies such as Wenjie, Xpeng, and Leapmo followed suit with price cuts, and the price war in the car market spread.

However, with the launch of BYD’s multiple championship models under the banner of “same price for petrol and electricity” and the emergence of Haval Xiaolong MAX’s “same price for four-wheel drive and two-wheel drive” pricing, the new energy price war has quietly changed. The focus of PK between car companies is no longer limited to the number of promotional discounts given by the terminal. It is that once a new car is launched, the pricing is in place in one step, and the quality is improved and the price is reduced.

Qiao Xinyu, executive deputy general manager of the Haval brand, once said bluntly that this year's price war has entered the second half, and it has begun to compete for intelligence and pricing. Regarding pricing, it does not mean that there is room for maneuver after setting the price and then lowering the price, but that there is no room for maneuver in the current market. Car companies must first push themselves into a corner and set the price in one step.

At present, new energy vehicles are developing towards higher and higher configurations and more cost-effective prices. Under such circumstances of intensified involution, if they do not lose their competitiveness, new energy vehicle companies can only improve their products. Improve quality and reduce price. However, this is a big challenge for most new energy vehicle companies. After all, only Tesla and BYD are currently truly profitable. Therefore, overall, behind the improvement of product quality and price reduction, the reduction of vehicle costs may be There is no other way, and for power batteries , which account for a large proportion of the cost of the entire vehicle , cost reduction seems to be even more urgent.

The era of "same price for oil and electricity" has arrived ahead of schedule

For the automobile manufacturing industry, extreme cost has always been the goal pursued. No matter how good the product is, it is difficult to achieve large-scale development if the price is not cheap. Musk has also said that if the cost is low enough, demand will not be a problem, because for most people, price is an important factor limiting sales.

Tesla has a strong say in price control, and the many price cuts it has initiated have almost always had a certain impact on its opponents. Some people believe that the core reason why Tesla's car prices have been able to drop again and again lies in its strong cost control. Thanks to lower battery costs and optimization of vehicle design, Tesla's average cost per vehicle has dropped significantly. In September 2022, Tesla's head of investor relations disclosed that Tesla's average cost per vehicle has dropped from US$84,000 in 2017 to US$36,000, a drop of more than half.

In addition, in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency to the greatest extent, Tesla's next-generation cars will also optimize the production process, car design, charging piles, supply chain integration, etc. Thanks to this, the cost of Tesla's next-generation platform models will be It will be half that of Model 3 and Model Y. It can be seen that Tesla is already brewing a more complicated situation.

In addition to Tesla, BYD, another major "volume king" in the domestic new energy market, relies on self-developed core technologies such as blade batteries and super hybrids, as well as the vertical integration capabilities of the supply chain, to rapidly reduce the vehicle cost of its new energy vehicles. The "Championship Edition" models that have been launched recently are a manifestation of its cost reduction and efficiency improvement.

It is worth noting that BYD has already launched the slogan of "same price for gasoline and electricity" through its "Champion Edition" model, and its products must compete with the same price as fuel vehicles. As we all know, high prices have always been a key factor preventing new energy vehicles from accelerating the replacement of fuel vehicles. For this reason, car companies have been continuously promoting the cost reduction of new energy vehicles in recent years. Finally, this year, "the same price for oil and electricity" appeared in the industry signal of.

Yang Hongxin, chairman of Honeycomb Energy, recently publicly stated that the rapid price changes and involution in the domestic new energy market have brought a very important signal that the "era of same-price oil and electricity" is coming ahead of schedule. It believes that the originally expected "same price for oil and electricity" will not be realized until 2025 or 2026, but through this price war, it is expected to arrive early in 2023.

In Yang Hongxin's view, the early arrival of "same price for oil and electricity" means that new energy vehicles, especially pure electric vehicles, will once again experience exponential growth just like Apple mobile phones replaced Nokia. At the same time, in the next two years, with the increase of raw materials As prices continue to fall, the problem that pure electric vehicles have a high charge compared to plug-in and extended-range vehicles due to their large charge capacity will be solved.

Judging from the above, the domestic new energy vehicle market will still be growing in the future, but at the same time, the involution of giants to reduce costs will intensify market competition. The way out for many car companies to survive is to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

As far as vehicle manufacturing is concerned, there are many ways to reduce costs, such as platform-based production, lowering parts procurement costs, etc. From the perspective of the cost structure of electric vehicles, power batteries still account for the largest proportion of the vehicle cost, accounting for 40%. Therefore, reducing the cost of power batteries is an important challenge for car companies to reduce costs and promote new energy vehicles in the future.

At present, car companies have gradually paid attention to the issue of power battery cost reduction. Zhong Liang, senior director of battery technology at Xpeng Automobile, said recently at the CIBF Power Battery International Exchange Conference, “Users’ demand for rapid recharge of electric vehicles is getting higher and higher, but in order to meet the user experience, we cannot increase costs as the premise. It should not increase costs or reduce costs to satisfy user experience. "For this reason, Xpeng Motors is also currently studying cost reduction strategies for power batteries.

How to reduce battery costs? Different roles have different strategies

In fact, the issue of power battery cost reduction was the most heated discussion in the industry last year. At that time, the price of upstream raw materials fluctuated and increased, and the price of power batteries also rose. Zeng Qinghong, chairman of GAC Group, even later complained that car companies were working for power battery companies. .

It was also this year that car companies such as GAC and NIO began to develop their own batteries, hoping to optimize battery costs through self-research and production. Among them, GAC is preparing to invest more than 10 billion to develop its own batteries and build a production base, while NIO has established a power battery team of hundreds of people and plans to launch an 800V high-voltage platform battery pack next year.

However, it is difficult to demonstrate whether self-developed and self-produced power batteries by car companies will ultimately achieve cost reduction. Relatively speaking, this is a long-term strategy adopted by car companies. In the short term, the power batteries used by most car companies come from external suppliers. In order to optimize procurement costs and improve efficiency, most new energy car companies have reduced their dependence on a single supplier, and have successively chosen secondary suppliers, Three offerings.

At the same time, car companies are also studying battery cost reduction strategies that suit themselves, and are cooperating with power battery companies to promote and implement them. Zhong Liang said in a speech recently that based on the next generation of products, Xpeng Motors mainly focuses on low cost and fast charging performance in terms of power batteries. In order to solve these two problems, Xpeng Motors will adopt a platform approach and the development of new materials. Explore and apply both strategies.

It is understood that battery cell platformization is to use the least battery cells to cover the needs of most car models. For battery companies, platformization will greatly reduce investment in battery production lines and research and development. At the same time, it can also significantly reduce the investment in battery production lines and R&D for car companies. Reducing platform costs and R&D costs will even help simplify subsequent battery recycling work.

On the material side, Zhong Liang pointed out that sodium-ion batteries have certain cost advantages, but the price of lithium carbonate will have a direct impact on the application of sodium ions. In the short and medium term, lithium iron manganese phosphate has more advantages than lithium iron phosphate. In the long term, the application of spinel lithium nickel manganese oxide and lithium-rich materials can reduce costs and improve energy efficiency.

In addition to car companies promoting battery cost reduction, power battery companies, as the most direct practitioners, have also continued to explore in recent years. At present, power battery companies mainly achieve cost reduction through technological innovation, optimizing material design and procurement channels, increasing production scale, and improving production efficiency.