Will consumers buy from this “good guy” again?

His open letter was full of gratitude, thanks and heartfelt apologies. It was clear that He Xiaopeng wanted to be a good person and wanted to appear to be one.

But if you choose the track of smart cars, you are destined to have nothing to do with good people.

Compared with traditional cars, smart cars have significant differences in technology, and rapid iteration is one of its characteristics. But this also became the reason why Xiaopeng was the target of public criticism this time.

It is inevitable that Internet cars will have a fast iteration speed. Li Bin, chairman of NIO, once pointed out in a speech that it takes 5 years for a traditional car chassis to be iterated, 3 years for styling design, and the electrical architecture can be stable for a longer time. In general, the iteration cycle of traditional cars is 7 to 10 years.

In terms of smart cars, software can be iterated on a daily basis, and hardware can undergo a major iteration every 30 months. In addition, domestic battery costs are decreasing at a rate of 20%, and battery life is increasing rapidly. Many new cars become outdated one year after they are on the market.

The performance has been improved exponentially, but the price has remained stable between hundreds of thousands and three hundred thousand after subsidies.

Tesla has had a similar experience.

Tesla has reduced its prices five times in the past year, with the largest price difference being 340,000 yuan. "I don't know whether I lose more by buying Tesla stocks or Tesla cars," one user joked.

Tesla's strategy is that after the new models are launched, users who have paid deposits for old models can unconditionally switch to purchasing new cars, and the old inventory can be directly resold through financial leasing. This secondary sales capability is something Xiaopeng is currently unable to do.

What's worse is that before used cars are put on the market, 4S stores are usually given a few months to consume old inventory and preheat new cars, thus buying time for the supply chain transformation, but Xiaopeng did none of this.

He Xiaopeng later said that he was confused and puzzled. He was puzzled as to why he was criticized for making a better product. This might be because he was getting further and further away from being an ordinary consumer.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars is by no means a small amount for any ordinary family. When this cost is exchanged for a faster depreciation than traditional cars, and Internet services are not yet mature enough for them to feel that they can pay for this depreciation, these criticisms seem to be justified.

05

This is not just a problem faced by He Xiaopeng and Xpeng Motors.

It took about a year for NIO to upgrade from ES8 to ES6. During this period, the large screen black border and screen problems of ES8 were solved. Because NIO has its own advantages of "swappable batteries" and OTA upgrades, these upgrades of ES6 can also be done on ES8 at the same time, without relying entirely on the new ES8.

Currently, WM Motor only has one model on sale, the EX5. In the second half of the year, WM Motor will also launch a 520km version of the EX5, which can be seen as a major upgrade and iteration of the EX5.

Basically, the iteration cycle of these smart cars is about one year, but there is no one-sided public opinion.

This is probably because WM Motor and NIO had done preheating for the update in advance, and their iteration time is longer than that of Xiaopeng and the cost is lower, so there were no too intense user incidents.

He Xiaopeng said that since he had never worked on cars, as a pure Internet person, he was very anxious about the quality and delivery of cars. He would gather people from all business lines to talk, ask about project progress, details, and even go to the factory himself.

Now, entering the Internet car industry will only bring more pain to He Xiaopeng.

He bought some books on automobile manufacturing, but he couldn't read them after reading a few pages. Communication became the way he acquired most of his knowledge about automobiles.

Because he believes that traditional cars have become increasingly mature in production technology after several years of development, but progress in technology and intelligent applications is extremely slow, and the core of smart cars lies in operations, not manufacturing.

Because of this sentence, he later bore a lot of infamy. He was considered to be disrespectful to manufacturers and contemptuous of his peers.

Internet entrepreneurs looked at him with sympathy and felt that He Xiaopeng had the courage to do things that they wanted to do but dared not do.

People in traditional car companies look down on him, thinking that he is just a clown promoted by the Internet trend and despising the experience and value of manufacturing.

Now even consumers hate him, believing that he is using them as his guinea pigs.

"Entrepreneurs must be on the front line to smell the smoke of gunpowder and be able to adjust quickly. We need to maintain balance on the front line rather than commanding from a safe zone," He Xiaopeng said to Fu Jixun at the beginning of his business.

Now, the smoke of war is everywhere, but the real war is not between traditional car companies and new car companies, but between new car companies and consumers. Obviously, He Xiaopeng's confident operation has not given consumers a good answer.

He may be a good father, a good boss, and a good partner. But what is more important now is whether consumers will buy from this "good guy" again?