The accumulated sales are less than 2,000 vehicles, and the more dry it is, the more it is.

Author | Zhang Yu

Editor | Yang Bocheng

Title map | Wen Xin yi ge

automobileThe new species has gone beyond the car stalls.

On April 15th, blogger "Dayao Tok" posted in Weibo that he was fired from his company after buying Xiaomi SU7, on the grounds that he violated the non-competition agreement and did not give him compensation. Although the blogger did not directly point out the company name, from his description that "the car company is jointly built by Geely and Baidu", it can be seen that the company is suspected of being a super car.

Because the incident involved Xiaomi SU7 and labor disputes, it quickly fermented on the Internet and aroused public concern, and related topics in Weibo also entered the hot search list.

For this growing crisis, the ultra-car has to stand up and respond. On April 17th, the legal department of Jiyue Automobile issued a document in Weibo, stating that Jiyue Automobile was not fired because Yao bought a certain car.

The statement wrote, first of all, Yao Moumou, as a staff member in charge of social media/private domain operations in the user development department, continued to operate the rider group for a certain rice brand, which directly conflicted with his post responsibilities and seriously violated professional ethics and non-competition obligations; Secondly, Yao is engaged in the above-mentioned behaviors that have nothing to do with company affairs and are obviously contrary to his own duties and professional ethics during working hours. What’s more, company records show that Yao still has many absenteeism behaviors for no reason.

To sum up, Extreme Auto believes that Yao’s actions have seriously violated the company’s labor discipline and system, and it is well-founded and reasonable for the company to unilaterally terminate its labor contract.

It is not difficult to see that Extreme Yue Automobile is trying to recover its brand reputation caused by this public opinion incident. However, compared with being caught in a public opinion crisis, the sales of Extreme Yue Automobile are hardly optimistic. For the automobile industry, which is extremely dependent on scale effect, the monthly sales of Extreme Yue Automobile are only three figures, which means that it is almost on the verge of life and death.

First, the more you get off to a bad start.

Jiyue Automobile (formerly Jidu Automobile) is backed by two big trees, Baidu and Geely.

In January 2021, Baidu announced that it would build a car, saying that it would formally set up a smart car company to enter the automobile industry as a vehicle manufacturer, and Geely was the strategic partner of the new company. Two months later, Jidu Automobile, initiated by Baidu and strategically invested by Geely, was officially born.

With the help of Geely, the car of Jidu is advancing very fast. In June 2022, the concept car of Jidu ROBO-01 came out. Only four months later, the limited edition of Jidu ROBO-01 lunar exploration was born.

It is worth mentioning that at the beginning of its establishment, Jidu Automobile defined its products as "smart cars" and gave it a gimmicky name: automobile robots.

At that time, Li Yanhong, founder, chairman and CEO of Baidu, attached great importance to Jidu Automobile. He once waved the flag for Jidu Automobile in various public occasions. "The purpose of Jidu Automobile is to promote Baidu’s self-driving technology and intelligent cockpit technology to the market for many years."

"In addition to the appearance of a car that is not like a person, other places are already very human." In his book Intelligent Transportation, Li Yanhong pointed out that in the next 10 to 40 years, intelligent robots are likely to look like cars, which may be what cars will look like in the future. When the car is regarded as an intelligent robot, the car is no longer a mechanical device that carries transportation capacity, but an intelligent system that constantly evolves itself.

Regarding the sales target of Jidu Automobile, Xia Yiping, CEO of Jidu Automobile, once said: "My goal is to sell 10,000 units every month. There is really no need to worry about building a car now, but it doesn’t mean that you can sell it if you build it. " In addition, Xia Yiping also revealed that "in 2028, Jiji will have the ability to deliver 800,000 car robots throughout the year".

However, the reality is very skinny. In February, 2022, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Notice on Launching the Pilot Work of Entrusting New Energy Vehicles", which put forward clear requirements for the OEM mode, that is, both the entrusted enterprise and the entrusted enterprise must have production qualifications before OEM production. This means that if Jidu automobile has no production qualification, it can’t directly entrust Geely to produce it.

In August, 2023, Baidu and Geely announced the strategic cooperation upgrade, and "Jidu Automobile" was renamed as "Jiyu ROBO-01", the first model of the original Jidu Automobile, was renamed as "Jiyue 01", which entered the latest batch of new automobile products announcement of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. fromequity structureIn fact, Baidu was the major shareholder in the car-gathering period, but in the car-crossing period, Baidu had to hand over the ownership of the car to Geely.

After handing over the leading power, Baidu quietly retired behind the scenes and chose to participate in building cars as a technical solution provider to ensure the smooth mass production of Extreme Yue cars, and Extreme Yue cars have officially become Geely’s sub-brands.

Second, why can’t Extreme Yue 01 be sold?

In October 2023, the first model of Extreme Yue Automobile, Extreme Yue 01, was officially launched. This model is known as the peak representative of the global intelligence level, positioning medium and large intelligent pure electric SUVs, and launching two models, Extreme Yue 01 Max and Extreme Yue 01 Max Performance, with prices of 249,900 yuan and 339,900 yuan respectively.

In terms of appearance, the hood of the Extreme Yue 01 is the largest clamshell hood in the world, and its lower edges on both sides extend to the fender, bringing excellent integrated visual effect. In addition, the door of the ultra-cross 01 adopts handleless electric induction door, equipped with automatic lifting tail and frameless window, and the drag coefficient of the whole vehicle is as low as 0.249cd and so on.

Intelligence is the most brilliant place of Extreme Yue 01. Extreme Yue 01 is equipped with Baidu’s ROBO Drive Max advanced intelligent driving system, which adopts a "pure vision" scheme, based on dual NVIDIA DRIVE Orin chips, and the AI computing power reaches 508 TOPS. At the same time, the pure visual perception architecture has 11 high-definition cameras, 12 ultrasonic radars and 5 millimeter-wave radars, totaling 28 intelligent driving sensors, achieving 360-degree full coverage. ROBO Drive Max advanced intelligent driving system has three core functions, namely point-to-point navigation assistance PPA, parking service and ROBO Drive.

However, the standard intelligent driving system of Extreme Yue 01 is "ROBO Drive". If you want to experience the "full blood version" of point-to-point navigation assistance PPA, you still need to spend 49,900 yuan to buy it out, or subscribe to the ROBO Drive Max advanced intelligent driving system at the price of 980 yuan/month. In other words, if you want to experience the complete extreme crossing 01, the threshold for users to buy a car will be close to 300,000 yuan.

Despite the huge momentum, the high price led to the terrible market feedback of Extreme Yue 01. In November 2023, Extreme Yue Automobile announced that the price of its first model, Extreme Yue 01, was lowered by 30,000 yuan. For the old users who have already picked up the car before, they will be given a cash compensation of 30,000 yuan. At the same time, Extreme Yue Automobile has also increased the rights and interests of users: free subscription to ROBO Drive Max high-level intelligent driving system for 12 months, simultaneous reduction of 10,000 yuan for long-life ternary lithium battery option package (100kWh), lifetime vehicle/three-electricity warranty, and lifetime free road rescue.

Xia Yiping said frankly at the media communication meeting that when the vehicle went on the market a month ago, it made some small mistakes in pricing, which gave it great rights at that time, but the user’s perception was not strong. It is better to really lower the price for marketing and gimmicks.

After the price reduction, the ultra-Vietnam 01 still failed to recover the decline. According to the data of Chedi, since its listing, the total sales volume of Extreme Yue 01 has been less than 2,000 vehicles, including 218 vehicles, 147 vehicles and 511 vehicles in the first three months of 2024, and the sales volume is so poor that it can no longer be described as "depressed". In contrast, the first month of the launch of the new Kyk 001 with a price range of 269,000 yuan to 329,000 yuan exceeded 30,000 units, while the Xiaomi SU7 with a price range of 215,900 yuan to 299,900 yuan reached 88,898 units in just 24 hours.

On March 25th, Xia Yiping pointed the finger at marketing when he reflected on the reasons for the sluggish sales of the ultra-Yue 01. "As a new brand and a new category of products, when a user enters the ultra-Yue store, the first question to think about is not that I want to buy a car, but what brand it is, which requires us to solve the problem."

According to reports, since the end of March, there have been intensive personnel flows in both the UD- user development department at the marketing end and the UO- user operation department at the sales end of Extreme Yue Automobile. Among them, Yang Zhen, the head of the UD- user development department at the marketing end, and several directors have been removed from their posts, and Xia Yiping personally took charge of the department heads; The head of UO- user operation department at the sales end was also managed by Luo Gangdai, the former head of operation, and changed to Andy.Gao from Tesla.

However, it is still unknown whether the adjustment for marketing can drag the ultra-Vietnamese car out of the current predicament.

Third, how much time is left for Ji Yue?

For Extreme Yue 01, which integrates the advantages of the two major shareholders’ software and hardware, with the intensification of the "price war" of new energy vehicles, there are not many opportunities to break through.

On February 19th,It took the lead in blowing the horn of the "price war", and the starting prices of its Qin PLUS glory version and destroyer 05 glory version both dropped to 79,800 yuan. Subsequently, SAIC-GM-Wuling,, Nezha Automobile, Zero Run Automobile, Tesla, Geely Automobile, Xpeng Motors, and Wenjie followed closely, or directly reduced prices, or gave preferential policies in a limited time, with price reductions ranging from 5% to 15%, and prices ranging from several thousand yuan to ten thousand yuan.

In addition to the "price war", intelligent driving has become a key part of the competition among major new energy vehicle companies. Yu Chengdong once said that the second half of the competition in the electric vehicle industry is intelligence, which will be the key to winning. He believes that if you can’t seize the opportunity of intelligent electric networked cars, no matter how powerful the company is, it may disappear in the future.

Li Xiang, CEO of LI, also said that the three-year period from 2023 to 2025 was an extremely cruel knockout. He judged that China’s smart electric vehicle market will have an inflection point in 2025, and LI must occupy at least 20% of the market share, that is, 1.6 million vehicles, in order to have a chance to get tickets for the next race.

According to the analysis, with the continuous launch of a number of new models of intelligent leading brands, the penetration rate of high-level intelligent assisted driving will increase rapidly, and the autonomous driving industry is expected to continue to expand. Under the industry trend of increasing penetration rate, the superimposed automatic driving policy is expected to be released, and it is expected that high-order intelligent assisted driving is expected to usher in an inflection point in 2024.

If you want to survive in a competitive market environment, intelligent driving is an important breakthrough opportunity. For Extreme Yue 01, intelligent driving is a long board, but it has to be admitted that its intelligent driving seems to be difficult to open the gap with Tesla and the world.

Industry insiders predict that by 2025 or 2026, the competition pattern of the new energy vehicle market will gradually become clear. This means that the competition in 2024 will directly determine the life and death of new energy vehicle companies. If they can’t win, they will face the fate of being eliminated or integrated. Extreme Yue Automobile urgently needs to bring Extreme Yue 01 out of the sales dilemma.