If you had to choose two new car companies that caught your attention the most at the Beijing Auto Show, which two would you choose? According to the Chairman and CEO of Daimler AG, Dieter Zetsche, the answer is NIO and WM Motor, as he visited both their booths on the first day of the exhibition. It’s unclear whether Zetsche was there to “steal ideas” as some media outlets suggested, but as the person in charge of the world’s largest luxury car maker, his visit certainly made these two new & emerging car companies the talk of the town.
If you take a closer look at NIO and WM Motor, they’re always mentioned together. For instance, during a visit to Shanghai on April 11, Premier Li Keqiang only examined two new car companies, and those were NIO and WM. Further examining which new car companies have the fastest team, financing, and product development, again, it’s NIO and WM.
What’s really interesting about these two companies is that they demonstrate a potential for providing a different path towards building a car brand, something distinct from Tesla.
Regarding NIO, their tagline “user-centric” sounds like a somewhat vague, overblown statement to embellish their brand. It’s also difficult to concretely define what it really means, despite founder William Li’s tight-lipped PR strategy. In fact, all CEOs of car brands, including Mercedes Benz, BMW, and Audi, like using the phrase “user-centric” to please customers, so what’s the big deal?
In August last year, Li gave a lecture at Hupan University on “User Experience is the Core of Business Transformation.” During the course, he explained NIO’s operation logic clearly: to rebuild the entire user experience life cycle for NIO customers, from initial awareness and understanding of NIO, to active event participation, product purchase, and finally, service enjoyment.
Other new car companies could very well do away with 4S stores and implement OTA (over-the-air) updates to maintain longer lasting user interaction, no problem. In fact, Tesla was the first to do so.
Li also discussed a concept that user pain points represent the functional experience while eliciting an emotional response reflects what he calls “emotional experience.” NIO wants to provide users with a full life cycle of emotional experiences. In other words, NIO aims to surpass Tesla in terms of user experience by taking the best parts of Tesla’s brand emphasis on products and going beyond to emotional experiences.
李斌和沈晖都说过，200 亿人民币是建立一家新造车公司的资金门槛。可是你知道至今还在亏损的特斯拉花了多少钱么？115.56 亿美金。注意，凡是1亿美金以下的融资我都没统计进去，这是特斯拉以产品为中心的模式决定的。
为了把产品推向极致，特斯拉烧了太多钱进去，当然也有很多成果。我简单列一下：
-
特斯拉超级电池工厂Gigafactory是全球产能最大的单体电池工厂
-
特斯拉和松下联合定义了下一代 NCA 圆柱形电池 21700，量产节点领先对手两年左右
-
特斯拉 Autopilot 是业内可成长性最好、潜力最大的高级辅助驾驶系统之一
……
为什么戴姆勒卡车北美 CEO Martin Daum 会说特斯拉 Semi Trunk 的参数违反了物理规律，而 Elon Musk 反口说我们量产版续航还会更长。如果没有出现技术代差，很难想象业内人士之间会有如此严重的技术认知冲突。
所以新造车公司朝着“中国版特斯拉”的概念挺进不仅落地难度巨大，说服投资人投入上百亿美金、数十年不盈利也是超高难度的操作。
我们来看看「以用户为中心」、专注于重塑服务的NIO是怎么做的。从NIO官网、NIO App的版式、UI 设计开始——这是你认识、了解NIO最基本的触点；到线下NIO House的布局、氛围的把控，这是你去看车、体验NIO服务的触点，NIO一直在潜心打造一种高端品牌的品质感。
还是来举几个例子阐述一下：
-
去年ES8发布会，NIO动用了8架包机、60节高铁车厢、19家五星级酒店、160辆大巴，将5000名预订用户带到了发布会现场
-
从上海车展到北京车展，NIO连续两年直接让NIO House的NIO Fellow（直接服务用户的顾问）们在展台向潜在用户介绍NIO
-
李斌、秦力洪、朱江连续两年在车展会亲自上阵向潜在用户介绍NIO，也会经常泡在NIO App与用户进行互动
-
NIO ES8试驾 ：预订用户从4月29日开始，但首次媒体试驾活动直到5月3日才举行
如何将「以用户为中心」差异化的落地？NIO无时无刻都在向用户暗示两点：“用户对NIO很重要”“NIO是一个提供优质服务的高端汽车品牌”。# Tesla: Focused on Products and Culture
Tesla, with its focus on products and investment in top talent, has established a high-performance culture, all while creating a level of excellence not easily matched in its industry. As Elon put it, “We’re best, which is not a class.” Additionally, they have created a business mechanism that is centered around their customers, instilling a company culture that is built to provide top-quality service as it accentuates their core values. As for NIO, they aspire to be what Starbucks, Airbnb or WeWork is for the automobile industry.
Both these models have their own unique advantages, are not a matter of which is right or which is wrong. They are both limited by the company’s own weight, making it difficult for traditional auto companies to mimic. Once a business model has been set in motion, it becomes reliant on robust brand barriers.
Tesla has created a luxury auto brand from scratch while NIO is just starting to gain its footing.
WM Motor: Making Electric Cars Mainstream
According to Co-Founder and Vice President of Strategy Planning, Lu Bin, WM Motor’s overall commercial logic can be simplified to one word, “volume.”
To further analyze WM Motor’s business logic, let’s start with the fact that 2020 is a crucial moment for the industry, as practically all automobile manufacturers are embracing electrification, while policies and resources pertaining to subsidies and licenses are declining, making it extremely important for new automakers to stabilize their foothold.
Looking into WM Motor’s team, Shen Hui provides an advantage that Elon Musk and Li Bin do not have: an extensive knowledge for the industry before founding the company. Having a strong supply chain resource, cost control, and project management, WM Motor’s core advantage ships predominates that of traditional auto companies.
Although the characteristics of its core advantages may seem unappealing, comprehensively, cost control as well as new energy subsidies can create substantial market demand, making it the best strategy to enter the market with a cost-performance label. In 2015, WM Motor already established the product definition for the EX5, focused on the logic of “volume,” directly targeting the largest A-segment car market.
The purpose of a product based solely on the logic of “volume,” focused on the affordable market, requires its strategists to make decisions based on limited costs. What’s most important to this specific consumer market? What configurations can we eliminate?
WM Motor is the second automaker to not release factory times during their public launch, contrary to Elon Musk’s “Tesla don’t make slow cars.” The EX5 has a single motor, powered at 160kW, with the Pro Model needing 7.9 seconds for acceleration from zero to a hundred.There are many benefits to low-power single motors: longer battery life, larger battery space, and lighter weight, but the most important one is lower cost.
In addition, autonomous driving was not mentioned during the launch event. In the 2018 new car brand automobile launch event, there was no introduction of autonomous driving technology. It’s not that the EX5 doesn’t have any active safety configurations, but since it’s positioned in the 100,000 to 150,000 yuan price range, even users wouldn’t expect models in this price range to be equipped with a comprehensive autonomous driving system.
Once again: based on the limited cost, the trade-off of functions is made, and the internal and external advantages are maximized. The so-called car must be sold after being built, and the price of WmAuto is designed to ensure that selling is not a problem. It became the first emerging car brand to reach 100,000 units.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that this is not to say that Tesla’s service is poor, NIO’s products are inadequate, or WmAuto is not intelligent. The discussion here is on the entry point of the three companies that invested the most and created their own brands. In fact, most Tesla owners have a good opinion of Tesla’s service; the ES8 is also one of the few full-size SUVs that can accelerate from zero to a hundred kilometers in five seconds; and there should be a presentation of the cooperation between WmAuto and Baidu Apollo on the EX6.
On December 17, last year, at the Ti Media T-EDGE Annual Summit, Li Bin and Shen Hui held hands. That night, WmAuto Vice President Lu Bin posted a picture on Weibo saying that the two sides were “mutually motivated and working together.”
At the time, I forwarded it with the sentence “I feel like NIO and WmAuto will take completely different paths, and the differences will become bigger and bigger.” Lu Bin only replied with one word.
“Yes.”
- Car Owner First Media Second, Rethinking NIO | Test Drive Section* Is the Era of Electric Cars Coming Early with the Launch of WM EX5 at 99,000 Yuan?
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.