To put it simply, Pony.ai is trying to create an Intelligent Vehicle Double Eleven Shopping Carnival.
On November 8th, CEO of Pony.ai James Peng announced that the Pony.ai Joyride Month User Feedback Event is about to start. Three days later, on November 12th, over 600,000 car owners with Pony.ai’s internet-connected vehicle operating system (OS) will become the first group to participate in the intelligent vehicle user feedback event in the industry.
From November 12th to December 12th, more than 600,000 Pony.ai users nationwide will enjoy discounts and offers for Pony.ai’s five major businesses: Intelligent Parking, Intelligent Refueling, Traffic, Self-driving Tours, and E-commerce. These offers include one-cent parking for intelligent parking, 50 yuan off when spending over 180 yuan at intelligent refueling stations, and free access to massive audio. James Peng expects that this event, which Pony.ai and its partners are putting over 10 million yuan into, will drive the transaction volume of over a hundred million yuan.
For those in the intelligent vehicle industry, the details of the event are not important. Instead, what is important is the potential influence of the event itself.
For competitors of Pony.ai, it is difficult to copy this event because Pony.ai not only has the intelligent vehicle ecological system to support the event but also has over 600,000 users who participate in and consume from the event. Then the first question arises: how did Pony.ai grow to have over 600,000 intelligent vehicle users?
Without discussing the birth of Pony.ai here, as Alibaba, China’s largest internet enterprise, and SAIC, one of China’s largest car manufacturers, were both successful enterprises in their respective fields, it was remarkable that they put that aside and sat down together to form Pony.ai. They spent two years designing and creating an internet-connected vehicle operating system that is genuinely based on driving scenarios, which achieved the integration of vehicles and the internet. In the words of Hu Xiaoming, Senior Vice President of Alibaba, this is a remarkable achievement.
Looking back, the Pony.ai team did several things very well.
Firstly, from the perspective of user experience, Pony.ai implemented OTA with account systems, cloud services, and HMI (Human-Machine Interface), which made Pony.ai the first company in China to integrate the internet and vehicles.
To take the iPhone as an example, before smartphones, led by the iPhone, emerged, we had to re-store contact information, import important data using a computer, and so on every time we changed phones. Since the iPhone introduced the account system and cloud services, you can now synchronize your contact list, call records, desktop layout, music, notes, and browsing history across phones.Switching to the automotive industry, it means that when you sit in the car, the seat angle, air conditioning temperature, favorite music that you set last time you drove… will all sync automatically, stored in the cloud according to your preferences, saving you the trouble of setting each time you get in the car. This is the most basic intelligent experience.
In addition, there is HMI’s OTA. Through OTA, automakers can fix software bugs left over from the factory delivery, continuously launch new functions and services, and make a car iterate and grow, giving it vitality.
Secondly, from the perspective of interaction, many interaction principles defined by the software team of Alibaba’s zebra are visionary today. For example, the zebra operating system is mainly based on voice interaction, with touch interaction as a supplement; it eliminates the app form of the smartphone era and replaces it with a card-style UI that is more suitable for blind operation; the map is the desktop, and scene-based push services and other concepts are defined based on the special usage scenario of driving to maximize the reduction of interference on the driver’s attention.
Before the zebra, no car company in the automotive industry has put so much thought into human-computer interaction on the central control large screen.
When the whole market was a blank piece of paper, as long as you put in a little effort, you would get good feedback. From the perspective of the market, after signing deals with SAIC Roewe, MG, and Joylong, zebra continued to sign deals with Dongfeng Citroen, Ford, and Qoros; the user retention rate also increased to over 600,000, and an open intelligent car ecosystem began to take shape. From the perspective of industry, Baidu began to focus on Duer OS car networking business, and Tencent and Chang’an established a joint venture company Wutong Car Networking. Zhang Yiming said, “Imitation is the best tribute to innovators.” The follow-up of Baidu and Tencent is the best award for Alibaba’s zebra.
However, as competitors followed up, zebra, as the pioneer, must think about how to build a differentiated advantage again, which is the foundation for zebra to maintain its leadership position. Hao Fei himself also admitted that the work zebra did three years ago in defining the basic experiences of maps, music, and voice is being quickly caught up by competitors. The basic experiences of different intelligent cars will become more and more homogeneous.
So what is the future of the automotive industry? Zebra’s answer is: operation. The zebra cruising carnival is the latest action of zebra in terms of user operation.
Starting tomorrow, all zebra car owners can enjoy the discounts mentioned at the beginning of the article in 2,000 gas stations and more than 8,000 parking lots in 102 cities in 26 provinces and regions covered by zebra in the following month.
Hao Fei predicts that in five years, the operational profit of car factories will be on par with traditional vehicle profits.
The basic reasoning behind this prediction is that traditional car companies, whose main source of profit comes from selling cars, are facing increasing difficulties. Since July of this year, China’s auto industry has seen three consecutive months of year-over-year sales decline. According to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, domestic passenger car sales in the first three weeks of October were down 23% from the same period last year. This is a signal: China’s auto market will gradually shift from an incremental market to a stock market.
Combining the trend of the entire auto industry’s transformation to smart technology, operating inventory users has become a water-to-channel outlet that is feasible for car companies. However, the key issue is that no one in the entire auto industry has ever planned and operated the vehicle ownership cost of refueling, parking, and maintenance. Even Zebra is feeling its way across the river. But Haofei believes that good operational plans are closely matched to consumer demand. If the planning is precise, consumers’ car expenses will continue to grow. Zebra will put its existing plans and ideas into practice, and develop tools for serving and operating users through its partnerships with car companies.
There is a problem here. The celebration format of Zebra Run is not rich enough and can only inspire the consumption desire of only 600,000 users and cultivate their consumption habits. China’s annual new car sales reached 30 million vehicles. But don’t forget, in 2009, when Alibaba launched the first Double 11 Shopping Festival, the total transaction volume for the day was only 50 million. Today, at 3:49 p.m., Alibaba’s Double Eleven transaction volume exceeded last year’s full-day total of 180 billion yuan.
There is still a lot for Zebra to do, such as not yet conquering whole-car OTA, providing a more complete intelligent car experience, having a richer ecosystem, and a larger user population. However, Zebra’s experiment is still worth the industry’s attention. Who dares to assert that it is not the initiator of the smart car industry’s Double Eleven?
* The Road to Advancement of Zebra
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.