Author: Zhu Yulong

After the cooperation between Geely and Mercedes-Benz, Smart’s styling has received much praise. This brings up a topic: In brands with female customers as the target audience, Ora has taken a step ahead in electric cars. BMW Mini brand will also launch some small cars in cooperation with Great Wall – whether the electric vehicle penetration rate can be increased sooner in this field is worth looking forward to.

Note: Our P7 car is too large and long, which makes it difficult to focus on too many things while driving, making parking and controlling the car more difficult. New drivers like Yanyan indeed prefer a small car that is easier to drive and park.

In the subdivision field of urban small cars, we can see that both Mercedes-Benz and BMW have chosen domestic partners in the electrification process – they first cooperate with Chinese car companies on micro-car platforms. One of the reasons is that in this subdivision market centered around cost-effectiveness, the brand’s continuity is questionable, while with the joint electric car platforms of Geely and Great Wall, one can conduct some form of experimentation, while the other can achieve a certain degree of Chinese-foreign integration. We need to continue to pay attention to the effect of such new situation cooperation and joint ventures.

In addition, we also need to pay attention to a situation: as mentioned earlier, this wave of Chinese electric cars still depends on whether the independent brands can achieve systematic advancement.

In Figure 2, I pulled out the sales data of several small cars in 2022, for everyone’s reference. In this data, Dolphin’s car models are all 45kWh versions with 400 kilometers range, the ID3 is a 57kWh version, and the Eula has mostly 46-49kWh versions with a range of 401 kilometers. The 59kWh ternary version accounts for less than 27%.

Smart’s platform design

The core logic behind Smart is actually very different from before. With the capital cooperation between Geely and Mercedes-Benz, Smart’s overseas development encountered a bottleneck. It started from a short-distance and small car, and then became larger. Therefore, based on the Geely SEA architecture, it was designed by Mercedes-Benz and developed by Geely for the whole vehicle engineering, using China’s supply chain system for production in China. It will be officially launched for sale this year.

The power and endurance system of the all-new smart Fortwo #1 is as follows:

• Permanent magnet synchronous electric drive with a maximum power of up to 200 kW, a peak torque of 343 Nm, and an acceleration time of only 6.7 seconds per 100 kilometers (this acceleration time is not very significant, even though it is very high). Premium edition is also equipped with SiC driver, which improves the range (from 535 kilometers to 560 kilometers) compared to the Pro+ version, which is an interesting configuration;
• It is equipped with a 66 kWh three-element lithium battery, which is designed for 2C charging from the multiplication rate. The charging speed is more effective on small batteries and also supports 150 kW direct current supercharging. The charging time from 10% to 80% is designed to be 30 minutes. As compared to the vast battery module, the situation should be similar.

In this sense, the 66kWh version can be reduced to the LFP version and cover a range of 400 kilometers. In this respect, after Geely switches to lithium iron phosphate as a raw material, it could reduce the price somewhat.

In terms of design, the cockpit is also an area of focus: a long strip-shaped 9.2-inch LCD instrument panel is mainly used to display basic driving information, and a 12.8-inch central control screen is used. This has been a design that people have accepted since the Model 3, and it is also equipped with a 10-inch HUD head-up display.

These three screens are supported by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 smart cockpit processor. The cockpit’s software system is the smart OS full-scene digital ecological car system, which has evolved from a closed iteration to an open system.

Technological diffusion leads to transformations in foreign brands

The above mainly assumes a possibility: we are observing where overseas brands are relatively slow in design and development.# Electric Vehicle Platform Iteration: Modularization for New Trends

In the development of an electric vehicle platform, collaboration with the original platform, design specifications, design processes, and personnel is indispensable. This is especially true for platforms, which require multiple rounds of personnel review. In the next phase, the highly competitive Chinese market has produced several platforms with huge investments and allowed for iterations of individual car models.

Therefore, the iteration of electric vehicle platforms has evolved into modularity in the new situation. It is crucial to continuously observe the experiments of Mercedes-Benz and Geely, BMW and Great Wall Motors in the small car sector and see if they can be expanded or provide some inspiration.

In summary, with the current product characteristics, as the price of pure electric vehicles rises, the previous mode of price wars between domestic brands and Tesla is finally coming to an end—a trend change that will require domestic brands to present differentiation to highlight something beyond cost-effectiveness. Additionally, the collaborative models in Japan and European car companies’ trials in China are also interesting.

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.