Author: Dolly
Recently, a friend of mine wanted to buy a domestic car, and he told me that his requirement was only to buy a car from the Great Wall series brand.
He said to me, “The reputation, quality and cost-performance of the Great Wall series brand are enough to be among the top Chinese brands.” Yes, from our professional perspective, Great Wall Motors has surpassed traditional car companies in just over 30 years. Its reputation is not only prominent in the domestic market, but also globally.
Clear division of labor and layout of five sub-markets
In fact, when we delve into the story behind Great Wall Motors, it is not difficult to find that one of the key reasons for its success lies in its clear division of labor and the five whole vehicle brands: Haval, WEY, Ora, Tank, and Great Wall Pickup. Even in the near future, Great Wall Motors will also enter the market with its new independently-operated automotive technology company, Salon Zhixing.
Specifically, since its independent operation in 2013 under the Great Wall Motors Group, the Haval brand has shouldered half of the responsibility of Great Wall Motors. Well-known Haval H6 has now evolved into the third-generation model, and spawned H6S, H6 National Tide, as well as other sub-models such as Chitu, Big Dog, Divine Beast, and First Love. Haval brand fully covers the SUV market with these models. It attracts users with ultra-high cost-effectiveness and gains a reputation for high quality. Today, Haval has won the Chinese SUV market sales championship for 10 consecutive years.
When a brand becomes stable, or even successful, it often leads to the high-end development of the brand, such as Lexus for Toyota and Lincoln for Ford. Great Wall Motors brings us a new brand, WEY, which is now known as WEY brand. Looking back at its establishment, the VV5 and VV7 models brought by WEY brand, with their sharp and distinct exterior design, as well as strong sense of technology, won the favor of many young users at once. Of course, the various “coffee” models nowadays are equally remarkable.
In the following period, the WEY brand also launched a heavyweight model, the Tank 300, which later operated independently. Actually, we think the independent operation of the Tank brand is only a matter of time. Friends familiar with Tank brand know that Tank 300 is just its first model, and its model layout ranges from 300-900, even more. What we see today is only Tank 300 and Tank 500. The appearance of Tank brand has filled the market gap of domestic independent brand hardcore off-road vehicles, and brought more choices for domestic users who enjoy hardcore travel.
In addition, the ORA brand is attracting female users in the new energy market, while the Great Wall pickup is popular among commercial users and hardcore players.
Overall, the huge success achieved by Great Wall Motors today is inseparable from the support of these five major brands. They respectively rooted and sprouted in the economical and practical cost-effective SUV market, domestic independent brand high-end market, hardcore off-road market, new energy market, and commercial and household pickup market.
Technology Creates the Technological Great Wall
In fact, in our opinion, the key to Great Wall Motors and its subordinate brands’ success, which is difficult for other domestic independent brands to replicate, lies more on the technological level. Just take a look at the three major technological brands that Great Wall Motors has launched in recent years, namely “Lemon”, “Tank”, and “Coffee Intelligence”. They cover the whole industry chain value innovation technology system of automobile research and development, design, production, and automobile life.
Simply put, in today’s automobile market that can be summed up with one word, “change”, only technological leadership can follow the trend of the times and gain huge advantages.
As a global high-intelligent modular technology platform, the Great Wall Lemon platform can realize the research and development of different types of vehicles, such as SUVs, sedans, and MPVs, and even support different levels from A0 to D. And it has four high-performance power solutions that achieve world-leading levels. For example, the recently popular Haval Lemon DHT technology, whose main advantages are “fast” and “energy-saving”, can be regarded as an expert in the automobile market’s hybrid field.
In the Tank platform, the powertrain that is equipped with the self-developed 3.0T engine and matched with a 9-speed automatic transmission in the Tank 500 model has caused a phenomenon called the “Tank Phenomenon” in the current automobile market. However, it should be noted that although the regular and efficient engines of the Tank platform are the 2.0-liter and 3.0-liter GDIT engines respectively used in the Tank 300 and Tank 500 models, as a global intelligent off-road platform, the Tank platform also covers three types of power forms, namely ICE, PHEV, and HEV.
In addition, in the “Coffee Intelligence” brand, as a car manufacturer’s intelligent brand, it coveres intelligent cabins, intelligent driving, and a brand-new electronic and electric architecture, which is enough to be called an intelligent system for future travel.
There is no exaggeration to say that with these three major technology brands, Great Wall Motors is enough to be an existence that other independent brands can’t surpass, but Great Wall Motors is never that simple. In the era of new energy, Great Wall Motors is also vigorously developing its own technology.
Regarding new energy technology such as automotive power battery materials, battery cells, modules, energy storage, and solar energy research and development, Great Wall Motors has established its power battery business unit as FCE (Fengchao Energy). The innovative introduction of the square stacked ternary battery has broken through the bottleneck of the winding battery with its high-speed stacking technology, becoming the new generation of battery technology. Coupled with its Dayu battery technology and cobalt-free battery technology, Great Wall Motors’ technology in the era of electrification can be described as forward-looking and can be regarded as leading the industry.
Of course, the era of new energy is not entirely an era of electrification. Great Wall Motors is also vigorously developing hydrogen energy technology. Great Wall Motors’ hydrogen energy technology has assembled a world-class team of 600 people for hydrogen energy, fuel cell systems, and vehicle technology research and development. As early as the first half of 2018, the Great Wall Hydrogen Energy Technology Center had been established. In 2019, it officially released the third-generation fuel cell engine- surpassing – 300E, and the system components of its fuel cell engine have achieved 100% localization.
Doraemon’s words
Strictly speaking, today we have only uncovered a corner of the iceberg of the Great Wall Motors. However, from all aspects we have discussed today, we can still learn why Great Wall Motors can achieve great success today, and even the success of Great Wall Motors has also been replicated in its five major passenger car brands.
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.