By Jingtao Wu

Red Flag’s footsteps in the new energy field are not small at all!

On the evening of January 8th, FAW Red Flag held a global strategy conference on new energy vehicles in Guangzhou, announcing the brand’s new energy development strategy plan, technical route plan, and new energy vehicle product plan.

At the conference, FAW Red Flag shouted the slogan “All in” for new energy, to demonstrate its firm determination to enter the new energy vehicle market.

As the luxury brand of the first-born child of the Republic of China’s auto industry, FAW Red Flag’s determination to enter the new energy market naturally attracted much attention. Today’s article will review the key information about Red Flag’s new energy strategic planning at the conference.

Brand strategy

As the root of the red flag’s independent luxury brand, “original intention and mission” is an indispensable important part of the brand strategy framework.

At the conference, Red Flag announced the mission of its own new energy brand:

1. Leading key technologies of new energy.

2. Establishing a new energy high-end national automobile brand.

3. Creating a new path for the innovative development of China’s new energy high-end brand automobile industry in the new era.

From the aspects of brand, technology, and path, it comprehensively summarizes the development direction of Red Flag’s new energy brand in the near future.

At the same time, for Red Flag’s new energy brand, it needs both the “big determination” of the All in new energy strategy and specific “small goals” at different stages.

According to the target plan formulated by FAW Red Flag announced at the conference, by 2025, Red Flag’s annual sales will exceed one million vehicles, and new energy vehicle sales will reach 500,000 vehicles, accounting for 50%. To achieve this goal, Red Flag’s sales growth rate per year needs to reach 138%.

By 2030, Red Flag’s annual sales will reach 1.5 million, and new energy vehicle models will become the mainstay of the brand.Translation:

In addition to achieving good results in China, Hongqi has revealed in the press conference that its new energy brand will also go international in the future.

Currently, Hongqi has already entered markets such as Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands, and is actively expanding in major European countries, including France and Germany.

In the future, Hongqi plans to build over 1,000 service networks overseas, and connect to 600,000 energy supplement terminals. By 2025, overseas sales will account for more than 10% of total sales volume, and by 2030, overseas sales will account for 25% of total sales volume.

After introducing the brand strategy and sales target at the higher level, it is time to disclose the specific information of the brand. In this section, Hongqi mainly introduces the achievements of the new energy brand in design.

Firstly, the brand logo was unveiled. The new logo adopts a symmetrical design, which is officially named “Wonderful Wings.”

This kind of design that emphasizes left-right symmetry is a style that many traditional domestic brands like to use. Therefore, as soon as the new logo was announced, many people on social media compared it with the logos of other traditional new energy vehicle brands.

At this point, Hongqi has released the logos of all four sub-series to the public.

Secondly, the product design was disclosed. Hongqi announced the new energy brand’s design language for its new vehicle models, demonstrating the design styles of the front, side, and rear of the car.

Technical Architecture

Strategic guidance drives brand development, and vehicle design language serves the static experience of vehicles. Meanwhile, among the technologies and performance that everyone is concerned about, the platform architecture is the core key.

To achieve breakthroughs in core technologies for new energy, Red Flag has built an advanced electric intelligent super architecture, FMEs which is also known as the “Flagship” super architecture.

Red Flag stated that the FMEs architecture will have the “Five Pole Advantages”: extreme innovation and creation, high integration and fusion, strong original innovation, extremely advanced manufacturing, and extremely cost advantage.

Under this architecture, Red Flag will build two major technical platforms: “Flag Yì” and “Flag Cài”. At the press conference, Red Flag gave a summary of the technical features of these two platforms.

“Flag Yì” is an electrification and intelligent driving integration platform, mainly including four systems: high-energy safety battery, high-efficiency electric drive, high-power intelligent energy supplementation, and intelligent driving safety chassis.

Among them, the high-energy safety battery system has a battery density of up to 260Wh/kg, which is currently the industry-leading level.

The intelligent energy supplementation system will be equipped with a 600kW super charging technology, which can achieve a recharging efficiency of 300km of range after 5 minutes of charging, which also has 22kW wireless charging technology, and the charging efficiency can reach 94%.

In terms of braking performance, thanks to the technical support of the new platform, the 100km/h-0 braking distance of the vehicle is only 30m.

“Qisai” is an intelligent and experiential integrated platform in the automotive industry, consisting of three major systems: advanced electrical and electronic systems, autonomous driving, and comfortable cockpit.

The highly accurate autonomous driving system enables centimeter-level positioning, realizing “point-to-point” autonomous driving covering all main roads, with less than 0.5 takeovers per 100 kilometers in all scenarios.

According to official statements by Hongqi, the “Qizhi” superstructure will complete all development work in the first half of 2023, with nearly 10,000 intellectual property rights, including patents and software copyrights.

Not only is the brand innovating internally, but Hongqi also plans to join hands with excellent domestic enterprises to build a core basic ecosystem, especially in the two key fields of “chip” and “operating system.” They will launch the FAW.OS operating system at the vehicle level, and the “Qizhi” chip with a computing power exceeding 800Tops.

The goal is to achieve a leading five-in-one level of global integration, including cabin driving fusion in vehicle control, intelligent driving, cockpit, communication, and safety.

New Energy Vehicle Models

With brand strategy and technology architecture support in place, product planning of new energy vehicle models that consumers are most concerned about remains. Red Flag released information about three heavyweight new energy vehicle models they plan to release to the market.

The first model is the new Red Flag Sedan EV, product code E001, a pure electric B-class car that is the first new energy sedan car built on the FMEs superstructure. Its main performance parameters are a range of 600-1000km, replaceable batteries, energy consumption of 12.9kWh/100km, and 0-100km acceleration in 3 seconds. The new vehicle is scheduled to be launched in the second half of this year.

The second model is the new Hongqi SUV EV, product code E202, positioned as a pure electric B-class urban SUV, also based on the FMEs architecture.

The car will be equipped with an 800V high-voltage fast charging system that can achieve a charging efficiency of 300km in 5 minutes, with air suspension, four-wheel drive system, and rear-wheel steering technology. The new car will be launched in the second half of this year.

The last model, product code E702, is positioned as a pure electric C+ level flagship sedan.

The advanced intelligent safety chassis system and precise automatic driving system of the car can realize zero take-over automatic driving for a hundred kilometers in all-weather and all-scenes. The car is equipped with an immersive 5D cinema dynamic effect, and a 7.1.4-channel, 2800W Dolby panoramic sound system. This model will be launched in the first half of 2024.

In addition to these three heavy-duty models that are about to be released, Hongqi also announced its future three-year new energy product plan.

The Hongqi new energy brand plans to launch 15 new energy intelligent products in the next three years, covering all sub-segments of the A, B, C, D-level sedans, SUVs, and MPVs.

Positive trend

As a symbol of special significance in the history of China’s automobile industry development, FAW Hongqi announced its global strategy for new energy vehicles at the beginning of the new year, and called for the determination slogan of “All In” new energy. This once again makes us feel that new energy has become an irreversible “major trend” in the development of the automobile industry.

According to the data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM), it is estimated that the wholesale sales of new energy vehicle models in 2022 will reach 6.49 million, a staggering 96% increase compared to the 3.31 million in 2021.

While the sales growth of traditional passenger cars in the domestic market has shown signs of fatigue in recent years, the new energy vehicle market maintains strong growth momentum, naturally attracting more and more traditional brands to enter the new energy market. This is very positive for the new energy market itself and for consumers.

For the market, the current new energy vehicle market is still large enough to accommodate the competition between new players and traditional brands in a benign way, and promote further market development together. For consumers, the increasing participation of traditional brands means that we have more choices and bargaining power, which is a kind of multi-party win-win benign cycle.

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.