Author: Wang Xuan
Never have I seen such a scene under a question on Zhihu: the launch of a new car brand that garnered over 300 answers within 48 hours, which is considered top-rated. What’s particularly unusual is that, regardless of everyone’s efforts, there was not a single answer with more than 60 upvotes. From top-notch V bloggers with 960,000 followers to Zhihu users who call themselves “big-headed soldiers” under Su Weiming, they all unanimously praised BeyonCa without analyzing its brand, products, user profile, and car-making philosophy. Instead, they strongly affirmed the imitated “Volkswagen China” team…
Under such widespread praise, I had an idea: if we reverse all positive descriptions, we might obtain a more authentic understanding of BeyonCa.
There must be something unusual behind it
Regardless of how dazzling Su Weiming’s halo is, his car-making venture is not a fresh specimen in the new car-making movement, as there are other newcomers with traditional automaker backgrounds such as Shen Hui from WM Motor. However, Shen Hui comes from the supply chain industry and only has experience at Geely. Su Weiming, on the other hand, has endorsements from Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, and Bentley, which naturally makes his background much stronger, thereby inevitably attracting more applause on social media.
Apart from their shared background as professional managers, the two also share a common approach in team-building – they prefer to work with their old buddies.
In WM Motor’s organizational structure, a large number of executives and talents come from traditional carmakers’ supply chains, and the team’s genes often reflect in their products. Relying on the team’s strong capability in integrating the supply chain, WM Motor, founded in 2015, produced its first product, WM EX5, in 2018 with lightning speed, helping it secure a place among the head new forces in the auto industry.# BeyonCa’s Supply Chain Dependency Is Holding Them Back
BeyonCa’s heavy reliance on the supply chain has made it difficult for the company’s future development. As competitors use independently developed technology to make their products more appealing and their brand images more lively, BeyonCa, who is following the traditional path, has become just average, clearly stung by the supply chain.
According to public information available on Tianyancha, Beijing BinLi Information Technology Co., Ltd., which BeyonCa belongs to, has 9 executives, aside from the investment from Dongfeng. Guo Xiaolin, Gong Ying, and others were Su Weiming’s subordinates during his time at Volkswagen’s subsidiary, Mobility Asia. Christian Klinger was a former member of the Volkswagen AG’s global board of directors, responsible for brands such as Bentley, Porsche, and Audi. According to BeyonCa’s announcement after the October 30 press conference, former Bentley designers and personnel responsible for the development of the Audi brand have also joined the team.
Surrounding Su Weiming are still the people he is most familiar with, BeyonCa has become a copy of “Volkswagen China” composed of multiple professional managers. Like Shen Hui and Weima, the advantages and disadvantages of Volkswagen China may also appear in BeyonCa’s team.
New car companies made up of players with rich experience in the automotive industry are called the “third force.” They have a high starting point, and the investors who choose them are also widely supported. In the opinion of a well-known Zhihu user, “Su Weiming’s experience is a perfect industry resume, and all of it is at the top of the industry, with a broad understanding of top international car companies, luxury brand operation, and helping the elephant of the automotive industry turn towards the Internet. When all of his subordinates are strong, one can imagine what capabilities he can build by putting together a team.”
Su Weiming is indeed a veteran in the automotive industry with outstanding achievements, and his extensive experience and resources are natural advantages that we do not deny. However, looking at it from a different perspective, the experience of achieving results with the backing of a big tree may not be applicable in a start-up company.
At the same time, “professional teams” also have many deep-rooted problems. In a sense, Volkswagen is like a “German state-owned enterprise” where the executives’ salaries are extremely high, and it is questionable whether they can adapt to the entrepreneurial environment of “Xiaomi and rifles”.
As a giant in the automotive industry, Volkswagen comes with strong potential energy. Carrying the Volkswagen brand out for negotiations, both upstream and downstream enterprises would show respect to you. Therefore, many things are easily accomplished due to the huge scale, but everyone wants to be the “digger” to take credit.
Compared with hard power, mastering office politics may be the key ability to stand out in this “German state-owned enterprise”. If BeyonCa wants to succeed, it should first sort out its own team. Besides creating alliances, forming cliques, what other abilities do they possess?
Lengthy working processes are also a stubborn problem in traditional car companies. In the era of new car manufacturing, the speed of problem solving is often the key factor to winning. Here are two real examples. Once, after we evaluated the intelligent cockpit product of a new car manufacturer, we were informed the next day that the engineering team had spent a whole morning carefully studying the problems we reported and would address them urgently. We learned from relevant people at Volkswagen China that, when establishing a local intelligent team, the recruitment of each high-paid talent has to go through multiple layers of application before finally being approved by the German side. The complex process would also result in talent turnover.
Whether new or old, everyone has to feel their way across the river in this era. If one cannot recognize reality, and relies on old achievements with unfounded confidence, BeyonCa is bound to run into obstacles.
The Dancing Elephant – Mobility Asia# BeyonCa’s Focus on Intelligence and Mobility
Following the BeyonCa launch event, a poster featuring Su Weiming was circulated, which mentioned the carmaker’s focus on addressing the core needs of people, deepening the experience of driving, and prioritizing health. None of these areas can be accomplished without intelligent assistance. In BeyonCa’s core brand concept, in addition to high-end luxury vehicles, intelligence is also a competitive force.
In the general public’s perception, intelligence has been a weak point for traditional car companies. As a former executive at Volkswagen China, Su Weiming’s background may prompt questions about his ability in this area. So how can we enhance people’s trust in him and his vision?
From a famous post on Zhihu, I found a trick for writing high-quality soft articles. The highly upvoted answer confirms Su Weiming’s leadership of Volkswagen’s wholly-owned subsidiary named Mobility Asia, which was established in 2018 to focus on telematics and autonomous driving businesses. It has become an example of Su’s frontier internet thinking.
However, I am more interested in the real scoop behind Mobility Asia. One post from a former Mobility Asia employee caught my attention: “his business layout for Mobility Asia made real breakthroughs in the traditional automotive industry.” What are these breakthroughs, specifically? Based on our analysis and evaluation, it appears that Su Weiming introduced the concept of intelligence to Volkswagen’s headquarters early on. However, due to certain constraints, genuine progress has faltered.Meanwhile, he also mentioned the cooperation between Volkswagen China and local internet companies, where internet companies always play the role of “radical activists” and communication with traditional car companies is no different from “talking to a duck”, because of the conservative legal review, many collaborations ultimately end hastily.
Of course, this finally proves what we mentioned above, that traditional car companies always have lengthy processes and regulations that lead to slow progress in some critical business aspects. However, what I am more concerned about is what achievements Mobility Asia has made over the years.
For this reason, I have browsed the content of Mobility Asia, which is published on the Chinese public account “Yijia Intelligent”. As a role similar to the supply chain, the content can be divided into three categories: recruitment information, technology popularization and product introductions. The ranking is arranged based on the frequency of appearance of different content, and it can be seen that the product category is the least.
After digging deeper, I found that the two most important achievements of Mobility Asia are the voice system for the Jetta brand (which used to be a well-known model under Volkswagen, which later became an independent subsidiary), and the LBS (Intelligent Location Services) embedded in multiple Volkswagen car models’ in-car ecosystems.
As for the former’s capability, I will not comment here since I have not experienced it. But as a real Volkswagen car owner, I have long forgotten what the ecosystem page of my car looks like, and the first thing I do when getting into the car is to connect to Apple CarPlay. If you are someone who insists on using the native ecosystem on a Volkswagen car, I admire you! This is completely different from the type of people who use Apple’s native navigation in China.
“The elephant dancing” is the most frequently mentioned element in the title of Mobility Asia’s public account. However, it now seems that this elephant is completely focused on dancing and has no intention of moving forward.Based on the product information currently released by BeyonCa, its medical functions are the closest relationship with intelligence. For BeyonCa which targets high-end users, health and medical care are the core elements that outline product differentiation. Therefore, the company has appointed international cardiovascular disease expert Guo Xin as the Chief Health Officer.
According to the industrial and commercial information, on August 11th, 2022, a patent application submitted by BeyonCa Information Technology Co., Ltd. contains a “cold detection system, equipment, vehicle, and storage medium”. The system includes a collection module, a speech detection module, an event detection sub-module, an event classification sub-module, and a fusion diagnosis module. According to the description, the system analyzes the collected speech information to finally determine whether the person has a cold.
System, module, analysis, these vocabulary seem to form a rigorous and scientific system. However, it always reminds me of the traditional Chinese medicine’s “looking, smelling, asking, and feeling the pulse”.
Playing this set of methods in the car, is it really scientific? At least I don’t believe it.
Su Weiming described a scenario about the application of the health system in the interview: “When driving at a speed of 120 km/h on the highway, if there are symptoms of acute cardiovascular disease, the car’s AI will ask the driver if they are uncomfortable. If there is no response, it will actively reduce the speed and park on the side of the road, and use AI to judge the driver’s physical condition. Based on the cloud doctor platform supported by data, it will quickly determine what kind of problems the driver has encountered and what needs to be done next.”Su Weiming claimed that BeyonCa’s health ecosystem is a closed loop that is fully perceivable, responsive, and reachable. It is indeed a closed loop with seamless logic, but it still cannot save the driver who suffered a sudden myocardial infarction on the side of the highway. At most, it can help him call an ambulance.
Perhaps the car medical system is really necessary, but based on Su Weiming’s current description, they clearly haven’t figured out the inevitable connection between cars and medical care. Specialized things need to be done in specialized places. Cars are transportation tools, and hospitals are places to seek medical attention. If you force the two together, it may end up being like trying to receive express delivery or order take-out in a car- not practical.
The era of creating super-luxury electric cars may have passed, as mentioned by Su Weiming during the interview. He believes that the real upward trend of electric cars S-curve will probably appear around 2025. The period from 2025 to 2030 is the most appropriate time for the development of new brands, and BeyonCa will undoubtedly catch up with this window.
To support this view, a well-known Zhihu influencer mentioned that when a new thing appears, the first thing that needs to be addressed is whether or not it exists, and then whether it is good or not. Therefore, as the penetration rate of new energy markets continues to rise, it will inevitably give rise to consumers’ demand for luxury electric cars.
However, we cannot forget the age-old issues of “how to achieve a true sense of luxury in new energy vehicles” and “where is the ceiling for luxury new energy vehicles?”
Observing the new energy market in the past decade, it can be seen that the era of ultra-luxury electric vehicles truly arrived in 2012, the year when the Tesla Model S was born. At that time, the automotive historian Robert Cumberford published an article on the Tesla Model S, pointing out that although the car’s appearance was ordinary, its outstanding acceleration performance and driving experience that completely surpassed that of fuel-powered cars fully deserve the label of a groundbreaking era.
At that moment, electric vehicles had high premiums, not only because of the more expensive cost of batteries and technology than now, but also because they could bring a revolutionary experience to traditional cars. Anything that was unique was highly premium.
In my opinion, Su Weiming, who has worked with brands such as Bentley and Bugatti, should be very clear that not everyone had the ability to build V12, W12, and W16 engines in the age of fuel-powered cars. This was the barrier that other brands could not surpass.
Now, there is no technology on electric cars that is a high threshold and can form a barrier. This is also why Tesla no longer puts more effort into the Model S and Model X. They can no longer support million-dollar price tags and have thus lost a large market.
Obviously, the GT sports car styling and healthcare mentioned by Su Weiming are not the key barriers.
The price ceiling of luxury electric vehicles is decreasing, from the earliest one million to now 500,000 yuan. The market is more mature, and customers need good products, but customers are not fools. Of course, there are still some expensive electric vehicle products in the market, but the monthly sales volume is at least worlds apart from Su Weiming’s plan for BeyonCa’s annual sales of 100,000 units.The statement “the best car under 5 million yuan” made by Li Xiang is not just empty talk, because from the perspective of product strength, 500,000 yuan is already the ceiling. Therefore, Li Xiang has also stated on Weibo that the prices of BBA’s mid-to-large-sized SUV products will further decrease, becoming more in line with their actual product strength. In fact, luxury brands nationalizing their high-end products is a signal.
Su Weiming needs to think carefully whether the foundation of his vision for ultra-luxury electric vehicles and his statement that BeyonCa “focuses on people’s core needs” are truly consistent.
Final Thoughts
I hope that ultra-luxury electric cars are not just a false proposition, but BeyonCa needs to think about how to prove this.
Su Weiming should understand clearly that what he has in his hand is Bin Li, not Bentley. Without a hundred years of history as a foundation, users will scrutinize his products with even more demanding eyes.
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.