Outing Hundreds of People Media, Focusing on the Evolution of the Automobile Travel Industry Chain

Original Article by Zhou Pei

“Thank goodness we aren’t driving an electric car.”

From Guiyang to Miao Village, there are winding mountain roads with no signal for over ten kilometers and a bumpy road that makes your head hurt. Of course, there is still a highway from Guiyang to Miao Village.

However, rolling mountain roads are a common road condition in Guizhou Province. The driver responsible for taking us around was avoiding the option of electric cars the entire way, though we felt it was unnecessary. In the city of Guiyang, you hardly see any electric cars parked on the roadside or driving on the streets.

As someone on Zhihu said, “The mountain roads are not only steep, but also dangerous. Purely electric cars that rely solely on electricity to start may have difficulty climbing up the mountain when the battery is not fully charged. It can even be quite dangerous if there is insufficient power.” Reality is the best persuasion. During our stay in Guizhou, we took over ten taxis and not once did we encounter a purely electric car. We traveled several mountain roads, and as the only province in the country without plains, the chances of seeing a charging station are slim.

“Too much trouble,” Guizhou locals “refuse” electric cars, and they are not being polite.

Charging? Too much trouble

The older sister who drove us to the breakfast restaurant drove a Corolla hybrid, and it was the model we encountered that was the closest to “new energy.”

“Do you charge it normally?”

“No, it’s too much trouble. It’s simple to just use gas.” After dropping us off, the older sister pointed to the other side and said, “That car has been parked for a long time with no one driving it.”

On the side of the street across from the breakfast restaurant, next to the vegetable market, a little electric car with a “New Special” logo was parked crookedly. The car was covered in gray and looked like it hadn’t been driven in a long time, with some wear and tear showing as the rain washed it away.

It belonged to the boss of a pancake shop in the market. They bought a New Special electric car because it was made in Guizhou, and they thought it was convenient to drive around in the city with a range of 300 kilometers.

But then, after driving it for over half a year, it was too much trouble to find a place to charge it. They had to bring the car home to charge it, and they were scared by the news of spontaneous combustion. “There aren’t many places to charge in the neighborhood. The charging stations being built now are mostly in shopping malls, so they’re not convenient to use all the time.”

So, they just left it parked there. Another reason was that “the car broke down and it’s difficult to find a 4S store to repair it” because this electric car brand, which once set a delivery record, changed its showroom management.

According to survey data from February of this year, the average discount for models such as GAC Toyota iA5, Qin new energy, and Langyi all-electric on sale is the highest among sedans in the automobile consumption in Guizhou. The average discount for models such as Toyota C-HR EV, GAC Honda VE-1, Yuanshinengyuan, Changan Oshan X7 EV on sale is the highest among SUVs.Before coming to Guiyang, I stayed in Shenzhen for a while, running through the streets to experience various brands of electric cars, forming two different worlds with Guiyang. In addition, Beijing has a few years’ wait for green license plate lottery, and Shanghai has restrictions on green license plates, all indicating that electric cars have become an irreversible trend.

In early summer of May, Guiyang was rainy and not very hot, and the popularity of electric cars failed to ignite in this southwestern province.

Oh, wait, it’s not that the people of Guizhou aren’t enthusiastic about electric cars, but the Guizhou provincial government is still actively promoting the trend of electric cars.

In 2018, Guiyang set a goal to build 100 electric vehicle charging stations and about 50,000 charging piles in the province, not exceeding 5 kilometers, so that you can find a place to charge electric vehicles within just 5 kilometers. A “power grid” was woven to meet the charging demand of 100,000 electric vehicles.

However, with three years gone, the electric vehicle market has already changed a lot, and the progress is far from ideal.

As of 2020, a total of 16,104 public charging piles have been built in the province, of which Guizhou Power Grid has built 2,815 charging piles. The completion rate of the target is less than half. This data is not significant if viewed in the whole province.

According to a Baidu search for charging piles in Guiyang, there were 289 results, mainly consisting of “Teld”, and “Star Charging Station”. According to an insider from Star Charging Station, “our charging piles are mainly concentrated in Guiyang and Zunyi”, and the total number of search results on Baidu is 32, which are the two most important cities in Guizhou.

“I often can’t find a place to charge,” said the boss selling cakes, shaking his head while handing over a cake.

The regret on his face was evident.

There aren’t many cards that can be played in Guizhou, which is why the progress is slow. Due to various factors, there aren’t many car factories in Guizhou.

Geely has a base in Guiyang where it produces new energy “methanol” cars, CV platform traditional power and pure electric cars. The MPV model, Jiaji, was born here.

In addition, Yao Zhenhua has brought the pace of car-making to Guiyang. After two years of construction, the Guizhou Baoneng new energy automotive industrial park is now entering the stage of wall construction. However, the expectation is not high for how much change it can bring to Guizhou’s electrification after completion.

Due to the limited choices, in recent years, the main electric car brand supported by Guizhou is the new special electric car “made in Guiyang”.# New Special Electric Vehicle in Guian Xin District

In September 2017, the new special electric vehicle settled in Guian Xin District, Guizhou, symbolizing “unique new life”. On October 31, 2018, a Guizhou-made electric vehicle was officially produced in large quantities with a comprehensive endurance of 350 kilometers and a price range below 100,000 yuan.

“The energy needs to continue to grow on a large scale, and it is necessary to break through the B-end dependence and truly return to the C-end. Only the ordinary people have this momentum to enlarge the factor and the denominator, so that the scale can be achieved.” Xian Yue, the CEO of New Special, showed full confidence before.

New Special reached a five-year OEM cooperation agreement with FAW, and it took only about 400 days from the establishment of the company to the delivery of the product, setting a record for the fastest production and delivery of new car-making forces. At one point, it achieved sales of several thousand vehicles, claiming to be the “first echelon of emerging car companies.”

The good times did not last long, and the speed of New Special’s collapse was faster than its delivery speed. “The B-end has become the main force of consumption and has eaten up a lot of our C-end.” When Xian Yue said this, it was when BAIC New Energy took the lead.

However, the support of Guizhou cannot prevent the decline of New Special’s reputation. If the car is not good, consumers will not buy it. Some consumers complained that the new car they bought in 2019 had already been licensed by the dealer in 2018, saying: “The car sold to me is second-hand. How can I use it safely?”

“Oh, that car is not easy to drive. It will drain the battery and become useless after a few steps.” The pastry shop owner is very dissatisfied with the product quality.

This is not an isolated case. Under the bad reputation, New Special’s sales have plummeted. Now that the showroom has changed owners, the manufacturer does not provide accessories, and it is difficult to contact New Special. Customers can only take it to a repair shop to fix it, or simply not bother fixing it.

The poor experience brought by New Special’s electric vehicles has also somewhat damaged Guizhou consumers’ impression of electric vehicles. When visiting 4S shops under Guizhou Tongyuan Group, the information obtained was also consistent: “Electric cars are difficult to sell.”

The homepage of Guizhou Tongyuan Group’s website mainly promotes popular car models such as Fit, Sail, and brands under Geely. They have agencies for more than a dozen brands, including Porsche, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Chevrolet, and Buick.

Even the promotion of electric rental cars by the government has been extremely slow due to short endurance, difficult charging, high cost, and difficult profitability. “We are used to using gas, and we can refuel everywhere.” Zhang, who has driven a taxi for seven or eight years, is worried that he will run out of power while driving and dare not use electric vehicles.In the past two years, during the period of enthusiasm for shared cars, you could still rent Chery QQ and BAIC new energy vehicles in Guiyang. However, there were not many available vehicles, and locals did not use them very often. Of course, there were occasional uses.

“As a young person, Liu Wei thinks it’s ok to occasionally use electric cars, but the problem now is that they’re hard to find.”

Although Guizhou is not a leader in “manufacturing strong provinces,” this temporary obstacle will not slow down their pace in promoting the electrification of cars. By vigorously developing big data businesses, Guizhou has emerged from obscurity and finally gained a sense of existence. “We do not want to fall behind in the trend of new energy in Southwest China.”

Therefore, the changes are continuing. The arrival of NIO and Tesla can also be considered bringing new opportunities to Guizhou. At least they have a chance to establish their reputation in the electric vehicle market.

In September 2018, NIO established a wholly-owned subsidiary, Guizhou NIO automobile sales Co., Ltd, in Guiyang. On January 12, 2020, Guizhou’s first NIO space was established in the Impression City of Guiyang. In just one year, NIO has welcomed its fifth store in the Guizhou region, the NIO Space I Guiyang Yitian Holiday World.

In January of this year, the Guanshanhu Tesla Center in Guiyang was officially opened, featuring the Tesla Model Y and Model 3 models. Tesla is gradually expanding its charging network in Guizhou, with three supercharging stations and a total of 25 charging posts online in Guiyang. At the end of May, Tesla announced that it will establish a data center in China. Some media reported that Tesla may follow Apple’s “cloud-based Guizhou” model.

The speed at which Guizhou is absorbing new blood in electrification and intelligence is accelerating. The intention of which is quite clear: to continue leading Yunnan. Many people in Guiyang have this mentality: “Guangzhou may be sad to fall out of the top three, but Guizhou will be excited for a night to become the third from the bottom, but we do not want to fall behind Yunnan.”

Between Sichuan-Chongqing, the two lakes, Guangxi, Yunnan lies Guizhou. During the Ming Dynasty, before the southern expedition to Yunnan-Guizhou, Zhu Yuanzhang warned Fu Youde, the expedition leader, “Every obstruction in Guizhou caused the interruption of the trade in South Yunnan.”

Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan have always been closely interconnected. Guizhou is not an exception among Southwest provinces. The same could be said for Yunnan, which relies heavily on the tobacco industry to make money while emphasizing tourism as its core industry. A small city can rely on tourism as its core support, but it’s hard for a province to make a living exclusively from tourism.The saying “no work, no wealth” is clearly understood by Guizhou. Therefore, in recent years, the big data industry has been thriving, and the goal of having all 88 counties in the province connected by highways has been achieved. No roads, no electric cars.

This round, Yunnan’s pace is indeed not as fast as Guizhou’s. There is a post on Zhihu asking for recommendations for electric cars, but the answers are still mostly about electric scooters, and there are few posts regarding pure electric cars.

With the tilt towards Guizhou’s core industries, the dominant and low-profile Guizhou pattern gradually broke. Yunnan also realized the crisis and is promoting electrification through the integration of cultural tourism and electric cars, planning to build 1,000 charging piles along the Dianxi West Line.

Finally, Yunnan, which had been accustomed to passive attitudes, has gained some momentum for transformation. Beijing Automotive Group’s Kunming Base also filled the gap in Yunnan’s new energy manufacturing, and the EU5 model of BAIC New Energy can be seen everywhere on the streets.

Yunnan focuses on electrification in Kunming. Not only has it introduced the “New Energy Vehicle Consumption Voucher”, with a maximum discount of 20%, but it also sets up a special “Green Channel” for new energy vehicle owners to register their new cars, ensuring that the process can be completed within an hour.

As the main force in the development of green energy industries in Yunnan, Yunnan Energy Investment Group has put 3,870 new energy vehicles into operation in the province, and built 721 charging piles and 86 charging stations. In May, the largest independent charging station in the province, “Yun Neng Charging”, was put into operation at Guangfu Road in Kunming, with 112 parking spaces and 88 high-power charging piles.

If Guizhou and Yunnan are catching up with this wave of electrification, then Sichuan, compared to them, has the initiative in hand. Chengdu, which is more than 600 kilometers away from Guiyang, is also a southwestern city, but it is completely different.

Chengdu is regarded by many car companies as a foothold in the southwestern market. In the era of traditional fuel cars, luxury car consumption was second only to Beijing and Shanghai, while sales of JV brand cars were higher than Beijing, and sales of super-luxury cars were slightly lower than Shenzhen.

Lynk & Co once stated that “the city with the largest sales volume is Chengdu”, and NIO also said that its sales are doing extremely well in Chengdu.

In the southwestern market, Chengdu is the absolute center. One factory after another has settled in Chengdu, which rivals Chongqing, the manufacturing core of the southwestern automotive industry, and is already a benchmark in the southwestern car market.

Moreover, Sichuan, which leads the southwestern region, will not concede defeat in this round of competition, striving to achieve an 80% coverage of charging piles at service areas on highways throughout the province by the end of 2024.

These southwestern provinces are once again at the “crossroads” of the times, facing the economic and technological challenges from all directions. Both tradition and modernity, as well as the avant-garde and tranquility, are in full swing, trying to find a balance in interwoven coexistence.

In the “2020 Best Travel List” released by the American magazine “Geographic” , Guizhou is the only province in China that made the list. The theme is to “explore the corners untouched by time”.

Being described as a corner forgotten by time, Guizhou is probably not pleased, as it seems incompatible with the trend of surging electric cars.

With the support of big data and the introduction of NIO and Tesla, Guizhou is determined not to fall behind again.

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.