Recently, a reader initiated a small survey on our exchange group – Huawei asked which of the two cars, the new M7 and the ideal L7, would you choose?
Here are the responses from readers in the group:
That’s right, all ask the world about the new M7. Correspondingly, the order of the new M7 broke through 50,000 units in 25 days.
With this new car orders surge, the greatest sense of crisis is ideal.
According to 36Kr, in the last week before the festival, Li Auto held a strategy meeting to discuss its development direction in the next 5-10 years. One significant adjustment was that it was ideal to replace the first strong opponent by BYD with Huawei.
Although Huawei has always insisted on not building cars, its influence in the car circle cannot be shaken, and asking the new M7 to "come back to life" in a short period of time is the best proof. So after Cyrus hitched a ride, Chery was also waiting for Huawei to fire its own new energy vehicle.
Not only ideal, other car companies are also beginning to pay attention to this new opponent. Huawei’s tentacles are getting longer and longer, who will be the next to be squeezed off the table?
What are you afraid of Huawei?
The success of the new M7 is based on the popularity of the masses.
The public opinion of the mountain and tsunami can be seen and touched, and these can be converted into real orders. It is reported that Huawei aims to ship 60 million – 70 million smartphones in 2024, double the annual shipment (30 million) in 2022.
With the appeal of Huawei mobile phones in the end point market, Huawei’s empowered Q models have also begun to reflect.
During the National Day holiday, the new M7 has a maximum of 7,000 units in a single day. Since its listing in mid-September, the cumulative number of units has exceeded 55,000.
This achievement also made Yu Chengdong sigh "it’s not easy". Of course, in terms of product strength, the new M7 also has enough confidence. The starting price of the new M 7.2498 million yuan is 40,000 cheaper than the old model.
Huawei has invested 500 million yuan in research and development, and has made upgrades to the chassis and performance, space design and layout, and most importantly, intelligent driving.
The intelligent driving and intelligent cockpit are the killer features of the new M7.
The new M7 is equipped with HUAWEI ADS 2.0 advanced intelligent driving system, and the most significant change is the addition of a lidar, which has the ability to assist driving in high-speed, urban, parking, and other scenarios.
HUAWEI ADS 2.0 is equipped with 27 sensors including 1 overhead lidar, 3 millimeter wave radars, 11 high definition visual perception cameras and 12 ultrasonic radars. It can realize NCA function based on BEV large model, road topology inference network and joint planning control without high definition map.
This is also Huawei’s greatest reliance. The urban smart driving pilot assistance (urban NCA) function will cover urban areas and expressways across the country in December this year.
The ideal AD Max 3.0 city NOA navigation assistance driving system has only been pushed to closed beta users since the second quarter of this year. It is expected to be pushed to more than 100 cities in China by the end of this year.
So from this round, Huawei is indeed far ahead, and even Li Xiang himself admits that their intelligent driving is half a year late.
And Huawei empowered the world, from birth to entry, as Huawei managing director, end point BG CEO, intelligent car solutions BU chairperson of Yu Chengdong, played a crucial role.
From "Yu big mouth" to "far ahead", Yu Chengdong can be said to be a "marketing wizard", but Lao Yu "although big mouth", but what goes around is technology.
The marketing focus was also technology. He was extremely good at packaging a certain technology in language, and then giving a review – far ahead.
Previously, Yu Chengdong said in an interview with the media that Huawei’s goal in entering the automotive industry is to be first, because no one will remember the second, and he once bluntly said that "the cattle I bragged about have basically been realized."
In this regard, Yu Chengdong is actually very similar to Li Xiang, the "king of Weibo", and he is a sharp-edged person in personality.
Therefore, Yu Chengdong was a person who understood both technology and marketing. Even as a new player, he could cut into the competitive Red Sea automobile market with a attitude of dimensional reduction.
How can the ideal be broken?
When a car company sells its cars better and better, and its competitors become more and more numerous, its original weaknesses will gradually surface. This is a good example of the reverse trend of the new M7.
The ideal obviously realizes this.
– His investment in intelligent driving has been slightly conservative and cautious.
36Kr reported that at this ideal autumn strategy meeting, intelligent driving became the core topic. Li Xiang reflected and concluded at the meeting that investment in intelligent driving should start half a year earlier, that is, from the middle of last year, we should go all out, rather than starting to increase efforts at the beginning of this year.
An important consensus was reached at the meeting, that is, "make up for the missed classes, and break the game by strengthening investment." After all, the ideal account still has 70 billion cash.
At the meeting, Wang Xing, Lu Qi and other shareholder bosses also said that "increase investment, and even sacrifice some efficiency" when talking about their attitude towards ideal smart driving.
Reviewing the time node of Ideal Smart Driving’s research and development, Ideal announced the start of high-precision maps in 2021, and only landed on high-speed NOA in December of the same year. In August 2022, Ideal officially delivered the Smart Driving 2.0 system on the L series.
Since then, the ideal of intelligent driving has been divided into two products: AD Max and AD Pro. AD Max 2.0 uses NVIDIA OrinX chip and Wesai car-grade lidar to deliver the first high-speed NOA product for visual fusion lidar; AD Pro 2.0 uses Horizon Journey 5 chip to deliver the first high-speed NOA product for pure visual perception.
Until September this year, Li Auto released the closed beta of urban NOA technology and commuter mode, and announced its city-opening plan, but it is worth noting that Li Auto’s city-opening plan is only limited to early bird users.
Under such a rhythm, it is not difficult to feel the actual landing ability of Li Auto’s intelligent driving function, which has a certain gap with friends such as XPeng Motors and Huawei.
Therefore, at this strategic meeting, the development of intelligent driving was also raised to an unprecedented level within the ideal.
First, the person in charge of the ideal internal perception and system was promoted to vice president respectively. On the third day after the National Day, Li Auto’s official account released more than 50 smart driving club recruitment positions.
Which covers the software algorithm, large model, vehicle hardware, testing, operation and other fields, intelligent driving algorithm engineer and a series of positions, most of the starting salary of about 30,000 yuan, large model and autonomous driving related positions, the highest monthly salary can reach 90,000 yuan.
At present, there are as many as 63 job openings for Ideal Smart Driving, covering visual perception algorithms, autonomous driving models, simulation platforms, map data engines, and other categories. The smart driving R & D team has also increased to 800 people.
All kinds of actions show that the weight of the smart driving business has been greatly increased within the ideal. Correspondingly, in the face of the current strong counterattack of the new M7 in the world, the ideal at this stage has decided to take advantage of its strengths and avoid its weaknesses, continue to strengthen the product longboard in the home market, and no longer compete with the new M7.
According to a report by 36Kr, the sales side has also changed its language, and does not take the initiative to mention the M7. If a car owner asks, they will say that an L6 model will be launched next year, which is the same price as the M7.
In addition to this, Li Auto’s product SOP plan has also been extended to 2027. During this period, Li Auto’s technology platform will experience an earth-shaking iteration. It is expected that by 2026, a new generation of technology platforms will be launched, with fully autonomous driving capabilities.
The two will fight
At the strategy meeting, many aspects of the ideal were planned, and the sea plan was also mentioned.
Ideally, going to sea will not be the ideal strategic focus for a relatively long period of time, and it may not be seriously considered until 2028. Before that, parallel exports will be the main focus.
In July this year, Li Xiang himself also sent a Weibo saying that Li Auto will not consider overseas markets before 2025, and will concentrate all resources to achieve the 2025 goal: to achieve the first sales volume of all luxury brands in the Chinese market, the annual delivery volume reaches 1.60 million vehicles, and to achieve revenue of 500 billion yuan.
The ideal is lofty, but it is indeed possible to achieve. Only 8 years after its establishment, the ideal has become the second most valuable car company in China after BYD. In 46 months, it has achieved the delivery of 500,000 vehicles.
How did Li Auto do it?
Li Xiang has publicly given the answer that growth is the core driving force of Li Auto, and every time he encounters a bottleneck, it is a time to frantically absorb growth. In his dictionary, growth is a closed loop composed of two parts, one is learning, the other is training, that is, practice.
Li Xiang himself is a very good learner and a reflective person, and the learning object is Huawei, which is also a competitor.
As early as June, Li Xiang released a small essay late at night, in which he reflected on the reason why the ideal ONE was discontinued early. Li Xiang admitted that it was because of the release of the original Q-World M7 that Huawei’s super capabilities directly caused the sales of the ideal ONE to collapse and stop production early, and the team was crippled.
In the case of failure, the ideal choice was to learn from Huawei. Li Xiang said that all the ideal management teams had purchased at least 10 Huawei public books to read.
Discovering that the painful problems encountered by Ideal in Product Research & Development, sales and service, supply manufacturing, organization and finance, etc., were solved by Huawei more than a decade ago, or even 20 years ago, which gave him a great shock.
And the ideal implementation of a talent rank system similar to Huawei’s, breaking down the ranks into more details, such as the original P9 sequence corresponding to more than 20 levels of the new rank, which can make "the promotion speed will be faster and have an incentive effect".
The same extended-range technology, similar product positioning and segmentation areas, make the world and the ideal destined to be entangled with each other. The old M7 in the world has impacted the ideal ONE, and now the new M7 has made the ideal feel the crisis again.
There will be a battle between the two, who will win? Another question is, who will you choose for the ideal L7 and the new M7?
Article source: Hunting Cloud Network
Reporters He Hongyuan and Chen Sha report
