Overtaking foreign brands, something that was considered mission impossible in the fuel car era, is becoming a reality in the electric car era.

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In the fuel car era, it was considered mission impossible for Chinese brands to overtake foreign brands. However, with the advent of the electric vehicle (EV) era, that window is being opened.

In an article published Tuesday, Yicai said that even if Mercedes-Benz and BMW increase their efforts, it will be difficult to change the current leadership of the new car makers in the Chinese market.

Here are the main points of the article:

Nio (NYSE: NIO, HKG: 9866) topped Tesla and BMW for insurance registrations in 2021 in the Chinese luxury EV market priced above RMB 300,000. Local companies including Xpeng Motors (NYSE: XPEV, HKG: 9868) and GAC Aion have generally beaten joint ventures.

Volkswagen's ID series has increased its efforts in the past year, but sales have not been good so far. The reason is that while the Volkswagen ID series offer good EVs, they are not the smart EVs that users prefer.

In the fuel car market, these changes are almost unthinkable. But the era of smart EVs not only brings the Chinese auto industry the opportunity to catch up with them, but also gives local car companies the chance to enter the luxury car market, which has been ruled by European companies for hundreds of years.

Including Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi and Volvo, foreign luxury brands will intensively launch new cars this year. However, judging from the product information already released, their chances of winning are generally not very good.

Most foreign companies do not understand the thirst of Chinese users for intelligent equipment and the fact that cars are accelerating their evolution to mobile smart terminals led by the Chinese market.

Luxury car brands are still launching EVs according to their definition of fuel cars, resulting in a lack of innovation from their products to marketing and services, so they can't find selling points or demand.

Companies including HiPhi, Nio, and Tesla are not only acting faster in terms of innovation in user insights and business models, they are already two stages ahead in terms of product definition and reinvention of supply chain ecology.

If you wish to learn more, you can copy the original Chinese text into Google Translate.

Original Chinese version: https://www.yicai.com/news/101349294.html

Google Translate at: https://translate.google.com/

Note: Weilai refers to Nio, Gaohe refers to HiPhi, and Xiaopeng refers to Xpeng in the automatic translation.

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