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On August 22, Xu Jieye, the public relations director of Jiyue Auto, blasted Xiaomi and Lei Jun for losing money by selling cars on his WeChat Moments.

Xu Jiye said bluntly, "Entrepreneurs like Lei Jun, can you please have some sense of public morality and shame? You are losing 60,000 yuan per car. Why do you sell so many cars when you are losing so much? Some companies lose money because they can't sell without discounts. What do you call Xiaomi and Lei Jun's behavior? In the past, this was called dumping. This is the worst nature of businessmen."

However, at around 6 p.m. that day, Jiyue CEO Xia Yiping responded to these remarks.

What exactly caused such a high-profile public relations executive to be so defeated?

In fact, the higher the sales volume of Xiaomi, the greater the pressure on Jiyue. Jiyue’s second model, Jiyue 07, is to be launched, and it is the benchmark of Xiaomi SU7. However, it was not until August 16 that Jiyue 07 was officially announced to be mass-produced.

A salesperson told Leifeng.com that "the delivery of the Jiyue 07 may not be until the end of the year."

In contrast, Xiaomi Motors delivered a total of 27,307 SU7 series new cars in the second quarter. With the start of double-shift production at the Xiaomi Motors factory in June 2024 and the optimization of production line maintenance in July 2024, Xiaomi Motors' monthly deliveries have exceeded 10,000 for two consecutive months from June to July. It is expected that the annual SU7 series cumulative delivery target of 100,000 vehicles will be achieved ahead of schedule in November 2024.

Sales volume has always been Ji Yue’s main concern.

In late October 2023, the first model of Jiyue, Jiyue 01, was launched. In the first half of 2024, the cumulative sales of Jiyue 01 were only 2,700 units. Since its launch, the monthly sales of this car have been as low as 218 units and as high as 1,001 units.

In July this year, the sales volume of Jiyue 01 was 1,143 units, a month-on-month increase of 147.94%. As for the reason for the increase, an industry insider told Leifeng.com that "Robot Kuaipao's popularity has boosted Jiyue's sales. Jiyue and Luobo are on the same platform, and their sales volume has increased compared with the second half of last year and the first quarter of this year."

Technical capabilities have never been a complaint about Jiyue, because Jiyue is a domestic manufacturer that firmly follows the "pure vision" intelligent driving route, and has stronger processing and generalization capabilities when facing extreme working conditions and complex scenes. At present, there are not many domestic car companies that can go through pure vision. In some public ranking competitions, Jiyue often achieves relatively good results.

What is the problem with Jiyue?

According to Zhang Yang, a frontline salesperson at Jiyue, the problem lies in product definition.In public publicity, Jiyue is labeled as "car robot", a label proposed by Robin Li at the Baidu World 2021 Conference.

The Jiyue 01 is a car that competes with Tesla. It completely follows Tesla's style in many product definitions, especially the screen shift function. However, after Tesla's screen shift function was launched, it was criticized by many consumers.

Zhang Yang said, "Consumers have great concerns about the advanced product design of Jiyue. According to the feedback from test drive customers, many of them are waiting for the next generation of Jiyue to have a paddle shifter."

In his opinion, (screen gear shifting) is not just about the driving experience, but more importantly, it is a safety issue, that is, how to ensure gear shifting when there is a problem with the car computer.

Zhang Yang once talked to Jiyue's product manager, who saidJiyue’s product definition is that it must be “new” and conform to the positioning of “car robot”, so it has added many functions that are contrary to operating habits.

For example, the physical left and right turn signal function was cancelled in the GY01, and it was replaced with two buttons. In the early stage, GY's technology was not up to date, and there was no way to realize the automatic left and right turn signal function. Users could only touch the two touch buttons on the steering wheel, and there was no vibration feedback, resulting in a poor user experience.

Later, the function of automatically turning on the left and right turn signals according to the navigation route was updated, and user reputation reversed, with the number of positive reviews increasing significantly.

Zhang Yang said, "This is a typical example of technology not keeping up with ideas. As a result, the Jiyue 01 model does not have mechanical switches for shifting and steering. I thought that technology could be quickly iterated to achieve the goal of 'car robots', but in fact, intelligence did not keep up, resulting in a big reputation problem for the product."

Zhang Tao, a person from a car company, told Leifeng.com that "the interactive experience of Jiyue's large connected screen is not very good. When it is really used, it is still divided into three screens. It is only in the demonstration scene that it is integrated.. Just because Jiyue says it is self-developed does not mean that everything is self-developed. Jiyue still relies on Baidu for technology. There was a period of time when Jiyue’s people went there to make trouble, and Baidu’s support was slightly stronger. ”

On the other hand, Jiyue’s product and marketing positioning have also led to its target users being more discerning young groups, who have more stringent goals for the in-car experience.

In order to reverse the sales slump, Jiyue carried out drastic reforms on the marketing and sales sides at the beginning of this year. Yang Zhen, the head of the marketing UD-user development department, and several directors and other executives were "resigned" and replaced by CEO Xia Yiping. The head of the sales UO-user operation department was also replaced by Andy Gao from Tesla instead of Luo Gang, the former head of operations.

On March 25, Jiyue held the AI ​​DAY 2024 technical conference.

After the press conference, Xia Yiping, CEO of Jiyue Automobile, reflected on the reasons for the sluggish sales and pointed the finger at marketing. He said: "As a new brand and a new category of product, when a user enters a Jiyue store, the first question he thinks about is not "I want to buy a car", but "what brand is it?" This is a problem we need to solve."

However, in Zhang Yang's view, brand building requires the front-end sales to constantly instill it into consumers.

Zhang Yang admitted, "Many salesmen don't have a strong desire to sell. For every car sold by Jiyue, the salesmen only earn a rebate of one or two thousand yuan, and usually earn a basic salary. Many salesmen will return the rebates to consumers. This has two purposes: first, to increase the probability of users buying from the salesman; second, the rebate amount itself is not much. Jiyue's internal regulations require that no-liability holidays be given after selling a car, so many salesmen are happy to exchange annual leave for selling cars."

"From this logic, the sales of Jiyue are relatively Buddhist, which is very fatal for a newly started automobile company, and the team motivation is very weak."

(Jiyue has a small number of stores, which has caused some target users to worry about after-sales issues. Interested readers can add the author’s WeChat Gru1993 to communicate about what are Jiyue’s shortcomings in marketing)

In terms of product delivery, Jiyue did not firmly grasp the key period of user retention.

In late July 2024, Jiyue officially announced that Jiyue 01 will usher in a sales peak in the near future, and some new car owners may face a 3-5 week extension in delivery time.

In the current fiercely competitive automotive industry, this delivery time will obviously lose some potential customers. However, this also reflects Geely's attitude towards the "Jiyue" brand.

In the Jidu era before Jiyue was renamed, Baidu and Geely held 55% and 45% of the equity respectively. However, because Baidu could not solve the problem of car manufacturing qualifications, it "adopted" Jidu to Geely, and Geely became the company with a higher share (Geely 65%, Baidu 35%).

From Geely’s perspective, Zeekr and Lynk & Co are its “own sons”.

In June, Zeekr's delivery volume reached 20,000 units. In an open letter released in July this year, Zeekr CEO An Conghui announced that Zeekr will challenge monthly sales of more than 30,000 units in the second half of the year. Lynk & Co's sales in June reached 24,439 units.

Just imagine, as Zeekr and Lynk & Co. are striving to achieve their sales targets in the second half of the year, does Geely have the spare capacity to devote more energy to the lukewarm Zeekr?

Jiyue's Xu Jiye's remarks actually reflect the anxiety of second- and third-tier manufacturers. Under the fierce price war, the survival space of new car manufacturers who lack characteristics and brand appeal will be further compressed.

For Jiyue, there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of product definition, production, sales, etc.