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interface news reporter | zhou shuqi

after 10 years of investment in grand visions such as user services, community operations and brand building, nio has finally returned to the essence of manufacturing: pursuing cost and efficiency, and competing for orders and deliveries.

according to the information disclosed so far, ledao l60 will be equipped with a 900v high-voltage platform, with a maximum range of more than 1,000 kilometers. it also uses the operating system that nio has developed for four years, which takes the intelligence of the whole vehicle to another dimension.

ledao frees the nio brand from the burden that it is forced to bear in order to maintain its high-end tone. it does not need to pursue personalized innovation and can fully follow the definition logic of popular products; it does not need to overemphasize high-end brand value, and a sufficiently cost-effective price can conquer consumers. it can also achieve scale effects and realize the monetization of nio's invested resources.

on the other hand, ledao is entering a mass market that nio has never entered before, and is facing a very different user group. it will start a game that is completely different from nio's previous business philosophy. in the 200,000 yuan mainstream market where competition is fierce and users are sensitive, ledao needs to ensure that its products are impeccable, reduce costs to the extreme, and not allow mistakes in every link of production, supply and sales.

this is a difficulty that the nio brand has never overcome, and the person in charge of operating this new brand is a newcomer who has never entered the automotive industry.

ledao president ai tiecheng has worked for companies such as procter & gamble and intercontinental, and has served as vice president of marketing at shanghai disney resort since 2013. li bin, ceo of nio, believes that ai tiecheng has a deep insight into family users, and as a nio es8 founding edition owner, he also has a good understanding of the nio brand and culture.

three years ago, when ai tiecheng's team was defining their first car product, they studied the strongest family cars on the market at the time, including toyota rav4 and volkswagen tiguan l, the kings of family cars in the gasoline era. but soon they focused on the model y as a benchmark, and set a goal at the time to use the model y as a prototype, but with a 10% lower cost.

in order to obtain a clearer user portrait, ai tiecheng and his team conducted intensive research in first-tier to fifth-tier cities across the country. they believe that family users with an income of 200,000 to 300,000 yuan need a product that is excellent in terms of safety, space, intelligence, and usage cost.

when reviewing the car-making process in an interview with media outlets such as jiemian news, ai tiecheng mentioned that his requirement for the team was to "make big dishes and main dishes", focusing on the high-frequency needs of family users. the chassis tuning is based on comfort standards, and it will not be a model that will be driven on the track.

in his opinion, there is no mid-size suv with better space than the ledao l60 on the market. according to li bin’s words at the ledao brand launch conference: “the l60 is longer, wider and has more space than the model y.”

thanks to the 900v high-voltage platform, the cable diameter of the ledao l60 is reduced by 30%, the weight of the wiring harness is reduced by 50%, and the weight and volume occupied by the vehicle are reduced. on the other hand, the rear motor of this model uses a new generation of silicon carbide technology, which can achieve both small size and high power, saving space for ledao without sacrificing performance.

energy efficiency is another focus of the ledao l60. one of the criticisms of nio's models is the high energy consumption caused by dual motors and four-wheel drive, which is a concession made to enhance the brand premium, but the family user group that the ledao l60 targets cares more about the cost of use.

li bin set a goal for the team to have lower energy consumption than tesla. he believes that family cars need to be calculated carefully, and lower power consumption means cheaper electricity bills, which is the principle of ledao's entire product definition. 36kr reported that in order to ensure energy consumption, li bin even overturned the styling design that took 6 months. public data shows that the energy consumption of ledao l60 is as low as 12.1kw/100km, lower than model y's 12.5kw/100km.

according to ai tiecheng's prediction, after more than 10 years of rapid development, the smart car industry may have entered the time node of the final product. the ledao l60, which uses the 900v platform and central computing architecture, is a model close to the final form and can cope with the technology updates in the next 5 to 10 years.

ledao follows the logic of benchmarking blockbuster products in car manufacturing, and will only launch three to four models in the entire brand life cycle. this cautious and conservative development strategy can minimize the risk of model launches. nio cannot afford the cost of ledao's failure, which is related to whether the company will become mainstream or become a niche.

according to the second quarter financial report of nio, the company suffered an operating loss of 5.2 billion yuan in the quarter, and has not yet reached the profit margin. in the reality that the high-end pure electric market itself is relatively small, ledao has become the key to nio's turnaround.

the supply chain of ledao l60 is prepared to deliver 10,000 vehicles per month this year, and will achieve monthly delivery of over 20,000 vehicles next year. li bin's long-term goal is to achieve sales of 50,000 vehicles per model of the ledao brand.

li yanwei, an expert member of the expert committee of the china automobile dealers association, provided data to interface news that as of the end of august, there were as many as 48 models in the pure electric vehicle market priced between 200,000 and 300,000 yuan, but only four models could achieve monthly sales of over 10,000 - tesla model 3 and model y, xiaomi su7 and zeekr 001.

if the energy form is not distinguished, there are a total of 128 models on sale in the price range of ledao l60, and in july, only 10 models had monthly sales of more than 10,000 units.

in the past two years, many chinese automakers have launched models that compete with tesla model y, and they are superior in terms of intelligence, battery life, hardware configuration and cost performance. but no product has yet achieved sales volume surpassing tesla. this "mediocre" tesla model, which has not been upgraded for five years, was still the global sales champion of a single model last year.

in the four-month pre-orders of ledao, about 39% of ledao l60 users have compared them with model y. however, ai tiecheng revealed that ledao's real strategy is to seize the market share of joint venture fuel vehicles with a price range of 150,000 to 200,000 yuan. through nio's unique baas solution, the final price of the first model will drop to around 150,000 yuan.

joint venture auto brands remain strong in this price segment. according to data from the china association of automobile manufacturers, from january to august, the year-on-year growth rate of fuel vehicles priced between 150,000 and 200,000 yuan reached 5.8%, the highest growth rate in the market segment.

ai tiecheng said, "there are not enough existing pre-order users who compare with fuel vehicles. we want to help these fuel vehicle owners to make a clear calculation. for products of the same price, the experience of ledao is three times better, and the cost of renting batteries plus monthly electricity bills, the cost of use is still lower than that of fuel vehicles."

for cost and efficiency reasons, ledao will share product development platforms, battery swap stations, manufacturing and supply chains with the nio brand. after the delivery of ledao l60, users can directly use more than 1,000 third-generation battery swap stations.

in the current automobile market environment that emphasizes resource integration, few companies are willing to spend a lot of money to deliver a new brand concept to users from 0 to 1. ideal and xiaopeng, which opened up new markets this year, chose to operate with a series of models, but nio insisted on brand differentiation.

the outside world is worried that ledao and nio will compete for the same group of consumers, but according to ai tiecheng, among the existing small-order user system, nio brand users account for less than 5%. nio brand will be more inclined to high-end business, while ledao is labeled as a family user.

the business strategy of the ledao brand is more practical. the weilai brand built luxuriously decorated central stores in shanghai landmarks, but the layout of ledao stores in shanghai is mostly outside the central ring, and its average decoration cost does not exceed 1 million yuan.

another concern of investors is that ledao may repeat the mistakes of nio's production capacity. ai tiecheng told jiemian news that in order to achieve the ability to deliver 20,000 vehicles per month, ledao procurement and quality team members began to be stationed at suppliers to prepare for the work since the first half of 2022.

ledao expects to have a production capacity ramp-up period of 3 to 4 months, but has not chosen to produce in advance to achieve the goal of delivering more than 10,000 vehicles in the first month. ai tiecheng believes that the decision-making cycle for family users to buy a car is 3 to 6 months, especially for new brands, which takes time to recognize.

the final pricing of the ledao l60 has been finalized for the last two versions. ai tiecheng is also about to hand in his first answer sheet after his transformation into the automotive industry. he looked calm, "the world's number one model in the next era must be a chinese one. if it is a chinese brand, why can't it be ledao?"

the following is some of the questions that ai tiecheng answered from jiemian news and other media, and some of the content has been edited and adjusted.

ledao l60 is comparable to tesla and surpasses tesla

q: when you first joined in 2021, your goal was to make an electric version of volkswagen and toyota. now, three years later, this car has officially come out. have there been any new changes in the positioning and understanding of this project during this process?

ai tiecheng:it is more like a metaphor. when we made the definition, we used model y as an example. there is nothing shameful about it. in the era of gasoline cars, the rav4 and tiguan l were all excellent cars, but we will soon stop looking at these two cars. they are basically based on the tesla model y.

in fact, brother bin said in 2021 that the car would be 10% cheaper than it and its product would be better, so he called it "model y with battery swap", but netizens were smarter than us and called it "model y with fine decoration and larger battery swap". we still achieved the product positioning at that time very well.

q: in what areas did you feel you were determined to surpass model y at that time?

ai tiecheng:in fact, it comes down to a few words: safety, comfort, large space, intelligence, and the other is the cost of use. i often tell my team that we need to make main dishes and main dishes, rice and main dishes. we don’t do very low-frequency ones, which are very low-frequency for home users, so the l60’s product strength today fully reflects this point.

speaking of space, no one in the market today can do better than l60. including the recent traditional one-box suv, the headroom is not as good as mine. of course, the real underlying technology is actually driven by technology. we use the new generation of silicon carbide technology. the motor is very small but has great power. the 900v platform has higher voltage and lower current, so the wiring harness can be thinner, which greatly saves space.

q: many models on the market are developed based on model y, but they will not sell better than model y. what do you think is the winning point of ledao l60 after it is launched as another model benchmarked against model y?

ai tiecheng:the main reason is that it has been in use for many years and has not been upgraded for a long time. it was the first to enter the market and has the first-mover advantage. it has done well in terms of space and energy consumption. the founder's halo and the ability to launch rockets. tesla is still very popular among users.

but the iteration in our country is too fast. there may not be a product as powerful as ledao l60 in the market in the past. which one is safe, comfortable, spacious, and low-energy? in the era of fuel vehicles, for example, volkswagen and toyota are the first family fuel vehicles, and model y took about five years to become the world's first model. i think the next generation of the world's first model should be a chinese brand, so why can't it be ledao?

q: although ledao l60 was targeted at model y from the beginning of the project, baas can actually lower the price to around 150,000 yuan.

ai tiecheng:this is the last bastion of joint venture cars. the ratio of new energy vehicles to fuel vehicles has exceeded 50%, but the proportion of fuel vehicles in the 150,000 to 200,000 yuan market is high. we are watching this market.

if you drive a tiguan or rav4 for 20,000 kilometers a year, it costs 9,000 yuan. we enter its field, and our product experience is better than its, several generations ahead. the cost of renting batteries plus the monthly electricity bill is lower than the oil cost. the cost of use is lower than its, and the experience is higher than its. this is what ledao l60 really focuses on, and this is our biggest strategy.

q: what is the approximate ratio between the market share taken from model y and the market share taken from existing suvs?

ai tiecheng:the volume will be relatively large, which is the problem we need to solve. 39% of our small order users have compared model y, but few have compared it with fuel vehicles. users who may buy a car worth 160,000 or 70,000 yuan today may not have calculated the cost. i want to help them figure it out and tell them that the experience is 3 times better and the cost of use is lower. but this comparison did not happen today, and we will have a strategic direction.

ledao and weilai are not competing for the same users

q: although ledao and nio use the same technology, how do we consider making features different from nio?

ai tiecheng:weilai is a high-end brand. let me give you an example. in the past, land rover may have been high-end, but no one has ever compared the range rover and corolla, which one is more fuel-efficient, because it is a luxury car, it consumes a lot of fuel, but ordinary people can accept it. why is weilai's power consumption higher than ledao? its motor is bigger and stronger. the more consumers can perceive those things, the more we will be different. this depends on the positioning of the two brands and the different groups of people. ledao l60 also has a parent-child zone in the car system.

q: how is the relationship between the ledao brand and the nio brand discussed internally?

ai tiecheng:the nio brand will be more inclined towards high-end business, while our ledao is more focused on family users. in the long run, the technology flagship is the real luxury. nio must be a technology pioneer and it will make the ultimate innovation, but ledao may not necessarily be the most innovative one. nio can delegate some technology.

q: will there be a problem that these users first know about weilai and then ledao? they know weilai's high-quality services, but after they come to ledao, these services are not as good as before, which leads to a decline in their evaluation of ledao.

ai tiecheng:we see that less than 5% of all reservations are from users in the weilai system, but there may be more weilai users in may, and most of them are new users. we think this proportion will get lower and lower. back to the root, many people ask why ledao does not use the weilai brand, why there are two brands, it is to hope for differentiation.

we are very clear. if you have enough budget, buy nio. nio is the best smart pure electric car, no doubt about it. if you don’t have enough budget, then compare ledao, model y, and other cars.