Ten years ago, the global new energy vehicle industry just started. It is generally predicted in the industry that the penetration rate of domestic new energy vehicles will only reach about 25% around 2025, and pessimists even think that the penetration rate will not reach 20%. Xpeng Motors, Weilai Automobile and LI, who have entered the new energy automobile industry one after another, are also called "three fools of new forces". Until 2019, they are still ridiculed as "making cars by PPT".
Today, ten years later, Xpeng Motors, the earliest of Wei Xiaoli’s three schools, took the lead in celebrating its 10th birthday. In the past ten years, G3, P7, P5, G9, G6, X9 and other vehicles have come out one after another, which has enabled Xpeng Motors to achieve a stable monthly sales volume of over 10,000, and everything is developing in a good direction, but He Xiaopeng has sent an urgent signal.
At the launch conference of MONA M03 in Tucki on August 27th, He Xiaopeng said,Including self-owned brands, joint venture brands and foreign-funded independent car brands, there may be only seven mainstream brands in China market in the next decade, and the annual sales of 1 million AI cars are only the final tickets.
In the follow-up group interview, He Xiaopeng was even more blunt.In 2025 and 2026, the decline of fuel vehicles in the domestic market will be more serious than this year, and in order to compete for the market, the bloody price war will continue until 2026.In order to cope with the next competition, Xpeng Motors announced its plan for the next ten years, and produced a sincere new product-Mona M03. This new product, which is highly anticipated by Xpeng Motors, can help Xpeng Motors win a good start in the new decade?
The configuration of MONA M03 in Tucki has been published in 7788.
The car has a length, width and height of 4780×1896×1445mm and a wheelbase of 2815 mm. Although it is a "standard" A-class car size, it provides a 621L oversized trunk that many medium-sized SUVs do not have. As for the locomotive system, Tucki MONA M03 is equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 chip and 16GB memory, which makes the system smooth and silky, and supports four-tone speech recognition.
The most surprising thing is the price of the car. Tucki MONA M03 offers three versions: 515 long battery life version, 620 long battery life version and 580 long battery life Max version, which are priced at 119,800 yuan, 129,800 yuan and 155,800 yuan respectively. The standard version will be delivered in September, and the Max version will be delivered early next year. The range of pure electric A-class cars in the early 100,000 s is generally only 300-400 km, and some of them can reach about 500 km, but Tucki MONA M03 has achieved the highest 620 km.
Of course, the most anticipated thing about this car is smart driving. Three years ago, He Xiaopeng said that no car company could equip a 150,000-yuan car with high-level intelligent driving, but three years later, Tucki did. MONA M03 comes standard with 2 millimeter-wave radars, 12 ultrasonic radars and 7 cameras. The standard version can achieve L2-level assisted driving, while the Max version can achieve high-level intelligent driving that is "easy to use all over the country".
Xpeng Motors is the first automobile enterprise in China to realize the mass production of BEV+Transformer architecture, and it is leading all the way from NGP to XNGP, but now Tucki has completely subverted the past smart driving scheme. Tucki MONA M03′ s intelligent driving technology is based on the end-to-end AI big model, which breaks through the constraints of regular algorithm and cancels the pure vision scheme of laser radar, thus reducing the cost of intelligent driving technology in Tucki. In addition, the limit adjustment of battery life makes the energy consumption of MONA M03 in Tucki only 11.5kWh per 100 kilometers, and further reduces the battery cost, so as to equip the 150,000-yuan model with high-level intelligent driving.
He Xiaopeng mentioned in the group interview that the pure vision scheme can realize L3-class intelligent driving, and other vehicles may gradually cancel the laser radar in the future. However, for the sake of safety, L4-class intelligent driving vehicles will not cancel the laser radar for the time being.
In addition, MONA appeared as an independent brand in the initial publicity of Xpeng Motors, but later it became a series of Tucki. He Xiaopeng’s explanation is that all models will use a system, such as smart driving, P series and MONA series are no different, and models with or without laser radar are also the same end-to-end smart driving scheme, so there is no need to open a brand separately.
In order to develop MONA M03, Xpeng Motors invested 4 billion yuan, and the research and development time was as long as four years. Considering the appearance, configuration, size and other factors, MONA M03 has not failed to live up to the high expectations of all employees in Xpeng Motors, and has the strength to compete with all categories of vehicles with a price of 100,000-150,000 yuan. Only 52 minutes after its launch, the MONA M03 in Tucki is set to exceed 10,000 yuan, which also proves the car’s appeal to ordinary consumers.
Xiaotong believes that the biggest significance of the sales of MONA M03 in Tucki is that it can inspire Xpeng Motors to continue to do difficult and correct things.. For example, for the study of high-level intelligent driving, Xpeng Motors has always been "arrogant and widowed" for many years. It was not until the other car companies followed suit in recent years that everyone began to understand the long-term layout of Xpeng Motors.However, we should also see that although Xpeng Motors has made some achievements, it is still very difficult for Xpeng Motors to get tickets for the finals in the face of the cruel competition market and traditional car companies with rich financial resources and technical background.
MONA M03, Tucki, is believed to boost Xpeng Motors’s morale. In the next decade, Xpeng Motors will also be more confident to continue its "long-term" thinking and move forward to the goal of "global AI automobile company".
Facing the next decade, He Xiaopeng put forward three routes at the press conference.
First, adhere to self-research of technology and take a long-term route.
He Xiaopeng said that the end-to-end big model has greatly improved the visual perception ability of smart driving technology, and it is planned to realize door-to-door smart driving of light radar and light map by the end of the fourth quarter of this year; In the second quarter of next year, L3-like intelligent driving technology will be realized, and the takeover will be less than once every 100 kilometers; In 2026, when some low-speed scenes are realized, people are not driving in the driver’s seat.
In order to speed up the development of pure vision intelligent driving technology, Xpeng Motors has also introduced a new generation of Tucki AI Hawkeye Vision Scheme, which can increase the perception distance by 125% and improve the recognition speed by 40%, and with the blessing of LOFIC architecture, it is not afraid of dark light, backlight and poor light. This technology will be launched by Tucki P7+ in the fourth quarter of this year.
More important news may be that Turing, a self-developed chip specially designed for AI model in Tucki, was also successfully streamed on August 23rd. This chip has a 40-core processor and dual NPU, and integrates the neural network domain-specific architecture, so one chip can support three chips in the field of autonomous driving.
Based on these technologies, in the future, Xpeng Motors can not only improve all aspects of product capabilities, but also optimize costs and relieve the pressure of Xpeng Motors in the face of price wars.
Second, open up overseas markets and earn money from foreigners.
China’s automobile industry started late. In the past, it could only produce automobiles through joint ventures with overseas automobile companies, and the market was exchanged for technology, but now the situation is reversed. Tucki and Volkswagen have contacted and cooperated for many times, and Tucki has exported technology, deeply empowering mass products. At the same time, Xpeng Motors will also enter overseas markets, with the goal that half of its sales in the next decade will come from overseas.
This year, Tucki will enter more than 30 countries and regions, and develop right-hand steering vehicles, focusing on the European market and expanding globally. However, Xpeng Motors understands that with its own size, it is too risky to build factories overseas independently, and cooperation with foreign companies is the safest way. During the group visit, He Xiaopeng denied the news reported by Bloomberg that Xpeng Motors had set up factories overseas, and said that the first thing to do was to bring Smart Drive and Supercharge to overseas markets.
In 2023, China surpassed Japan to become the world’s largest automobile exporter, and domestic new energy automobile enterprises are also accelerating the development of overseas markets. Xpeng Motors has reached a cooperation with Volkswagen, and with the help of Volkswagen’s influence and technical strength, it may be able to accelerate the pace of developing overseas markets.
Third, Tucki will expand its business by adding flying cars and robots.
In addition to exploring new markets, Tucki is actively developing new businesses. Apart from new energy vehicles, Tucki’s most famous business is undoubtedly flying cars, and the previously released "land carrier" will be pre-sold in the fourth quarter of this year.
The domestic low-altitude economy is developing rapidly, and Xpeng Motors is one of the few enterprises involved in flying cars among the new forces of building cars. Once the low-altitude flight control is liberalized, Xpeng Motors, which has the upper hand, has the opportunity to rapidly increase its revenue.
On the other hand, Tucki is still developing robots, and hopes that people in the future can enjoy new energy vehicles, flying cars and robot services. On October 24th this year, Xpeng Motors will announce more information about the second generation humanoid robot.
RoboTaxi is also in Xpeng Motors’s plan, but Xpeng Motors will only make products and will provide self-driving cars for global taxi companies, and will not participate in the operation. He Xiaopeng even thinks that entrepreneurs can buy dozens of Xpeng Motors to run RoboTaxi.
It is worth mentioning that all pure electric cars, flying cars and robots in Xpeng Motors will be equipped with Turing chips in the future. It can be said that Turing chip will be an important part of Xpeng Motors’s grand blueprint.
The competition in the new energy automobile industry is becoming more and more fierce, and even the old and strong ones may fall behind.Xpeng Motors chose to focus on technology research and development, while exploring overseas markets and developing new businesses, so as to be as deep-rooted as possible and enhance the enterprise’s ability to resist risks.
Tucki’s financial report shows that the revenue in the second quarter of this year was 8.111 billion yuan, up 60.22% year-on-year, and the net profit attributable to the mother was-1.285 billion yuan, down 54.19% year-on-year, which is not far from turning losses into profits.The arrival of MONA M03 in Tucki may be an opportunity for Xpeng Motors to make a profit, and it may also be the beginning for Xpeng Motors to grow into one of the seven giants.
"There will only be seven domestic mainstream car companies in the next decade" is not He Xiaopeng’s word. Many industry leaders such as Yu Chengdong, Zhu Jiangming and Musk have expressed similar views. Xiaotong believes that there are two reasons for this.First of all, with the advent of the Internet era, information can be quickly dispersed, and car companies with high influence can further enhance their popularity and speed up their headedness with the help of the Internet.
Secondly, the arrival of the era of autonomous driving will enlarge the technical gap between car companies.End-to-end intelligent driving technology requires a high amount of data, and the cost is not low. Yu Chengdong thinks that there are not many car companies in China that have the ability to complete the research and development of autonomous driving technology. After the amount of data is backward, the car companies in the second or even third echelon will be quickly widened by the car companies in the first echelon of smart driving technology.
It is probably an optimistic view that domestic mainstream car companies keep seven. As He Xiaopeng said, the annual sales of 1 million vehicles are only tickets for the finals. China is a huge market with an annual sales volume of 30 million vehicles. Only car companies with an annual sales volume of more than 3 million vehicles in the future can be called giants in China.
In terms of sales volume, Xpeng Motors is hard to compare with traditional car companies. Fortunately, the new energy automobile industry is still in the stage of rapid development, and any automobile enterprise still has opportunities. If you choose the right direction, it is possible to achieve a sales breakthrough.
Many new car-making forces are busy rushing to the high end, but they ignore that the domestic car market share is over 50% within 200,000 yuan.The launch of MONA M03 in Xpeng Motors is essentially to create a coupe that young people can afford. In the case of a certain price, smart driving may not be as important as space and chassis, but if a car has the same product space and chassis, and adds a high-level smart driving, then this car is naturally very attractive.
MONA M03 has created a good start for the journey of Xpeng Motors’s new forces, but whether Tucki can expect a smooth development in general depends on the next products of Xpeng Motors’s P series, G series and X series.In the fourth quarter soon, Tucki P7+ may bring us more surprises.
