One thing to say is that the manufacturing concept of current new energy vehicles, especially hybrid vehicles, is becoming more and more like mobile phones. No, the cell phone battery has just been upgraded, and now it’s in the car. Take a look.These new hybrid cars launched this year have all begun to use large batteries.The extended-range version of the 2024 Leap-Moon C11 has a maximum battery range of 300km. The Deep Blue S07 also uses 3C supercharging, which can reach a maximum range of 285km...
Although it is a bit less than those pure electric vehicles that often cost 600 or 700, you must know that we have always pursued the ideal of larger batteries and extended range. The previous L6 of the same level only had a maximum battery life of 212.
As for plug-in hybrids, the pure electric range of this year's new Denza Z9GT is almost catching up with the Ideal L6. The 25 Lynk & Co 08emp models produced by Geely also have a pure electric range of 245.
Not only are new cars equipped with large batteries, but the pure electric battery life of the same model of the Ideal L9 and new models has also increased from 215 to 280, an increase of more than 30%.
Some people in the industry have directly confirmed it. For example, Hu Chengtai, Avita’s vice president, said that the trend of extended-range vehicles is definitely “big batteries and small fuel tanks”.
Doesn't it sound reasonable? But I still have some violent comments as a negative reviewer:
Not only range-extended vehicles,Including plug-in mixing,Most hybrid vehicles will have smaller fuel tanks and larger batteries.
Source: New Energy Industry View
Let's just say that, the bad reviewer discovered that hybrid cars actually bring new anxiety about battery life.
First of all, we must admit that for pure electric vehicles, everyone is still quite worried about battery life.
McKinsey's "2024 China Automotive Consumer Insights" report stated that only 3% of car owners regretted buying pure electric vehicles in 2022, while the figure increased to 22% in 2023. A key issue here is the battery life and charging issues of pure electric vehicles.
Mainly because of battery life, PHEV/REEV has become the choice of most people. Source: McKinsey
Many people do not buy pure electric vehicles because of range anxiety, and instead buy hybrid vehicles that can use both gasoline and electricity..
But what a coincidence,Hybrid small battery,It has brought new anxiety to everyone.
Last year, Leapbo disclosed at the press conference that more than 68% of its users commuted within 50 kilometers in the city every day, and more than 70% of them used pure electric vehicles. Some media survey data even exceeded 92%.
After all, there are charging stations for short-distance travel, so who wants to refuel? Gas is so expensive...
But the problem is that if you keep running purely on electric power, the cruising range will be a bit overwhelming.
From the end of last year to September this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's "Catalogue of New Energy Vehicle Models Reduced or Exempted from Vehicle Purchase Tax" included 443 hybrid vehicles. More than 92.55% of the vehicles had a pure electric range of less than 200 kilometers, and 25.73% even had a battery life of less than 100 kilometers.
Although these 25.73% of hybrid vehicles generally have a range of 45-90 kilometers, their sales are still very high.
But even if you give them 100, the battery life really needs to be powered by pure electricity.If you are close to home, you may have to charge it once every two or three days. If you are far away from home, you have to charge it once a day. Who can bear this?
Sometimes it’s hard to queue up for charging
Of course, it is easy to solve this problem. Just make the battery bigger.
If you zoom in on all hybrid cars, you will find that hybrid cars with large batteries are popular.
. For example, Ideal, no matter how much you call it a refrigerator, color TV, or daddy car, it just sells well.
In the first 10 months of this year, Ideal sold 393,000 cars, a year-on-year increase of 38.2%, and monthly sales have basically remained around 50,000.
However, although the ideal is great, why don't other factories follow suit? The reason is simple, batteries are expensive!
It also needs a large battery, a refrigerator, a color TV, a car, etc., and it also needs good after-sales service. How can the cost of the whole thing be low? If I hadn't looked at the ideal data, I really wouldn't have known that there were so many rich people buying cars worth over RMB 300,000...
So when it comes to small battery manufacturers, they don’t mean to not give you larger ones, so you have to pay extra.
There's no way around it. Batteries are expensive now. A small battery costs more than 100,000 yuan. You have to pay extra to replace it with a larger one.
But there is another important reason:,For plug-in hybrid vehicles, it is actually more difficult to enlarge the battery.
mainThe design of plug-in hybrid vehicles is different from that of extended range vehicles., compared with the range extender, the plug-in hybrid engine is larger and more difficult.
It has its own research and development costs, and coupled with the size of this plug-in drive system, it is difficult to fit a large battery into a plug-in hybrid vehicle.
As for range-extended vehicles, they do not need to invest heavily in infrastructure like Tesla and NIO, nor do they need to develop complex engine systems. Ready-made domestic range extenders are also not expensive. The 1.5T costs 10,000 yuan, and the 1.2T three-cylinder version costs even several thousand yuan.
This also allows car companies on the extended-range route to spend a lot of money on it.user experience, it has a pure electric feel and no range anxiety, which is very attractive.
Although it is indeed difficult to build a large battery, the reviewer still definitely said that the trend will definitely become a large battery.
The reason is easy to say. The price of batteries has dropped!
Friends who follow the power battery industry are probably familiar with this matter. With the development of our domestic new energy industry, the industry's demand for batteries has increased significantly. Therefore, due to supply constraints at the beginning, there were not enough raw materials for lithium batteries, so batteries became more expensive.
As a result, by 2023, the demand for upstream lithium materials will beThe production scale has increased, production stocks increased, and power battery manufacturers also started price wars. Battery prices began to plummet.
How exaggerated is this drop? Taking last year’s data as an example, at the beginning of 2023, the prices of ternary lithium and lithium iron phosphate batteries were 1.07 yuan/Wh and 0.96 yuan/Wh respectively;
As a result, it fell to 0.49 yuan/Wh and 0.43 yuan/Wh by the end of the year.The drop reached about 55%, which is basically a cut in half.
By this year, although the price fluctuations are not so big, they are actually still falling slowly. In September this year, the prices of ternary lithium and lithium iron phosphate batteries dropped to 0.45 yuan/Wh and 0.35 yuan/Wh.
Success or failure is inevitable. At first, due to price restrictions, people could not use large-battery hybrids. Now that the price has been reduced, how can manufacturers let this opportunity pass?
The extended range of large batteries, which was originally only available in the 300,000 level, has been decentralized since 2023.Facts have proved that large batteries are still rare in the range of 100,000-200,000 yuan.
Let’s talk about Leapmo. In March this year, Leapmo sold 14,567 vehicles, a year-on-year increase of more than 136%; in October, it sold 38,177 vehicles in one month, ranking third among new forces.
Among the cars sold, the C10 and C11, two large-battery range-extended vehicles, accounted for 45%, of which the C11 sold tens of thousands in a single month.
You know, the gross profit margin of Zero Run in 2022 is -15.4%, and it is still losing money as it sells;
As a result, riding on the spring breeze of falling battery costs and taking advantage of the trend, after launching the extended-range vehicle, the company's gross profit margin turned positive in 2023, and its cash flow also changed from a loss to a positive 1.08 billion.
Everyone ridiculed it as "crossing the river by grasping the ideal" and "circling the red rice".But you can decide whether this turnaround is successful or not.
Judging from the data from the Passenger Car Association in recent years, although the growth rates of plug-in hybrids and pure electric vehicles have gradually increased this year, the most obvious trend is the popularity of large batteries with extended range, and the sales growth is greater than the previous two combined.
This is why Li Xiang said in November last year: "Chinese independent brands and car companies that are still insisting on multi-speed PHEV will switch to the extended-range technology route in the next one or two years."
Although many people criticized it at that time, isn't it true that Chery and Geely have also started to engage in single-speed cars now?Even An Conghui said in an interview that he would not rule out making extended-range hybrid vehicles in the future.
In fact, even plug-in hybrid cars in the price range of more than 200,000 yuan are now facing the difficulties and starting to develop larger batteries.
Geely's super electric hybrid, which is an extended-range plug-in hybrid, pure electric and pure gasoline four-in-one line, is now looking for ways to make the battery larger, such as the Lynk & Co 08emp mentioned at the beginning.
Even Toyota President Tsuneharu Sato from the neighboring island country can’t sit still., saying that this year they will develop a plug-in hybrid car with a pure electric range of at least 200 miles.
Not to mention the manufacturers of complete vehicles, even the upstream manufacturers of power batteries have begun to pay attention to making larger batteries for hybrid vehicles.
Ningde Times released a special battery for hybrid vehicles this year, with a range of 400km; and Honeycomb Energy, a subsidiary of Great Wall, is also launching its 800V hybrid fast-charging battery this year.
There is no way, everyone's demand for "use more electricity and less fuel" is so real and urgent. I just want a long pure electric range, and I also want to be able to refuel without mileage anxiety. I will buy whoever treats me well.
Therefore, in the future, regardless of whether it is a plug-in hybrid with extended range or a low price and high price, the trend of larger batteries will actually be adopted.
Consumers want both, so if you don’t give both as a manufacturer, you won’t be able to capture the hearts of consumers.
The teachers who have made a comeback from scratch are already there. Competition in the industry is so fierce, and Hayek will teach everyone how to behave.
But, that’s what it says,But we are not just saying that everyone who makes small batteries will die. This is too absolute.
For example, in the market of around 100,000 or even less than 100,000 yuan, even if the battery price drops again, the impact on this segment will not be very large. Because within this range, the cost of enlarging the battery is incomparable with increasing the fuel tank space.
For example, the Qin L of the fifth-generation DMI has a range of 2,000 kilometers. Compared with the Qin PLUS of the fourth-generation DMI, the fuel tank has increased by 17 liters, but the battery pack capacity has also shrunk. It is a purely large fuel tank and small battery route.
Compared with the Sylphy Lavida, which is also in this range, these cars not only have a lower acceptance threshold, but also have a green license for plugging in a small battery and are exempt from purchase tax. There are no restrictions on driving in some places, so there are definitely many people who like them.
In addition, there are some niche tracks that pursue performance and off-roading. Even if hybrid vehicles are used here, they will still prefer large fuel tanks.
For example, the hybrid version of the Great Wall Tank 400Hi4-T has a pure electric range of 105km, but the fuel tank reaches 70L. The pure electric range of the Warrior 800 is only 125km, but the fuel tank reaches 84L.This thing is still a range extension...
Therefore, in the final analysis, the direction of the industry is mainly determined by everyone's needs. As Guan Haitao said at the Guangzhou Auto Show,The automobile industry chain is essentially about the relationship between supply and demand.
In the past, the direction of the seller's market was larger, and we could only buy whatever joint venture cars were sold; but now with the rapid deployment of various new energy brands, the industry has gradually become a buyer's market, and manufacturers only produce what everyone needs.
Similarly, because most people’s demand for home hybrids is large batteries, manufacturers will launch such products;
With the changes in the supply chain, battery price reduction has become a trend, and the threshold for meeting demand is getting lower and lower. If the two go in both directions, it will form a trend in the industry.
Finally, seeing the missionaries here, what do you think will be the next trend?