According to Reuters, on September 13, Beijing time, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivered her fourth "State of the Union Address" to the European Parliament and stated that the European Commission would launch a countervailing investigation into Chinese electric vehicles.

"The global electric car market is flooded with affordable Chinese cars. Their prices are so low because they receive huge state subsidies, and this is distorting our market," von der Leyen said.For Chinese electric vehicle companies represented by BYD, this is obviously a big blow.


European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen

But judging from the performance of Chinese cars in the European market, the 65-year-old female politician seems to be overly worried. In the first half of this year, China exported about 350,000 new energy vehicles to Europe, accounting for 25% of the total sales of 1.419 million new energy vehicles in Europe during the same period. Although the market share seems to be quite high, Wu Songquan, senior chief expert at the China Automotive Industry Center and chief engineer of the China Automotive Strategy and Policy Research Center, pointed out that although China’s total automobile exports are huge, its share in most single markets is relatively small.In addition, there are a large number of Chinese automobile brands, and compared with multinational brands such as Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea, they have not yet achieved the same status.

This can be seen from the sales list of Chinese pure electric vehicles in 14 European countries in August this year released by @First Electric. Even for domestic electric vehicles that have achieved "big sales" in some narrative logic, their brands are still European.


Obviously, compared to familiar Chinese brands like BYD and Weixiaoli, Europeans prefer "foreign-flavored" MG, Volvo and Polestar.And inBYD, which dominates the domestic market, ranks fourth among domestically produced cars in 14 major European countries.

So the question is, why are domestically produced electric vehicles, which have set off a wave of substitution for fuel vehicles in China, unable to be sold in Europe?

How can we raise an electric car with enough water and soil?

Of course, Chinese car brands are not limited to poor sales in overseas markets. According to the sales ranking data of Dianchedi, in August this year, the electric vehicles of German car brands encountered Waterloo in China. In August this year, none of the five electric vehicles sold by Beijing Benz sold more than a thousand. The worst among them is EQC, with monthly sales of only one unit; Audi's only Q4e-tron sales reached 2,301 units, while the other three electric vehicles together sold just over 200 units.


In contrast, only BMW and Volkswagen, which have launched price cuts, had great sales in August. Among them, the former relied on the BMW i3 with a price reduction of more than 120,000 yuan, allowing the monthly sales of electric vehicles to exceed 7,500 units; while the latter reduced the price of the ID.3 to 162,800 yuan (guide price), allowing the single-bike sales of this car to approach 8,000 units. From this point of view, the electric vehicles of German brands that used to be high-end and luxurious in the era of fuel vehicles did not perform well in the Chinese automobile market.

Of course, brand is a decisive factor that leads to the poor sales performance of electric vehicles in China and Germany in the other market. After all, Chinese car brands have not had a high presence in European and American countries for a long time. As for German electric vehicles, due to their lack of product strength and cost performance, they have not gained a good reputation in the Chinese automobile market as they did in the era of fuel vehicles.

A while ago, while attending the IAA Auto Show in Munich, Bavaria, Germany, the author drove Mercedes-Benz's new plug-in hybrid E-Class on several mini "self-driving tours" in Germany. During the process, the author found that excluding the "cliché" topic of brand factors, the huge differences in traffic environment and consumer car usage scenarios between China and Europe (especially Germany) may no longer be suitable for car companies to "conquer the world" with one car.

The first thing I want to talk about is the car usage scene.According to the survey of the "2023 National Major Cities Commuting Monitoring Report" released by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, the China Urban Planning and Design Institute, and Baidu Maps, the average one-way commuting distances in China's megacities (first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen) and megacities (provincial capitals in central and eastern provinces, developed cities) are 9.6 kilometers and 8.6 kilometers respectively. Among them, Beijing has the longest one-way commuting distance at 11.7 kilometers. It can be seen that the vast majority of Chinese people commute to and from get off work within the same city.

In contrast, Germans face more intercity and even intercontinental commuting. Taking the Weibo content released by @ German Embassy in China as an example, 48% of office workers in the country live in the suburbs and drive or take trains to the city center for work every day. In large cities such as Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich and Stuttgart, the number of people living outside the city is even as high as 60%.


As shown in the figure, the cyan, blue and dark blue areas with a commuting distance of more than 19 kilometers account for more than half of the area in Germany.

But in comparison, the average commuting time of German people is much shorter than that of Chinese people. According to @ German Embassy in China, only about one-third of the working population in the country has a one-way commute of more than 30 minutes. In comparison, the commuting times in my country's megacities and megacities are 40 minutes and 36 minutes respectively.

It can be seen that compared with our country, the daily commuting distance of German people is longer and the time is shorter. It can be inferred from this that when driving to and from get off work in Germany, the probability of traffic jams is not as serious as in China.

Secondly, the road traffic environment is different.When driving in cities in my country, most car drivers have to pass through urban roads or urban expressways with strict speed limits. In megacities, road sections that serve as connecting lines often face severe congestion during morning and evening peak hours.


“Welcome to Guomao Bridge”

In contrast, Germany's suburban highways tend to have low traffic volumes and fast traffic speeds. I believe that friends who pay attention to cars have heard about the highways with no speed limits in Germany. However, contrary to common sense, the highway sections without speed limits actually exist in large sections on national highways such as the A8 and A9.Like the A952, the connecting line connecting the A95 highway in Tutzing, a wealthy area around Munich, also has an unrestricted highway section of less than 5 kilometers.


The red circle marked by the author is the unrestricted section of the A952 highway.

In other words, when the Germans set up unrestricted road sections, they completely adopt the "seek every opportunity" model. That is, as long as the distance between the two ramps meets the standards, designers will try to allow drivers to drive without speed limits in order to improve traffic efficiency.


Pay attention to the sign passing by on the right side of the screen. It is a sign indicating no speed limit.

For drivers like me, who have been driving in China before, the most intuitive difference between German highways is that if you have to rush to and from get off work, your "undivided attention" is required here. Because on the one hand, you need to seize the "fleeting" unrestricted road sections and speed up quickly in order to shorten your commuting time; on the other hand, when driving at super high speed, other road participants will leave you much less reaction time than the 90 km/h situation on the North Fifth Ring Road.

In order to protect you and your car from an accident at a speed of 200 kilometers per hour, you must be very alert.

More importantly, in this case, driving really becomes a very exciting and interesting thing. And because of the faster speed, the impact of the road environment and vehicle performance on the dynamic performance of a car will be amplified. At this time, you will be more aware of whether the high-speed performance of the car you are driving is excellent.

Whether the steering direction is accurate, whether the power output is continuous in the range of more than 150 km/h, whether the body shape is conducive to reducing wind noise, whether the suspension can achieve a good balance between accurately transmitting road feel and filtering vibrations... The most important thing is whether the vehicle's energy reserve can prevent people from feeling anxious during long-distance high-speed driving.

It is precisely these tests that have stumped domestic electric vehicles.

Are the selling points of Chinese electric vehicles “useless” in Germany?

In Germany, the author and my colleagues took a test drive of the NIO EL7 (also known as the domestic ES7), which was launched in many European countries last year. On a highway with no speed limit, the top speed of this car is limited to 200 km/h, and the acceleration feeling is no longer obvious in the range above 150 km/h. You know, the power and top speed of this car are already at the "ceiling" level for domestic electric vehicles.

After driving for a period of time, the vehicle's power consumption per 100 kilometers actually reached close to 30kWh. Obviously, if you drive on highways like the A8 and A9 that run across the country and have long-distance unrestricted roads, this electric vehicle with a standard configuration of 75kWh will bring users range anxiety.

Not to mention that even the CEOs of BMW and Mercedes-Benz admit that Germany’s charging infrastructure still lags far behind China.You know,Most highway service areas in Germany do not have supercharging piles installed.Therefore, Chinese car companies, which generally tend to build SUVs, have no advantage at all in terms of energy consumption. Not to mention, domestic electric vehicles defined based on domestic operating conditions of up to 130 km/h have disadvantages compared to German vehicles in terms of chassis, power and high-speed performance.


If you replace the car with "the best SUV under 5 million", the fuel consumption/power consumption may be even more impressive.

To make matters worse, while the disadvantages of domestically produced electric vehicles have been magnified, their advantages have also been "diminished" in foreign countries.

In addition to the cost-effectiveness of current domestic electric vehicles, their advantages over German electric vehicles mainly focus on the following two points: basically realizing standard high-end intelligent driving functions, and a rich intelligent cockpit ecology. But these two points are not so practical in the common commuting scenes of German people.

First of all, it is the intelligent driving function that car companies have invested a lot of effort in developing. At present, most domestic car companies' speed limits for assisted driving functions are limited to the upper limit of China's road speed limit, which is 130 kilometers per hour (10% over speed). In fact, even Tesla, which was born in the United States, has a maximum speed limit of only 85 miles per hour (approximately 136.79 kilometers per hour) for its FSD (fully autonomous driving) function. At the author's driving speed, it is obvious that the intelligent driving system cannot help.

What's more, you can't trust the steering wheel to the intelligent driving system at this speed.


At the same time, even if Huawei, Xpeng and other companies currently have technological advantages in urban pilot assisted driving, I am afraid that it will not be able to take off in Germany.

In the urban areas of Munich and Stuttgart, the author witnessed the true "German efficiency". The picture below shows the construction site of the Ludwigsbrcke Bridge, an important thoroughfare connecting Munich's Old Town and New Town across the River Onten (Isar). According to the tour guide who was traveling with him, the construction site of this bridge had started long before the epidemic began, and there is no sign of completion yet.

Here, the original two-way four lanes have been divided into two lanes. Piles and barriers are everywhere and their positions change irregularly. This is an absolute nightmare for most of the current intelligent driving systems that still rely on high-precision maps.


At the same time, Stuttgart's central station is also a typical "hell scene". This station located in the city center, like old train stations in many domestic cities, is also undergoing underground renovation. According to travelers, the Central Station project has lasted for ten years, and the completion date may have already reached the fourth decade of the 21st century. On these road sections, even an intelligent driving system like Tesla FSD that does not rely on high-precision maps may find it difficult to find a way out for yourself.


Not to mention, the narrow roads in urban areas in Germany and even Europe are subject to temporary traffic control from time to time due to various activities, prohibiting the passage of motor vehicles.

In terms of smart cockpit, this function actually relies heavily on smart driving. A fellow well-known media influencer mentioned in a casual chat that the most common thing he does during his daily commute is to look at his car and mobile phone from time to time after turning on smart driving on a congested urban ring road.Although this type of behavior is illegal and not worth promoting, it is indeed a common practice among most domestic smart car users.

But in Germany, on urban roads with "passionate" highways and "irregular" construction, there is really not much room for intelligent driving. On this basis, the value and benefits of smart cockpits to users have also been linearly compressed. After all, what is the use of such a large car screen when the only common functions are navigation and audio listening?

Of course, some people may ask, will Germans, like Chinese users, use large screens to watch karaoke in their cars?


"Yeah, who doesn't need a projector in their car?"

Let’s not talk about whether people in other parts of the world like KTV as an art form except East Asians. I believe everyone admits that if you can watch football at home or in a bar, no one will like the small space in the car. As we all know, Germany has a world-famous beer and bar culture, and the country’s per capita living area has reached 48.4 square meters, with little regional difference.

In comparison, the per capita living area in my country is just over 41 square meters, and there is a huge gap between urban and rural areas.According to the "China Census Yearbook-2020" released by the National Bureau of Statistics, the per capita living area in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong Province differs from the average by up to nearly 9 square meters.

9 square meters, far larger than the cockpit area of ​​a car. To be honest, if everyone lived in big houses like Europeans and Americans, who would be willing to watch football in the car?


Write at the end:

In the past few years, when launching EQS and EQE in China, Mercedes-Benz always emphasized that its products have "low wind resistance" and "accurate battery life"; on the Audi e-tron, the company even "crazy" only released 88% of the total power for users to use; and on the Porsche Taycan, the manufacturer even equipped the low-end rear-wheel drive model with a 2-speed gearbox to allow users to drive at a top speed of 250 km/h...

At that time, many people said they "could not understand" this kind of approach by German manufacturers. However, through the author's previous analysis, you can probably feel that when German manufacturers build electric vehicles, they obviously prioritize development based on local user scenarios.

Not to mention, the "weak" smart cockpits and smart driving of German cars are largely the result of manufacturers' insights into the needs of users in the local market. After all, no matter how much a manufacturer pursues the ultimate, it will be difficult to invest more resources in users' low-frequency needs.

From this perspective, global allocation of R&D resources and allowing local talents to develop "specially supplied" smart electric vehicles based on local needs has become the only way for car companies to ensure the sales of their products in the new era. This is why we have seen that German electric vehicles have announced the establishment of software research and development centers in China and actively cooperated with domestic manufacturers to build new vehicles.


BMW Group’s China R&D center built in Shanghai

But how many domestic car companies are willing and able to do this in Germany?

Not to mention, European politicians have already sounded the 12-minute alarm about Chinese electric cars that have not yet exploded in sales.