Second tier luxury brands are facing unprecedented difficulties in the Chinese market - in addition to the common impact of the global shortage of chips on all car enterprises, they are also facing the dual pressure from traditional first-line luxury brands and new forces in car manufacturing; The slow pace of its electric transformation has ceded part of the market to independent brands with rising prices.
On April 21, Jaguar Land Rover and Lincoln both released their new cars. Among them, the new generation of Jaguar Land Rover range rover was officially launched in China; In the morning of that day, Lincoln completed the global debut of Lincoln star, its first pure electric concept car.
In the view of industry insiders, the action of the luxury brands that ranked ninth and eleventh in China's luxury car market last year on the same day is just one of the footnotes of the current difficult survival of second-line luxury brands in the Chinese market - the slow electrification process.
According to Lincoln's plan, three pure electric vehicles will be launched by 2025, so as to achieve the goal that the sales volume of pure electric vehicles in the global market accounts for more than 50%; The fourth pure electric vehicle will be available in 2026. Different from Lincoln's pure electric concept car, although the new generation of range rover was born in Jaguar Land Rover's EVA 2.0 electrification architecture, it is an out and out fuel vehicle, and Land Rover's first pure electric model may wait until 2024 at the earliest.
A little more radical than Lincoln and Jaguar Land Rover is Cadillac. After GM launched the ultium electric drive modular platform in March 2020, Cadillac's first pure electric vehicle lyriq was first released. However, there is little localization information about this new model, which will be officially opened in the U.S. market in May this year.
"Foreign funded enterprises can't say they are not good at grasping the technology of new energy vehicles, but the development cycle is too long, the reaction speed is too slow, and the traditional inertia is too large, so it's difficult to change their roles." Ouyang Minggao, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and vice president of China electric vehicle hundred people association, once issued a "warning" to foreign brands. In the view of academician Ouyang, they lack the main direction of attack in the new energy track, which has a lot of risks in the rapidly changing Chinese market.
"Warning" has been translated into realistic market performance. According to the statistics of the financial Associated Press, among the SUV models with an official guidance price of more than 300000 yuan in the first quarter of this year, including the main products of second-line luxury brands such as Volvo XC60, Cadillac xt5 and Jaguar Land Rover Discovery sports, the sales volume fell year-on-year; What surpasses them in the ranking is the pure electric models of new car making forces such as ideal one and Weilai es6ec6.
In the range of 200000 yuan and 300000 yuan, the same story is also being staged Byd Company Limited(002594) Han and Xiaopeng P7 both surpassed Cadillac CT5, Lincoln adventurer and Volvo s60l in the first quarter.
The high-profile product strategy offered by the new forces of car making in the early stage of entering the market has not only "stolen" part of the market of second-line luxury brands, but also quietly eroded the share of some luxury cars such as BBA. The latter further intensifies the competition between them, forces the traditional first-line luxury brands to make changes, and then transmits the pressure back to the second-line brands.
According to market data, in the first quarter of this year, luxury brands accounted for 29% of the top ten used car brands that replaced ideal one. Among them, the user replacement proportion of BBA accounts for 21.5% of all brands, and the top three replacement are 8% of BMW, 7% of Mercedes Benz and 6.5% of Audi.
"Intelligent electrification reconstructs the game rules defined by the original BBA." In the opinion of Liu Tao, CO CEO of Zhiji automobile, intellectualization gives intelligent cars unlimited imagination in intelligent scene mining, which can bring innovative experience to users, which gives new brands new opportunities.
A few days before the official launch of the new range rover in the Chinese market, Ryan Miller, senior global manager of Jaguar Land Rover, said publicly that users' demand for the electric version of the range rover largely depends on the market. "I think there is demand, but I don't think it is a lot of demand." Ryan Miller said that in the near future, users' demand for electric vehicles is unlikely to exceed that of standard internal combustion engine models.
Such judgment is affecting the electrification transformation of Jaguar Land Rover. Although the pure circuit range rover will be launched in 2024 and Jaguar will completely transform into a pure electric brand in 2025, before that, second-line luxury car brands, including Jaguar Land Rover, will pay a price for their slow electrification process.
