Xia Yiping does not need to ＂sell badly＂, and Ji Yue 07 should not be ＂underestimated＂ any more.

Author |Wang bin

Xia Yiping, CEO of Jiyue Automobile, didn’t cry at the press conference this time. On September 10th, Extreme Yue released the second model, Extreme Yue 07. After a limited time discount, the price was 199,900 yuan, which was quite competitive.

This may be the biggest press conference in the history of Vietnam. The venue of the conference was chosen in the Capital Gymnasium, and nearly 2,000 media reporters, industry partners and car owners’ representatives were present. Baidu Li Yanhong, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited Zeng Yuqun and Weilai Automobile Li Bin were invited to the scene. Li Shufu of Geely was unable to attend, but also specially recorded a video to congratulate him.

Li Bin, Li Yanhong and Zeng Yuqun.

Extreme Vietnam launched its first model, Extreme Vietnam 01, in October last year, and its sales volume was poor in the first half of this year, with a minimum of 100 units sold in a single month. However, after June, the sales volume picked up, and the sales volume doubled continuously in the past two months. In August, the sales volume has exceeded 2,000 units.

The fierce competition in China’s automobile industry far exceeds that in other parts of the world, and Xia Yiping is quite excited about the extreme success in breaking through the trough. He cried at the scene when he was interviewed by the media group half a month ago, and his voice choked.

This question was asked again in the media group interview after the 07 press conference. Xia Yiping was more confident this time. He said that the tears were really a true feeling, not for any traffic. He laughed a few times and said that if it was really for traffic, he should cry at the press conference of Extreme Vietnam 07. "Hundreds of media are present, and the traffic effect may be better."

Xia Yiping has great confidence in Extreme Yue 07. At the press conference, he used words such as "the strongest smart car on the planet", "Model 5 that Tesla has not yet built" and "the most cost-effective pure electric car" to describe Extreme Yue 07, believing that it is competitive in the market.

Jiyue 07

The pure electric car market of 200,000-300,000 yuan is the most competitive price segment for the new car-making forces. Extreme Yue 07 faces many strong competitors, including Tesla Model 3, Xiaomi SU7 and Huawei Zhijie S7.

Xia Yiping didn’t disclose the specific sales forecast of Extreme Yue 07, only expressed the hope that the sales volume of Extreme Yue will continue to climb in the coming months. They plan to release the next new car at the Guangzhou Auto Show at the end of the year or the Beijing Auto Show next year.

He said that it is not yet possible to say exactly whether it is the turning point of the sales volume, but at least they know how to do it, "very clearly know how to do it."

The core problem solved by Extreme Yue Automobile in the past few months is how to let consumers know this brand. This intelligent automobile brand, jointly built by Baidu and Geely, was always called Jidu Automobile in the first two years of its establishment. It was not until August last year that it was renamed Extreme Yue. Two months later, Extreme Yue 01 was listed.

Xia Yiping said that there was no time for any brand to store water before they officially went public. Many users see their stores in the mall, and their first reaction is not to see how the car is, but to know nothing about the brand. They had to use huge fonts on the publicity board of the store, which was jointly created by Baidu and Geely.

This situation improved after May this year, one of the reasons is that Xia Yiping went to the stage more intensively. It is the trend of this year that the CEOs of car companies go off to do marketing in person. Countless CEOs learn how to shoot short videos, broadcast live and send Weibo from scratch, but few succeed, and often the novelty of a few months passes and then falls silent.

Xia Yiping didn’t want to make a video at first. He is a technical background, has worked in the communication and automobile industries for more than ten years, won the China Excellent Patent Award, and still holds at least 40 invention patents. One of his most well-known experiences is his participation in the founding of mobike. He is the co-founder of mobike, but also the CTO in charge of technology.

People with technical backgrounds often believe that products can speak for themselves, but this logic has encountered problems in Ji Yue. He said in a group interview with the media after the press conference of Extreme Vietnam 07 that the extreme Vietnam is not born with 1 billion users like other brands, and they need more efforts.

"We didn’t do badly at the 01 press conference, maybe it’s just that my speech skills are more refined now, and there is no problem with the communication after that press conference. The only variable is that no one knows about us."

He said that cars are not like ordinary consumer electronics. Ordinary people don’t go to car stores if they have nothing to do. There is a long decision-making process between users knowing the brand and deciding to enter the store for a test drive. "It is very difficult."

From the end of May, Xia Yiping began to shoot short videos intensively. He set himself a goal to do a live broadcast once a week and shoot a video a day. In the past three months, he has updated at least 137 short videos and made at least 20 live broadcasts. In June alone, he made 80 short videos.

Xia Yiping’s Tik Tok account

At the end of each press conference, he often has to face the owner for an hour of live broadcast. On September 10th, the launch conference of Extreme Yue 07 lasted for 2 hours, and the media group interview lasted for more than 1 hour. He immediately made an 1-hour live broadcast, and was busy until after zero.

Many CEOs will go through several rounds of packaging when they go to the stage. Most of the bosses’ speeches are cautious, and Xia Yiping seems a little stunned-he can talk about almost any sensitive issues.

Some time ago, their employees commented that Xiaomi Automobile caused controversy, and he specially recorded a video to explain it. Online celebrity, the car ring, shouted that his marketing was not good, and he also responded with a video and stood up straight. At an event, Yu Chengdong of Huawei questioned that the current level of the media’s intellectual driving competition was not good enough, and it was not fair and objective enough. He also sat in the conference room and listed the refuting reasons one by one. In the intellectual driving competition organized by an automobile media, Ji Yue and the media participated in it, and Ji Yue won the first place in several cities.

It is difficult to measure how much of these broadcasts actually translate into sales. So far, his Tik Tok account has only 49,000 fans, not a fraction of Lei Jun’s 29.18 million.

But at least the sales of Extreme Vietnam 01 are picking up. Since June, the monthly delivery volume of Extreme Yue 01 has been rising from 444 units, reaching 2,117 units in August, an increase of 108% from the previous month. Xia Yiping said that they now have a happy worry-the delivery cycle has become longer, and he has to constantly appease the owners in the live broadcast and make a special trip to the factory late at night to urge the production capacity to increase.

Extremely more than the sales in the past three months

Extreme Yue 07, which went public yesterday, experienced a longer exposure. In the past few months, Xia Yiping has dismantled 07 from the aspects of appearance, performance, battery and intelligent driving. The method he used is not to shoot a promotional film or advertise, which is common in the automobile industry, but to do the test directly.

For example, users are worried about the battery safety of trams, and they directly arrange a battery shooting experiment. The battery of Extreme Yue 07 has not been penetrated and caught fire after several rounds of shooting.

For example, the car of Extreme Yue didn’t use the door handle, and many people shouted on the Internet that it was not safe enough. He made several field tests to prove it-a freezing test at MINUS 18 degrees, a front-rear and side collision test in the automobile laboratory, and a 20-meter high slope rolling test. These tests are expensive, and the car door can still be opened normally under all kinds of violence.

Collision test of polar cross 07

Zhijia live broadcast, he did more. At first, he didn’t have any marketing concept. He often ran to the store alone when he was free, borrowed a car and turned on his mobile phone to do live broadcast. Later, he knew to do propaganda and have a concept. In August, after Jiyue held a conference on intelligent driving technology in Chengdu, he took the team to Chongqing, which is famous for its 8D magic, to measure the intelligent driving level of Jiyue. He has confidence in his own car, and he even put forward an idea, hoping to organize the CEOs of all car companies to test each other’s smart driving.

This is a "stupid method" that is not very pleasing but real. However, users like to watch this kind of field test. Some people commented under Xia Yiping’s test video, "Netizens dare to mention it, and you dare to test it, so you like this real and exciting test." The freezing test video with a temperature of 18 degrees below zero is the second highest praise in Xia Yiping’s Tik Tok account.

"What users pay attention to is what I want to test personally." Xia Yiping said at the press conference of Extreme Yue 07. He plans to do another live broadcast of 07′ s intelligent driving on September 12, challenging to show users 07′ s intelligent driving strength through the non-standard pontoon bridge.

Jiyue 07 listing conference

Extreme Yue Automobile was formally established in 2021. Compared with most of the new car-making forces established in the same period, this car company’s current achievements are not bright, such as the polar krypton, which is also owned by Geely, or Xiaomi, which has set a delivery volume of 100,000 this year.

Xia Yiping thinks this is unfair. He said that when they were established in March 2021, there were only two people in the team, and he personally ran down to rent the office in the first few months. The company’s underlying software is written from scratch, and it is not easy to realize the listing of two cars in three years. It is a real startup company starting from 0 to 1.

However, compared with other new forces making cars, Extreme Yue Automobile is the most radical one. They abandoned lidar from the beginning and were the first domestic car companies to turn to a purely visual route. They also did not use physical gear shifting and canceled the door handle.

They used the slightly uncommon concept of "AI robot" to describe their first car. According to Xia Yiping’s logic, the present has entered the AI era, and the future cars should also be defined by AI. They hope to make a car that will not be out of date after 20 years.

To this end, they have done a lot of forward-looking design and exploration. For example, the Extreme Yue 01 with a price of 200,000 yuan was the first model to use Qualcomm 8295 chip. According to Qualcomm’s original plan, this chip should be used in more than 400,000 models. At that time, another model with the same chip was Mercedes-Benz E-Class.

They were also one of the first car companies to put the big model on the car, and they are still the only car company in the world to mass-produce the smart cockpit with the big model of ERNIE Bot.

Last year, they made voice interaction available outside the car. Users can wake up the car directly outside the car with voice, which is much more difficult than the voice inside the car. Until this month, Huawei added a voice-controlled switch door when the 500,000-level M9 five-seat version went on the market.

Those radical designs also have technical support behind them. There is no physical gear shift, and the automatic gear shift is realized. There is no door handle, in addition to voice control outside the car, their intelligent electric car door also realizes automatic opening of the door to welcome guests. In addition, they also realized many intelligent functions such as automatic turn signal, side door opening protection and so on.

But this way of building a car is risky for a new force, which means more R&D investment, greater user education costs and more difficult market acceptance. In the first two months of this year, the total sales volume of Extreme Yue 01 was just over 300 units, which was far from Xia Yiping’s earliest estimated monthly sales volume of 10,000 to 20,000 units.

After the listing of Extreme Yue 07, Xia Yiping reflected on their problems when it was launched in 01. At that time, their expectations for 01 were too high, and they thought it could be an explosive car, but in the end it backfired. After their resumption, they found that it was not the car’s product strength that had a problem, but their initial brand building, marketing and sales channels, misjudgment of the current market environment and other factors.

For example, at first, they emphasized the intelligence of 01, but ignored the emphasis on the quality of the vehicle itself-many users only found out after buying a car that Extreme Yue 01 was among the best in many indicators such as endurance achievement rate and handling performance in some third-party media environmental assessment tests. For example, in this year’s summer test of pure electric SUV, Ji Yue 01 is the champion of endurance and control.

They changed when Extreme Vietnam 07 went public. In the press conference, the handling performance of 07 was listed as the same publicity focus as battery and smart driving. Xia Yiping also went to the Zhejiang International Circuit to "brush the circle" and drove the ultra-07 to run 01:50:975. In the 2024 China Top Ten Chassis Selection by China Automotive Research Institute, Extreme Yue 07 not only won the honor of Top Ten Chassis, but also won the Best Handling Award.

Jiyue 07 listing conference

"Our strategy is not only to increase the volume of sound in terms of intelligence, but also to let more people know that our products are very strong in all aspects of battery life, energy consumption, control and space. Should we break through the products?" Xia Yiping said.

At the beginning of the year, when it was cold, many people advised him that if one car was unsuccessful, it would be better to give up early and concentrate on the next one. He doesn’t believe in evil, 01 product strength is no problem, intelligence is leading, all he needs is sound volume, and he will certainly do well.

From February, he began to reform the marketing and channel side of Chaoyue, personally took the lead and led the team to turn over. He later said that only when the CEO stepped forward can more problems be solved. It is not enough to write articles, hold press conferences and make evaluations.

Although Extreme Yue 01 was not re-released, they changed the communication strategy from the beginning. In many store communication, the product strength of Extreme Yue 01 was broken down one by one and told again. "It is equivalent to re-publishing Extreme Yue 01 in the consumer scene."

In addition to shooting short videos himself, he also asked all stores in the country to go online. In June, they only had about 9 Tik Tok-certified accounts in the whole company, and now they have 300 blue V numbers. They shot 8,000 short videos in July and 13,000 in August. He believes that in the current era, every short video account is a store. Even if only 500 people watch a live broadcast of an account, there are 15,000 people a month.

From this point of view, the rapid iteration of Extreme Leap may be comparable to the MEGA storm in LI at the beginning of the year. Xia Yiping said that they are startups, and their advantage is that they can quickly try and make mistakes, verify and iterate themselves. If they can’t, they will have another one, and they will fight for physical strength and time.

The user’s recognition of this new brand is gradually improving. Xia Yiping said that this year, they found that many users who booked cars in July were test-drive owners at the end of last year. "They waited for such a long time to find that this company is actually good and can live for so long."

Changes in some industries can prove that the company is ahead in technological exploration. Since last year, the most talked about by the new car-making forces at the press conference is smart driving. In 2022, almost no car companies in China auto market really landed in NOA. In the past year alone, the measure of domestic car companies’ intelligent driving has become whether they can drive all over the country.

Most domestic car companies only started the research and development of end-to-end and pure vision solutions this year, but Extreme Yue chose pure vision solutions from the beginning of its establishment, making it one of the earliest car companies in China to start end-to-end research and development. Now, Jiyue has the only pure visual high-order intelligent driving system in China and the only one in the world, and has a complete pure visual perception system of "BEV+OCC+Transformer".

Jiyue 07 listing conference

However, perhaps it was the lack of marketing volume before. At the initial stage of listing, Extreme Yue’s lead in intellectual driving was not perceived by the public.

Baidu is the first company in China to invest in autonomous driving with the greatest R&D efforts. Backed by Baidu’s accumulation in the research and development of L4 autonomous driving, the company is one position ahead of domestic car companies in terms of intelligent driving strength.

In this year’s second China Intelligent Driving Competition, Extreme Yue won the championship in Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai in succession, and it is the automobile brand that won the championship the most times at present-Extreme Yue 01 is also the only car that adopts the pure visual intelligent driving scheme among the participating models.

The 2nd China Intelligent Driving Competition.

Xia Yiping said that when they first went public last year, they also focused on smart driving, but they didn’t get too strong market feedback. This year, they found that the situation has changed. "Now many people come to buy cars for smart driving." According to the data provided by Extreme Vietnam, the ASD mileage penetration rate of Extreme Vietnam has reached about 80%-which means that only 20% of the road sections of Extreme Vietnam owners are driven by themselves, and at least 80% of the road sections are driven by intelligent drivers.

It is very likely that it is also a rare car company among car companies to realize the standard of intelligent driving. The newly released Extreme Yue 07 has three configurations, with a limited time discount of 199,900 yuan for the standard version, 219,900 yuan for the long-life version and 289,900 yuan for the performance version. However, there is no difference in the intelligent driving configuration among the three. The standard version is still equipped with dual NVIDIA Orin X intelligent driving chips and the bloody version of Qualcomm 8295P intelligent cabin chips. All car owners will receive a free subscription of ASD Apollo advanced intelligent driving for 3 months.

The listing price and rights and interests of Jiyue 07

"Now the smart driving market has broken through the seed stage and is growing at the next level." Xia Yiping said that he believes that smart driving will become one of the most important car purchase decisions for consumers in China automobile market from the second half of this year. "Especially in these two or three months, the changes in the overall market are, in the final analysis, because everyone’s perception of smart driving has changed."

Xia Yiping firmly believes that the popularity of smart driving will be faster and faster, and next year will be the first year to eliminate non-high-level smart driving. "After Q4 ushered in the nationwide launch this year, consumers’ acceptance of smart driving will be higher and higher, which will open the gap between many brands and gradually eliminate some brands. Starting from Q1 next year, Zhijia will become the core promotion point of all similar products. "

The knockout round is accelerating. After getting on the bus end-to-end, the iterative speed of intelligent driving is accelerating exponentially, and the gap between the intelligent driving level of the head players and the tail players in the industry has become larger. Data, algorithms and computing power have begun to restrict the catch-up of other players.

The latest news is that Tesla plans to land FSD in China as soon as next year. Ten years ago, when Tesla first entered China, it led to the explosion of electric vehicle industry in China. The industry predicted that the landing of FSD would also set off the catfish effect and promote the popularization of smart driving.

Many CEOs of domestic car companies have shouted for the early landing of FSD. He Xiaopeng of Xpeng Motors said that he especially welcomed Tesla FSD to enter China and supported letting a hundred flowers blossom. Yu Chengdong of Huawei said that he was very happy to compete with Tesla FSD in China and was confident to beat his opponent.

Extreme Yue is the only car company in China that adopts the pure visual high-order intelligent driving system at the same level as Tesla. Xia Yiping said that under the more complicated road conditions in China, they will definitely not be worse than Tesla. He even called Extreme Yue 07 Model 5 that Tesla has not yet built. "If Musk wants to make a bigger car than Model 3, I believe it will definitely have the shadow of Extreme Yue 07."

Now, it’s time for a real knife and a real gun competition.