Weilai started the fight, Geely and Xiaopeng followed suit. Ideal, which deliberately led the trend in the weekly sales list, should be condemned by everyone.

China's new energy vehicle market is in an uproar again, this time about the weekly sales chart.

On July 30, NIO executive Ma Lin called out to Li Xiang, CEO of Ideal Auto, on Weibo: "Brother Xiang, please stop and stop engaging in low-level involution. The weekly rankings are more or less a bit like low-level involution." Seeing this, Geely's Yang Xueliang and He Xiaopeng quickly followed up and interacted.

Rumor has it that the weekly sales list of new energy vehicles was first released by Ideal Auto. This list is hated by many peers, and NIO executive Ma Lin directly characterized it as "low-level involution." In fact, this list has been questioned from the beginning, and Li Xiang, as the person who pioneered this industry trend, is naturally criticized by his peers.

It should be made clear that Li Xiang was not the first to come up with the concept of weekly sales charts. The practice of counting sales of goods on a weekly basis first came from e-commerce platforms such as JD.com and Alibaba more than a decade ago, when they were used to count mobile phone sales.

Logically speaking, since the sales data on this kind of list is real, there is nothing wrong with the sales platform publishing it. The weekly sales list of mobile phones has been popular in the mobile phone industry for many years, and not only mobile phones, but also tablets, computers, smart watches and other digital products have similar lists, but practitioners have never protested so much. Why has it become a rat crossing the street that everyone shouts and beats in the new energy vehicle circle?

Ideal Auto first released its weekly sales ranking in April last year. In that month, Ideal's sales hit a record high of 25,700 vehicles. During the same period, NIO's sales were 15,600, Xpeng's 7,079, Leapmotor's 8,726, and Nezha's 11,080.

At first glance, it seems that their sales are quite high, but if you divide it by 4 weeks and then list these data together, then Ideal has 6,000 units, while Xpeng has only 1,700 units.

The difference in first impression is quite obvious.

The new energy weekly list is essentially derived from small sales techniques. For example, if a rope is 10 centimeters long, you may think it is too short, but if you change the unit to 0.1 meters, you will subconsciously think it is longer. Similarly, if a mobile phone weighs 250 grams, you may think it is acceptable, but if you say it weighs half a pound, you will immediately associate it with a weight that will fall out of your pocket.

The reason why Ideal does this is just to highlight its sales volume. Plus, everyone likes to see intuitive data that can quickly become a topic of conversation. So before the rise of Wenjie, Ideal was at the top of the list almost every week.

This list is equivalent to bringing a wave of traffic to Ideal every week, reinforcing consumers' stereotype that "Ideal is strong" at a very low cost. Moreover, other manufacturers have to follow suit because these sales figures are real and cannot be disputed. No breakthrough can be found to blame it, and it only makes life difficult for its peers, making them feel the sourness, which is what Ma Lin calls "low-level involution."

After being besieged this time, Li Xiang, the founder of Ideal Auto, expressed his dissatisfaction and directly posted an illustration of the fable "The Man Covering His Ears to Steal the Bell" and also added a "shut up" emoticon.

91Che tried to translate it. Li Xiang said two things. First, the list is the real sales figures. If I don't publish it, does it mean it doesn't exist? Second, the list is the ranking. If you don't agree, make your sales surpass mine, otherwise shut up.

Li Xiang's confidence comes from the strong market performance of Ideal Auto. Data shows that in July 2024, Ideal Auto's sales once again exceeded 50,000 vehicles, leaving the world that has been chasing it far behind and firmly ranking first among new forces.

So, why is such a well-reasoned list so hated?

Peers oppose Ideal Auto’s release of a weekly sales list because of its “adaptive” double standards on this issue.

The weekly sales list was first released by Ideal Auto in April 2023, and then stopped being released, but returned again in the second half of 2023; the weekly sales list stopped being updated in March 2024, and then resumed and has continued to this day.

The reason for stopping the update in March 2024 was that Ideal Auto was in the midst of a huge public opinion whirlpool of Ideal MEGA at the time, which was a rare low point for Ideal Auto in the past two years. In other words, Ideal only released the list when its sales were strong, and stopped updating when it was weak.

Of course, the main reason why the weekly car sales list makes peers angry is not here, but because its reference value is very low and cannot reflect the real situation of the development of the automobile industry.

Compared to mobile phones, cars are several orders of magnitude more complex and have longer delivery cycles.

For example, many areas in the south have recently suffered from floods and waterlogging disasters, and the transportation link is bound to be affected. This can be easily reflected in the weekly sales list, but natural disasters will not always exist. It is obviously biased and even tempting to judge the operating conditions of a car company or the popularity of a certain car based on the weekly sales list.

In addition, manufacturers will concentrate various resources on promotion before the new car is launched, and use various means to induce users to place orders. At the same time, they will concentrate deliveries within a short period of time after the launch, which will be reflected in the good-looking numbers on the weekly sales chart. However, this artificially created sales peak will mislead consumers.

In other words, the weekly sales cycle is too short and can be easily affected by off-market factors.

Automobile manufacturing is an asset-intensive, long-cycle industry. It is not possible to clearly see the development status of a manufacturer in just one or two years, let alone a week.

More importantly, this kind of high-frequency updated list will create anxiety in the industry for no reason and even interfere with the normal development of manufacturers.

The weekly sales volume version is particularly popular among consumers, and many people regard it as an important basis for purchasing a car, which forces car manufacturers to follow up and pay attention. However, anyone with a little common sense knows that it is impossible for manufacturers to improve product performance within a week. In order to achieve a good ranking on the weekly sales volume version, manufacturers have to spend a lot of energy on creating conflicts online, competing for traffic and occupying online public resources.

What's worse, in order to attract users' attention, manufacturers have begun to observe their competitors on a weekly basis. As long as the sales of a certain brand decline in a certain week, they will immediately mobilize their online troops to create public opinion that "the certain brand is no longer doing well", and the entire automobile market has become chaotic as a result.

This is indeed a typical case of low-level internal competition. Automobile manufacturers should have relied on product performance, but now they regard traffic as core competitiveness for the sake of ranking. Normal competition has turned into a shrewish quarrel, deviating from the meaning of the sales list itself. The originally objective and neutral list has become a tool for manufacturers to attack each other.

Similar phenomena do not only occur in the automotive industry.

On the same day that automakers criticized the weekly sales edition, a topic titled "After waking up, China is currently ranked sixth in the gold medal list" suddenly became a hot search, instantly sparking a wave of negative public opinion and anxiety on the Internet. This discussion even affected the performance of Chinese Olympic athletes on the field.

However, the reality is that the performance of the Chinese delegation has been very stable. Yesterday, China regained the top spot in the gold medal list.

It is foolish and even malicious to ask athletes to "reflect" on the gold medal list just a few days after the Olympics began. By the same token, letting a car compete with other manufacturers on the sales list as soon as it is launched is also deliberately disrupting the development order of the industry.

Ah Zu, please stop! Great Sage, please withdraw your magical powers!

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.