Leapmotor, founded in 2015, has successfully become popular by "talking big" seven years later.

As China's voice in the smart car industry chain continues to grow, a number of new energy vehicle companies have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain. The intensity of market competition is no less than the melee in the smartphone market in previous years. However, beneath the surface of market prosperity, there have also been various chaos in which companies are trying to stand out and attract capital injection.

At the recent Leapmotor 2.0 strategy launch conference, founder Zhu Jiangming confidently announced that he would "surpass Tesla in the field of autonomous driving technology within three years." Naturally, this statement aroused cheers from the public, who believed that Leapmotor might really be able to catch up and replace Tesla in autonomous driving, becoming the global technology leader in this field.

However, the reality is not so.

Just like Yuan Chonghuan vowed to Emperor Chongzhen that "it will take five years to conquer Liaodong". But when his colleagues asked him about the detailed strategy, Yuan gave another answer, "The emperor is worried and tired, so this is just to comfort him." The meaning is very clear, just a verbal attack to ease the emperor's mind. Considering the current gap between Leapmotor and Tesla, "surpassing in three years" can only be regarded as deliberately ignoring reality and confusing people, and the actual possibility is infinitely close to zero.

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Whether it is Leapmotor's press conference or the public relations releases, its parent company, Dahua Technology, a giant in the surveillance industry, is always present. Leapmotor has used Dahua Technology's achievements in the surveillance industry more than once to highlight its own technical strength. But can Dahua Technology really turn the tide in the field of autonomous driving and help Leapmotor realize its ideal of surpassing Tesla?

The answer is obviously no. Although Dahua Technology has occupied a wide market in the monitoring industry with its excellent image recognition technology, there is not much technical overlap between autonomous driving technology and the recognition technology of monitoring systems.

Unlike surveillance image recognition, the difficulty of image recognition in autonomous driving technology lies in the fact that, because the car is moving at high speed when in use, it is necessary not only to ensure the accuracy of image recognition, but also to ensure the timeliness of the output of recognition results. This poses a severe test to the performance of the chip responsible for calculation.

This is exactly where Tesla's advantage lies. The comprehensive computing power of its self-developed HW 3.0 chip has reached an astonishing 144TOPS. However, Lingxin 01, which was launched by Leapmotor last year and is known as "China's first automotive-grade AI smart driving chip with completely independent intellectual property rights", has a computing power of only 4.2TOPS, far behind Tesla's HW3.0 chip.

Faced with such a significant generational performance gap, Leapmotor could not surpass Tesla in terms of physical performance even if it tried its best. It also gave up on developing its own CPU processor and chose to "take what is available" by directly adopting Alibaba's Pingtou Ge processor solution. This also meant that Leapmotor could not achieve the same deep customization and optimization of chips as Tesla when developing new models, and could not achieve comprehensive control over the entire process of vehicle development.

In addition to the hardware, in terms of another core component of autonomous driving technology - "software algorithm", Leapmotor can be considered to have almost no advantage over Tesla.

Zhu Jiangming, founder of Leapmotor, mentioned at the press conference that one of the strategies of Leapmotor 2.0 is to increase the software algorithm team to more than 100 people. We have no way of knowing how many people are currently in Leapmotor's software algorithm team, but we can confirm that the number of members is definitely less than 100.

Data shows that the size of Tesla's autonomous driving team has already exceeded 200 people and is still growing. In addition, since Tesla's current autonomous driving technology is still better than that of Leapmotor, Leapmotor, which faces both a gap in scale and a gap in foundation, has a very difficult task to surpass Tesla in the competition on software algorithms.

As for the news that Leapmotor announced that it will officially put the lidar solution into production in 2023, although from a technical point of view, the lidar solution is undoubtedly safer and more advanced than the pure vision solution chosen by Tesla, but if it wants to be used on a large scale in the consumer market, cost is also a factor that manufacturers must seriously consider.

Currently, suppliers in the smart car industry, including Huawei, are still working hard to reduce the cost of LiDAR, but considering the current price of 64-line LiDAR is as high as $80,000, no one can guarantee that the price will be reduced to a level that can be widely popularized in three years. Leapmotor wants to surpass Tesla's autonomous driving technology with LiDAR, which is also a pie in the sky.

Are you talking nonsense because you are short of money?

It is obvious that Leapmotor does not have the hard capabilities to surpass Tesla in autonomous driving technology within three years, and the gap between them will even become larger over time.

So, what exactly is the reason that prompts this new energy vehicle company to frequently talk nonsense and shout out unrealistic slogans?

Perhaps, all this stems from the fact that Leapmotor is short of money.

Although Leapmotor has been very high-profile since its establishment, in fact, its sales volume and average selling price are far from the level of first-tier automakers.

According to data, the best-selling model of Leapmotor is the T03 micro electric car, which costs less than 80,000 yuan. It is not difficult to see from the pricing of this car that its main competitor is Wuling Hongguang's MINI EV. However, judging from sales, they are not rivals at all, because Wuling Hongguang's MINI EV has completely crushed Leapmotor's T03 in sales. The sales of MINI EV in 2020 were 126,603 units, while Leapmotor sold only 11,391 units of all its models in 2020.

The two are not on the same level at all, so how can there be any competition?

It is precisely because the average price of its main products is basically below 100,000 yuan that Leapmotor's net profit margin is much lower than that of its imaginary rival Tesla, whose starting price of products is close to 300,000 yuan. It is even very difficult to catch up with NIO, Li Auto and Xpeng.

In fact, whether it is the sluggish sales or the less-than-ideal profit margin, it makes it extremely difficult for Leapmotor to survive on its own profitability.

To make matters worse, while its hematopoietic ability is not satisfactory, Leapmotor's ability to attract money in the capital market is not outstanding. The Hefei Municipal Government, known as the "No. 1 venture capital for China's new energy vehicle companies", invested 7 billion yuan in NIO in 2020, successfully resuscitating NIO, which was struggling on the line of life and death. This year, it also announced that it would join hands with NIO to jointly invest 50 billion yuan in Hefei to build a smart car industrial park.

But when investing in Leapmotor, the Hefei government was not as generous as it was to NIO. It first announced an investment of 2 billion yuan, but only invested 200 million yuan in the B round before withdrawing from the Pre-IPO round of investment. Considering that Leapmotor has only received less than 20 billion yuan in investment so far, we can clearly conclude that investors are not optimistic about the development prospects and investment returns of Leapmotor, so they are not willing to invest in Leapmotor.

Against the backdrop of insufficient self-generating capabilities and lack of recognition from investment institutions, the only way for Leapmotor to survive in today's smart car market, which has completely become a money-burning game, is to go public and raise funds.

In order to achieve listing and attract enough investors to invest, Leapmotor chose to make a big promise when it received investment from the Hangzhou Municipal Government: "It will surpass Tesla in the field of autonomous driving within three years." This is also the only card that Leapmotor can currently say.

From pacing Liao in five years to overtaking Tesla in three years, although a span of four hundred years has passed, the basic logic of the event has remained essentially unchanged - this is just consolation.

Even when talking nonsense, we need to respect the basic laws of the physical world. If our R&D strength and resources are completely incomparable to Tesla, even surpassing NIO, Xiaopeng and Li Auto will be a difficult task. Three years have passed quickly, what should we do in the fourth year?

I believe Zhu Jiangming himself is well aware of this, but in order to achieve the goal of listing at the end of the year, Leapmotor, which is almost isolated and helpless, can only frequently talk big and make empty promises, hoping to attract investors in this way and become the next Jia Yueting who successfully lists.

However, for China's smart car industry, which is still in its infancy, if Leapmotor's behavior becomes a trend, it will undoubtedly seriously damage the public and capital's confidence and recognition of the entire industry. Not only will it lead to a decrease in the market recognition of domestic smart cars, it will also make it difficult for real car companies to obtain investment in a timely manner, hindering the development of my country's smart car industry.

Less talk and more action, with the speculative mentality of "just to comfort each other", it is not just Zhu Jiangming and his Leapmotor who are worried.

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.