Tesla's frequent recall announcements have once again put it at the center of public opinion.

According to the State Administration for Market Regulation, Tesla has issued three recall notices for its cars this year. Although the number of Tesla recall notices is not large compared to traditional car companies, considering the base difference in sales between the two, it can be said that Tesla's recalls are actually quite frequent.

Admittedly, as an automobile company, Tesla's ability to announce a car recall in a timely manner fully demonstrates its sense of responsibility to consumers. However, the frequent quality problems have inevitably tarnished Tesla's golden signboard, and even made it show signs of falling from the altar.

Tesla, stepping down from the altar

In recent months, Tesla's reputation has declined sharply. Tesla, which was once synonymous with high-end and black technology, has been labeled by the public as "unstoppable, life-threatening, and overbearing."

In May this year, Sina Weibo launched a poll on "What is your first reaction when you see a Tesla on the road?", in which 60.88% of the options were "Dodge, its brakes may fail?"

In fact, as some industry insiders have analyzed, the reason behind Tesla's sudden collapse in reputation is not the conspiracy theories such as "competitor suppression" as some Tesla supporters believe, but as Tesla's sales have increased rapidly, some previously unknown problems have begun to be exposed to the public.

If we trace the root of the problem, the real reason lies with the first three rows of Tesla's board of directors. They violated the laws of production, and their hasty and quick-success production philosophy caused the products to deviate from their original intentions and ideas when they were put into large-scale implementation.

As CEO, Musk has publicly expressed his desire to bring Tesla to market on a large scale more than once. As a relatively young automaker compared to traditional automakers, low cost and high production capacity are necessary to achieve large-scale production. Generally speaking, traditional automakers achieve this through repeated testing, slow ramp-up, and multiple iterations. However, Tesla has deviated from this point, and is a bit too hasty to clean up the mess, because it has been blindly pursuing production and has ignored some issues that must be addressed in large-scale mass production.

The first is to reduce costs. As a popularizer of autopilot technology, Tesla is unrivaled in the field of autopilot technology. The combination of "millimeter wave radar + camera" adopted by Tesla provides the best solution in the industry. However, as an emerging industry that is constantly improving, the advantages of any manufacturer can only be temporary.

Therefore, with the emergence of more advanced lidar solutions, Tesla's "millimeter-wave radar + camera" solution began to face the risk of obsolescence. However, Tesla made a shocking decision: it announced that the new Model 3 and Model Y in the North American market will no longer be equipped with millimeter-wave radar, but will use a pure camera solution to achieve autonomous driving functions.

Although millimeter-wave radar is about five times more expensive than a $30 camera, autonomous driving technology based solely on cameras has not yet matured. In bad weather and low-light environments, radar has obvious technical advantages over cameras.

Although Tesla's decision can effectively reduce the manufacturing costs of these two low-end models, thereby reducing consumers' car purchase costs, from a safety perspective, this "Cost Down" move is a serious disregard for consumer life safety.

In terms of how to increase production capacity, Tesla also gave a shocking method - lowering quality control requirements.

In the Internet industry, "rapid iteration" is recognized as the best option to capture the market in a short period of time. Bugs that appeared in the previous version are quickly fixed in the next version after receiving user feedback. This efficiency is far better than the rigorous method that requires repeated internal QA testing before the software can be put online.

However, software will not endanger human life, but a car can become a knife to kill people.

When it comes to automotive products that are closely related to the safety of users' lives, the development methods commonly used in the software industry are obviously not feasible. Once a problem occurs, the consequences are disastrous, and it is lives that are borne the consequences.

What’s puzzling is that Tesla actually did this.

In an interview, Musk himself admitted that in order to increase production capacity in the short term, there was not even time for the paint on the surface of the cars to dry.

A former executive also confirmed in an interview that the reason Tesla did this was because Musk believed that consumers would be willing to ignore some car quality issues in order to pick up the car early.

What is even more disappointing is that until now, Tesla does not seem to have changed its bad habit of relaxing quality control in order to ship quickly.

In early June this year, Tesla announced the recall of some imported Model 3s due to problems with the car's brake caliper bolts.

In addition to forcibly pursuing output in product manufacturing to reduce costs and relax quality control, its arrogant attitude towards the public has become the straw that broke the camel's back. Its senior management's evasiveness and evasiveness in facing consumers are infuriating, and "passing the buck" has become an important label for it.

In February this year, a Tesla owner in Nanchang reported that his newly purchased Model 3 could not start after using Tesla's official super charging station. However, Tesla directly blamed the State Grid for the excessive current without conducting a comprehensive and complete investigation.

However, Tesla hit the wall this time. State Grid did not take the blame and directly denied the claim, saying that the current was normal at the time. In the end, Tesla could only apologize and let the matter go.

Not only that, Tao Lin, head of Tesla's China business, did not show the corresponding cautious attitude towards the truth of the matter when talking about the female car owner in Zhengzhou who has been insisting on defending her rights. Instead, he directly hinted to the media that the female car owner was instructed by someone and bluntly said that "Tesla will never compromise."

Regardless of whether the female car owner really had an arrangement behind the scenes, first of all, she purchased the Tesla car through legal and legitimate channels and is a consumer. Tesla's direct implication of the user's motive for rights protection not only shows its lack of experience in handling problems, but also indirectly damages its long-established brand image.

It is precisely because of these NO ZUO NO DIE that, despite being a pioneer in smart cars, Tesla’s intention to achieve rapid scale-up by reducing car safety and its arrogant public relations attitude have made it no longer synonymous with black technology in the minds of consumers, and it has gradually fallen from the altar.

From batteries to autonomous driving, domestic smart cars are killing Tesla on two fronts

As history has repeatedly written - "The change of dynasties never ends", the same is true for the smart car industry. As the industry leader Tesla has fallen from the altar, domestic cars have also reached the best historical moment to defeat Tesla.

Back then, as a new player, Tesla was able to carve out a niche in the automotive industry with extremely high industry barriers, which was inseparable from its first-mover technological advantage in the field of smart cars. However, with the overall improvement of the domestic smart car industry chain in recent years, the technological gap between Tesla and domestic smart cars is rapidly narrowing.

One of the recognized advantages of Tesla cars is that they have longer battery life than other brands of smart cars. The 18650 cylindrical lithium battery developed in cooperation with Panasonic has achieved an astonishing energy density of 152Wh/kg, far exceeding the industry level at the time. Naturally, the domestic smart car industry is also far behind.

However, Tesla's leading pace did not last long. As the leader of my country's power battery industry, CATL has leapt up and made a significant breakthrough in battery energy density. According to the technical route previously announced by CATL, by 2022, CATL will launch batteries with an energy density of 220-240Wh/kg. Obviously, China's power battery level has already stood among the top in the world.

Such advanced technology has naturally won the recognition of the market for CATL. According to data, in the first quarter of this year, CATL ranked first in the global power battery market, with a share of 45%. Such excellent results naturally attracted the attention of Tesla. After long-term negotiations, the two parties finally reached a cooperation, and Tesla announced that CATL will provide it with power batteries in the global market.

As a result, Tesla is on the same starting line as Chinese smart cars in terms of power batteries, and the relevant advantages disappear in an instant.

In the field of autonomous driving, Tesla's technology is gradually being surpassed by domestic manufacturers.

First of all, the actual experience of Tesla's autonomous driving function is not as good as advertised. Tesla employees once revealed that their autonomous driving technology is still at the L2 stage, but the company deliberately misled consumers and said that "Musk boasted", which made consumers over-trust their autonomous driving technology, and ultimately led to many accidents in recent years.

Previously, Musk had praised a Tesla owner who took his hands off the handlebars on social media, implicitly endorsing the strengthening of its autopilot function. This is actually very puzzling. When the technology is not fully mature, is it really a good example to encourage such behavior?

Looking at the achievements of domestic self-driving technology manufacturers at this stage, we can clearly feel that some Chinese companies have surpassed their predecessors in the accumulation of self-driving technology. The main reason for this is the popularity of LiDAR solutions.

Compared with Tesla, which is opposed to radar technology, the choice of domestic autonomous driving manufacturers is obviously much safer. Many manufacturers including Huawei and Xiaopeng have achieved quasi-commercialization of autonomous driving functions of lidar solutions; and because my country has adopted a vehicle-road collaborative development route, the urban autonomous driving solution will also add data flow functions between cars and road IoT devices, thereby helping the system to better predict road risks and achieve more stable and reliable autonomous driving, which is truly infinitely close to L5.

In the field of automotive chips, which is closely related to autonomous driving technology, my country has had little accumulation in the past. However, with the overall development and upgrading of the industrial chain, more and more car companies and technology providers have begun to enter the field of self-developed chips.

Huawei, which has rich experience in chip design, has launched a number of chips that can be used in the field of smart cars. Currently, the computing power of Huawei's MDC 810 substrate has reached 400+ TOPS, which is fully capable of meeting the needs of L4-level autonomous driving. Another giant in the new energy vehicle field, BYD, has also made a complete layout of the entire chip manufacturing industry chain, achieving self-sufficiency from raw materials to chip design.

In addition, due to the significant impact of the sanctions on Huawei, the domestic semiconductor production sector has received unprecedented investment. It has been confirmed that my country will achieve national production lines for 28nm and 14nm processes this year and next.

Although these two processes seem slightly outdated compared to TSMC and Samsung's 5nm, they are sufficient for smart cars that do not require high chip performance. And with the localization of chip manufacturing production lines, the impact of "choke" sanctions on my country's technology industry will become smaller and smaller, especially the automotive chip industry.

Go ahead, domestic cars

When talking about products like cars, it is unavoidable and undeniable that a considerable number of Chinese people still believe that buying a good car is a matter of face.

To be honest, due to the late start of my country's manufacturing and technology industries, for a long time, our domestic brands did have less "face" than products from Europe, the United States, Japan and other countries. However, with the continuous development of my country's economic level and the leapfrog progress of the technology industry, this situation is quietly changing.

Representatives of new domestic car-making forces: NIO, Xpeng and Ideal have been widely recognized by market consumers in recent years. For example, in March of this year, the three car companies achieved monthly sales of 7,257, 5,102 and 4,900 vehicles respectively, while still maintaining positive sales growth, with growth rates starting at 200%. This is enough to show that consumers' recognition of domestic smart cars is gradually increasing.

Secondly, Tesla's performance in recent months can be said to have been a great assist for our domestically produced cars. Not only has it been exposed for problems such as lax quality control and arrogant attitude, but it has also extended olive branches to Chinese manufacturing in the supply chain. All these series of events have not only helped us gain a deeper understanding of the so-called imported brands and broken our imagination that "European and American products must be good", but also allowed us to build confidence in China's high-end manufacturing industry in the shortest time.

From superstition to demystification and then to "domestic products are really good". Just like the rapid development of China's home appliance industry in the past 30 years, China's smart car industry, which masters core technologies, will also fight back against international brands in multiple ways and promote the overall change of market perception with solid and good products.

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.