With its share price falling by 70%, does NIO, which keeps self-igniting, still have a future?

Both NIO cars had accidents again.

On the afternoon of June 14, 2019, a NIO ES8 caught fire in the parking lot of Wuhan Hanxi Building Materials Market. This was the third spontaneous combustion incident of a NIO car in two months, following the spontaneous combustion of NIO cars in Xi'an on April 22 and Shanghai on May 18. The market value of NIO was also burned. Compared with the IPO, NIO's current stock price has been burned by nearly 70%.

You should know that the total number of ES8 deliveries in 2018 was 11,348. Currently, most of the NIO ES8s are less than one year old. If this trend continues, the spontaneous combustion rate of NIO cars is likely to reach 0.1%. This number may not seem large, but if the denominator is large enough, it will explode into an astonishing number - if the spontaneous combustion rate of Chinese cars reaches 0.1%, then nearly 240,000 cars will burn every year.

From making cars based on PPT to producing over 11,000 vehicles a year in 2018, NIO has finally been affectionately called "China's Tesla" by the media. However, apart from the useless halo of "China's Tesla", huge losses, safety issues, reduced mileage and other problems have deeply troubled NIO and its future like a nightmare.

Weilai Automobile has become a joke

In addition to spontaneous combustion, NIO has encountered almost all the safety issues that the automotive industry may encounter.

On December 16, 2018, a NIO ES8 crashed into a roadside lamppost at a speed of more than 20 kilometers per hour. As a result, the front of the car was smashed to pieces, but the airbag did not deploy.

NIO officially stated: "Since the street lamp that was hit did not bend, it was judged to be a direct collision of a rigid columnar object. During the collision, the crush structure of the front cabin of the vehicle absorbed the collision energy, and the double front longitudinal beams were not seriously damaged, so the airbag did not need to pop out in this case."

In other words, although the front of the car was smashed to pieces, the NIO ES8 judged that there would be no safety issues for the occupants in this situation, so the ES8 did not deploy the airbag.

On September 30, 2018, Weibo user Mr. Hu revealed that the NIO ES8 claimed to have a range of 350km, but after Mr. Hu's car experienced a system freeze and restart, the actual range was only about 200km, and the charging pile could not charge normally, so he had to return the car for upgrades and repairs.

Li Bin, CEO of NIO, said: "The 200 kilometers is because Mr. Hu is a novice driver and is easily excited, which causes the battery to be consumed too quickly."

After a NIO vehicle caught fire in Shanghai on May 18, 2018, Shen Fei, NIO's vice president of energy, responded to the fire by publishing "Interim Measures to Strengthen Charging Safety" on the NIO App: The vehicle was parked in a plugged-in state for 4 days. After being fully charged, the system automatically recharged the battery multiple times to keep it fully charged for a long time. Given that the probability of failure of power batteries increases when they are in a high-power state for a long time, out of the principle of safety and prudence, NIO will temporarily take measures to limit the charging volume to 90% for dedicated charging piles and vehicles that are connected to the network before the official investigation results come out.

In other words, the spontaneous combustion of the NIO ES8 is not our problem, but the problem of the car owner. In the future, when using the NIO ES8, please do not keep the charging cable plugged in, but also do not let the NIO ES8 run out of power. This means that when users charge the NIO, it is best to move a small stool to watch it, further solidifying the title of "Electric Dad".

Taking into account the various faults and through his own actual testing, a car reviewer said: "The NIO ES8 is not a finished product, or it is one of the few cars on the market that can be defined as not being completed before being launched."

A postmodern electric car that should have been extremely cool and technologically advanced turned out to be a joke car.

Behind the jokes are NIO's unoptimistic data

Corresponding to the problems, NIO’s stock price has also been “rising and plummeting” all the way.

Since March 5, 2019, when NIO's stock price reached its peak, it has been in a state of plummeting. As of June 14, 2019, NIO's stock price fell to US$2.42, a record low, which is only 37.5% of the issue price. The total market value is only US$2.543 billion, and US$11.9 billion has evaporated out of thin air, which is equivalent to a drop of 36 Sohu (Zhang Chaoyang expressed his heartache).

According to the 2018 financial report released by NIO, NIO's annual revenue was 4.951 billion yuan and its net loss was 9.6 billion yuan, with the loss expanding by 92% year-on-year.

This loss data is higher than that of iQiyi and Meituan. NIO ranked second in the list of net losses of Internet listed companies in 2018, second only to Pinduoduo.

In terms of product delivery, although NIO exceeded its annual delivery target of 11,348 vehicles in 2018, NIO's shipment data in 2019 is not optimistic. Last month, NIO only delivered 1,089 vehicles. Compared with 1,373 and 1,124 vehicles in March and April, the delivery volume has been on a downward trend month-on-month.

Overall, NIO delivered 3,989 vehicles in the first quarter of 2019, nearly half of the 7,980 vehicles delivered in the fourth quarter of 2018.

ES6 is not a life-saving straw

Due to the slowdown in market demand and the reduction in government subsidies, NIO is in urgent need of a market hit other than its high-end product ES8 - this is the ES6, the protagonist of NIO's 2018 NIO Day.

According to the official introduction, the NIO ES6 is positioned as a mid-size SUV, with three versions: the basic version, the performance version, and the first-ever founding version. The NIO ES6 can accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h in 4.7 seconds, with a braking distance of 33.9 meters per 100 km, a comprehensive range of 510 km, and is pre-installed with the NIO Pilot automatic assisted driving system. The pre-subsidy price is 358,000 yuan. The pre-subsidy price of the ES8 six-seater version is 456,000 yuan.

After the release of the car, many senior media experts were also excited, saying "it's a sure thing!", "Tesla killer!", "the culmination of domestic electric vehicles!"...

But when we carefully analyze the price of ES6, we will find that compared with Tesla Model 3, ES6 does not have much advantage.

The NEDC range of the ES6's base version, which costs RMB 358,000, is only 410km, while the Tesla Model 3's standard range upgrade version, which costs only RMB 328,000, has a range of 460km. Considering NIO's practice of offering a "half-price discount" on range, people further doubt the ES6's strength.

And if you consider buying the top-of-the-line version with the first commemorative edition and 84kWh battery pack, the price is already 548,000 yuan - wouldn't it be better to buy a BMW 5 Series or Mercedes-Benz E-Class for this price?

Could NIO’s problem be a problem with domestic electric vehicles?

Although NIO is considered to be the manufacturer with the most "black" physique in the domestic electric vehicle industry, if we look at the industry from a broader perspective, NIO's problems are also problems that domestic electric vehicles must face together.

The first is the issue of delivery. Currently, domestic electric vehicle manufacturers are generally eager for quick results.

On December 16, 2017, NIO ES8 was officially launched on the market and immediately received orders for over 10,000 vehicles. At that time, Li Bin also announced that it would be officially delivered from March 2018. However, due to insufficient production capacity, the delivery date was postponed from March to April, and from April to May, with repeated delays.

In August, Li Bin made a bet with He Xiaopeng, the founder of Xpeng Motors, on Weibo that NIO would deliver 10,000 cars before the end of 2018.

Subsequently, NIO began to accelerate its mass production plan.

However, since NIO does not have the qualifications to produce new energy vehicles, it can only choose to cooperate with JAC Motors and let JAC Motors produce the NIO ES8 and ES6 on a contract basis. Although NIO still has the right to design and adjust products, it cannot set standards for quality because it cannot control the factory.

Therefore, although the number of NIO cars has increased, as we saw at the beginning, the quality of the cars has also been declining sharply.

If this was a mobile phone, it would be fine. For example, when the Hammer T1 was launched, it also suffered a quality Waterloo. Either the buttons were wrinkled or the screen had color cast. But it was a big deal. At most, you could just change the phone. It would not endanger your life.

However, NIO produces cars, which are different from mobile phones which are merely "entertainment products". When cars are driving at high speeds, safety problems are very likely to occur and endanger human lives. At this time, in order to deliver the goods, relaxing quality control is a bit like being blinded by commercial interests and disregarding human lives.

For comparison, we can look at the data of Tesla, the benchmark in the electric vehicle industry, in terms of car delivery.

Tesla released the Tesla Model S in June 2008, but it was not delivered to the United States until two years later, in June 2012. The total global sales of this model in 2013 were only 22,300 units.

Although competition in the electric vehicle market is intensifying, it is still recommended that domestic manufacturers strictly control quality and not play with consumers' lives for the sake of temporary production.

Then there is NIO’s “new energy strategy” - building a large number of battery swap stations.

This strategy is actually a gas station for electric vehicles. If your NIO car runs out of power, just go to a battery swap station and NIO will directly replace the battery with another fully charged one for you.

Although it looks ideal at first glance, there are still many shortcomings in the details.

Currently, the price of NIO's battery swap is 980 yuan per month, and it can be used up to 15 times per month. This is probably mainly because NIO has allocated the round-the-clock operation and maintenance costs of the battery swap station and the costs of battery loss to the car owners. Therefore, compared with fuel vehicles, NIO's battery swap solution has no advantage at all.

In order to allow car owners to "go anywhere in the world", NIO has an even more bizarre operation, using a cart to pull the battery to provide power to the car owners.

This is very similar to the Da Vinci demonstration of the solar flashlight in Stephen Chow's nonsensical comedy "From Beijing with Love" - ​​the magic of this flashlight is that it only lights up when there is light, and it will never light up without light.

NIO's operation of using a flatbed truck to provide power to car owners is really putting the cart before the horse.

The biggest problem facing domestic electric car manufacturers now is that they are fighting each other and have not realized that charging is the first issue that consumers consider. After all, it would be very inconvenient if you buy a car but are not brave enough to travel far.

If domestic electric car manufacturers can imitate the way fuel vehicles refuel and formulate a unified charging strategy, they can concentrate resources to do big things. Not only can they concentrate charging stations in first- and second-tier cities, but they can also solve the problem of point-of-care vehicles not daring to travel long distances. Of course, it also avoids the problem of carts pulling batteries.

In general, NIO is currently facing great difficulties. Its products have frequently encountered problems and its market value has been shrinking. What's more, Tesla, the electric car giant, has been coveting the domestic market.

I still hope that domestic electric car manufacturers represented by NIO can face up to the industry and consumers, and not ruin the overall industry environment for the sake of petty profits.

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.