Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

The successful completion of the electrified transformation is related to the future fate of every fuel truck giant.

1. The electrified transformation is not yet on the right track. According to the financial data of 2021, Audi Group's performance is very eye-catching.

In fiscal year 2021, Audi Group had sales revenue of about 53 billion euros, operating profit of 5.5 billion euros, operating profit margin of 10.4% and net cash flow of 7.757 billion euros. Among them, operating profit and net cash flow have set a new record.

Audi executives also seem satisfied. "Audi is on the right path and will continue to accelerate the transformation of its business model to carbon-neutral, connected travel," said Dussman, chairman of its board. "

But if you take into account the fact that Audi sold only more than 80, 000 electric vehicles in 1.68 million in 2021, Duthman's "right" is clearly too optimistic.

With its strong brand appeal and product capability, Audi Group will naturally have no problem in maintaining the high profits of fuel vehicles in the next few years, but Audi's "elephant turn" general electric transformation is far from on the right track in the competitive new energy vehicle market.

Take China, the world's largest new energy vehicle market, as an example. In 2021, domestic new energy vehicle sales exceeded 3.5 million, an increase of 157.8 per cent over the same period last year, but Audi sold less than 10,000 electric models in China, a growth rate of less than 5 per cent. In the same period, Tesla's production and sales in China reached 470000, BYD's pure electric models also sold 320000, and new car-building forces such as Lailai and Xiaopeng also sold more than 90,000 vehicles a year.

This can also be seen in the electric models sold by Audi in China. In 2019, Audi executives said: by 2021, it will sell more than nine electric models in China, and by 2025, all Audi products sold in China will be electrified. But so far, Audi has only four pure electric models in China: Audi e-tron (including imported and domestic versions), Q2L e-tron, Q4 e-tron and Q5 e-tron, the latter two of which have only been on the market in nearly a year.

Audi, as one of the three major luxury car brands in the world, the performance of its electric transformation is obviously unacceptable.

Whether it can keep up with the wave of electrified transformation of the automobile industry is related to the future market fate of auto companies. Audi is no exception, but why does its electrified transformation behave like this?

2. Multiple models encounter "Waterloo" if one word is used to evaluate Audi's electrified transformation before 2021, "carelessness" may be a more appropriate comment.

Although it launched Audi's first pure electric car, the R8 e-tron, a high-performance sports car in the R8 series in 2009, the high price of the sports car and the delay in mass production make it a ticket game for Audi.

After 2014, the car industry is becoming more and more electrified, but Audi remains indifferent. Audi didn't arrive until 2018, when the electric car market was hot. In September of that year, Audi launched its first all-electric medium-sized SUV- Audi e-tron in San Francisco.

At that time, Tesla has been popular all over the world, traditional fuel car giants have also entered, Chinese car-making new forces are springing up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, at this time the launch of Audi e-tron, in fact, does not have a strong sense of existence.

In terms of product power, e-tron, which was born from the MLB evo oil-to-electricity platform, revealed "flaws" as soon as it appeared. It was originally scheduled to be delivered to users by the end of 2018, but the delivery time was delayed for several months. Reuters later reported that this was because Audi was having trouble with its software.

Not long after delivery began in April 2019, e-tron was recalled because of a sealing problem with the battery pack and the risk of spontaneous combustion.

In November 2019, Audi e-tron and Q2L e-tron specially designed for the Chinese market launched in the Chinese market at the same time.

The subsidized price of imported e-tron is as high as 69.28-828600 yuan. by contrast, the ES8 is about 300000 cheaper, and it has rich intelligent configuration and user-friendly power exchange service. Model X, which coincides with its price, completely crushes Audi e-tron in terms of mileage and intelligence. Even compared with its old rival Mercedes-Benz, Audi e-tron and Mercedes-Benz EQC are at a disadvantage in terms of actual range success rate, 100 km acceleration and so on.

Under such a market competition pattern, the market performance of e-tron can be imagined. Not long after landing in the Chinese market, many 4S stores offered a 15% discount to boost sales.

Although the price of another small pure electric SUV-Q2L e-tron is relatively close to the people (after subsidy, the price range is 22.68-237300 yuan), but the product performance is also hip-pulling. Its NEDC mileage is only 265km, and it takes 7 to 8 hours to charge slowly to 100%, and about 50 minutes to charge 80% in the case of fast charge. Compared with competitive products with a range of more than 400-500 kilometers, there is no advantage.

After the launch of the Q2L e-tron, it sold more than 700 and 1000 vehicles respectively in the first two months, but then turned around and the monthly sales fell to a pitiful 10.

The two pioneering works of Audi's electrified transformation have encountered their "Waterloo" in the market.

But even so, Audi's electric transformation still appears to be slow, and Audi has only one e-tron at the 2020 Beijing Auto Show. In 2021, the competition in China's electric vehicle market has been white-hot, at this time Audi cooperated with FAW to localize e-tron in the form of bulk assembly.

The domestic version of the e-tron is priced at 546800 yuan to 648800 yuan, which is more than 100,000 cheaper than the imported version, and it has been replaced with a ternary lithium battery pack from the Ningde era, which is said to last for about 500km. However, after users got the real car, they found that its range had shrunk seriously, and the power consumption index of 100 kilometers was so amazing that some media called it the largest electric car in the market.

In the unprecedented volume of China's new energy vehicle market, such product power is naturally not favored by the market. At present, the highest monthly sales of the car is only 205 and the lowest is 2.

In February this year, Audi teamed up with SAIC to launch a new main product, Audi Q5 e-tron. However, this luxury electric SUV is still disappointing: the acceleration time of the Q5 e-tron (the 560km model) is as high as 9.3 seconds, which has no advantage over some 200,000 domestic electric cars; the Q5 e-tron chassis and braking use a cheap front McPherson plus rear drum brake combination. In addition, as a "shell-changing vehicle" on the same platform, Volkswagen iD.6X uses a touch-controlled semi-hidden door handle with better wind resistance, while the more luxurious Q5 e-tron uses a mechanical door handle, which costs more than NT $100,000.

Currently, its highest monthly sales are 338 in August. Such sales also show once again the failure of Audi's electrified transformation.

3. By combing through Audi's electrified products, it is not difficult to find that Audi's electrified transformation has come to this stage mainly due to the following three reasons:

First, mistakes in strategic decision-making. Audi's determination to electrify the transition is far from enough before 2018, and for more than two years after 2018, Audi still looks slow and slow. Among them, some analysts believe that, on the one hand, Audi's senior management made a strategic miscalculation of the arrival time of the car electrification wave, on the other hand, the huge profits of fuel vehicles increased the difficulty of Audi's transformation.

For a giant fuel truck giant like Audi, it is extremely difficult to decide to give up the lucrative track and transform to a new track to "start all over again and self-revolution". And this matter also involves changes in corporate strategy, organizational adjustment, new technology research and development, capital investment, talent accumulation and other aspects, so it is even more difficult.

Some commentators believe that from this point alone, Audi has lost to a lot of new car-building forces from scratch.

Second, the power of Audi electric vehicles is insufficient. Due to the late arrival in the electric car market, Audi's electric car encountered a strong challenge from competitive products as soon as it made its debut. Although the car logo of the four rings is still eye-catching, the vast majority of consumers are rational and they know clearly whose products are more attractive.

The lack of product power of Audi electric vehicles can be traced back to the fact that Audi did not accumulate technological advantages in the core technology of electric vehicles (three electricity technology + digital ability). The technological innovation is pinned on the supplier.

Peter Mertens, a former head of research and development at Audi, who has worked for a number of luxury car companies, told the media: "in order to deal with the challenger, the old giants turned to ask whether the supply chain they most relied on could develop products similar to those of Tesla. The answer from the supply chain is yes, but by 2020, the world's most powerful car R & D department will build a car comparable to Tesla's 2012 work."

Volkswagen's software department CARIAD (uniformly responsible for software development within the group) made a similar mistake. Due to its lack of digital capabilities, it had to outsource a lot of software development work to a third party, but it also lacked talents to run all modules through the integrated software at the system level, resulting in repeated twists and turns in Volkswagen's software development progress, which greatly affected the listing of many of its electric vehicles.

Third, relying on the parent company Volkswagen has both advantages and disadvantages. As a subsidiary of Volkswagen, Audi can achieve large-scale advantages through coordination within Volkswagen Group, whether electrified or digital. For example, Audi's Q4 e-tron and Q5 e-tron are all products based on the Volkswagen MEB tram platform.

The collaboration with Volkswagen Group has improved Audi's ability to launch new products, but it also brings the problem of "indistinguishable products". For example, Audi's Q4 e-tron and Q5 e-tron have been criticized as the "shell cars" of Volkswagen ID.4 and ID.6. This is obviously not good for Audi to maintain its high-end luxury brand image.

In addition, Volkswagen's own electric, intelligent transformation encountered a lot of software problems, also dragged down the speed of Audi electric car launch.

4. Can the new strategy reverse the decline? In the face of the unfavorable transformation situation, Audi is obviously aware that the lack of a clear strategy is an important reason for the outdated electrified transformation. So it launched the "Vorsprung 2030" strategy in August 2021.

"our Vorsprung 2030 strategy will ensure Audi's long-term competitiveness and social change will continue to accelerate, so we also need to accelerate the transformation process," said Mr Duthman.

The "Vorsprung 2030" strategy focuses on three strategic priorities: electric travel, autopilot and digitization. Its specific contents include: from 2026, Audi's new models for the global market will be fully switched to pure electric products; by 2033, Audi will gradually stop the production of internal combustion engines; accelerate the construction of a comprehensive electric vehicle ecosystem, enable self-driving with a new operating system and software platform in 2025, and expand after-sales service to areas such as intelligent hardware and predictive maintenance. Bring the dimension of sustainable development into enterprise management.

In terms of investment planning, Audi has also made a big bet on electric travel: under the new plan, Audi plans to invest about 18 billion euros in electrification and hybrid power from 2022 to 2026, with a total investment of about 37 billion euros. This means that nearly half of the spending will be devoted to the research and development of future model projects.

In addition, Audi will continue to increase and expand its ability to localize the production of electric cars in the Chinese market, which accounts for nearly half of Audi's sales. In this regard, in addition to the original FAW Audi, the new partner SAIC and Audi FAW (55% of Audi, 40% of FAW and 5% of Volkswagen China) will play an important role.

In terms of improving product power, the next key step in Audi's electrification strategy is to create a PPE (Premium Platform Electric) all-electric luxury platform jointly developed by Audi and Porsche.

Audi has four major tram platforms available, namely, MLB evo, J1 Performance, MEB and PPE. But the MLB evo platform that gave birth to e-tron is essentially a hybrid platform of oil and electricity, with inherent disadvantages; although the MEB platform shared with Volkswagen is a pure electric platform, but its diversified adaptability is destined to be not suitable for more high-end luxury products; the J1 Performance platform used in Porsche's pure electric sports car Taycan is essentially a platform after electrification of the MSB fuel platform, not a native pure electric platform.

Therefore, if we want to maintain Audi's concept of "breaking through science and technology to enlighten the future" and maintain Audi's luxury brand image in the field of electric vehicles, PPE platform has become the main platform of Audi's pure electric models for the future. It is reported that the PPE platform will launch Audi A6 e-tron, Q6 e-tron, pure electric Porsche Macan and other models. Among them, Q6 e-tron is Audi's first PPE-based model, and its 800V DC fast charging power of 350kW 100kWh battery pack takes only 25 minutes to charge from 5% to 80%. These data show the good technical strength of the PPE platform.

Audi's new strategy and efforts have raised some expectations for its future product and market performance.

However, on the whole, Audi still faces great challenges, and at a time when car electrification has become a fixed pattern, the appeal of traditional fuel car luxury brands is not as strong as before. In the key area of the battery industry, Audi and its parent company, Volkswagen, do not have much technical and market say at present. In addition, in terms of digitization, due to the huge shortage of local IT talents in Germany, the digital ability of German car companies lags far behind Tesla and many Chinese car companies. In a small example, Volkswagen, including Audi's electric car products, does not yet support OTA remote upgrade, which has long been almost standard for electric cars in China.

Today, Audi has made a big bet on the electrified transformation, but it will take time to answer the outcome of the transformation.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:lishiqiche2016, author: Zhang Junzhi

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