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

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizens Xiao Bing for your clue delivery! CTOnews.com November 27, CEO Li Bin attended the opening ceremony of Dongguan Songshan Lake Weilai Center and had a brief communication and interaction with the attendees to answer questions related to user experience, supply chain and capacity, as well as mobile phone business progress.

Now, Weibo blogger @ Meat Daddy has sorted out the more important remarks made by Li Bin, founder of Xilai, at this meeting.

Q: user: the mobile phone of Xilai has been activated now. Can you tell me something?

Li Bin: the mobile phone team has teams in Shanghai and Shenzhen, and it is going quite smoothly.

As for when it will be released, Li Bin said: users who want to change their phones within a year, there is no need to change. If they are Android users now, there is no need to switch to other phones.

CTOnews.com has reported that Weilai Mobile Technology Co., Ltd. was officially established on August 4 this year. Yi Wei, former senior vice president of Meitu Mobile, has joined the mobile team as head of the software department, according to the Future Automobile Daily. Li Bin has also revealed that Xilai mobile phones are being promoted, developing one mobile phone every year, just like Apple.

Q: users who chose BaaS were 70kWh batteries when they first bought ES8, and the second car bought 100kWh batteries. For the same user, the battery can be exchanged, except for BaaS users. Only users who buy out the battery can be exchanged. Can Brother Bin help solve the problem?

Li Bin: BaaS is a relatively complex thing, some things, may be the system does not support, may be business logic, commercial contract issues, from the user's point of view, is a reasonable demand. Go back and sort it out and see how to support you.

Q: users from non-Weilai owners, can you give me a reason to become a car owner in the future?

Li Bin: if your ideal model is the product of BBA, then in terms of product, service and experience, BBA is quite far from Xilai in these three latitudes. Among the more than 400000 pure electric models in China, 73 users have chosen Weilai.

There was a user who drove 45w kilometers in three years, and we bought it and did a quality test, and found that three years saved the user a bba. So if your intention is to buy BBA, then it is recommended to choose Weilai.

Q: the problem with the duck feather of the owner of the Weilai car: there are too few third-party software in the Weilai car system, no more than 10, including the software for watching the World Cup, which is too slow.

Li Bin: this is the pain in our hearts. In terms of car applications, the direction is to adapt and put on the new applications (so the third-party applications are relatively inefficient), and probably push the new Banyan system by the end of the month.

Q:ES8 's car-machine system is getting slower and slower, and Alder upgrades have been out of stock. Is it possible to optimize Aspen's system through engineering?

Li Bin: Aspen system, we will continue to optimize, will not stop, the upgrade speed of Alder is also improving, the chip part of the front is moved back to the top.

The first user of Q:ET7, because of the abnormal noise, all four doors of the car were dismantled in a month. Hope not to become a guinea pig, there are too few walkers, the after-sales side should share the solution, not every city end should grope from scratch.

Li Bin: there were some problems with the early ET7. The March / April quality team was sealed at home because of the mask, so there were some problems with the early quality control, which we tried to improve.

Q: will there be a MPV release this year?

Li Bin: the categorical answer: no! For a long time, there is no MPV plan; we have received a lot of user demand, originally there is no plan, it is more troublesome to do it temporarily, we put MPV in the relatively late schedule.

Q: when can Weilai start to make a profit?

Li Bin: this matter has not been made public at present. I hope it will break even in 2024. Our current R & D investment is relatively large, mainly in chips / mobile phones / sub-brands / batteries, with R & D investment of more than 3 billion per quarter. I hope to sell more cars to share R & D costs, because the increase in the price of raw materials is also less than billions of gross profit, because the mask is also billions less, so this year is more difficult.

Q: why is the delivery volume of Wei Lai always affected by the epidemic / supply chain? Why doesn't the impact of other brands seem so great? For example, the subframe yield of ET7, competitors also use the same supplier, why is the delivery volume so high?

Li Bin: I think this question is the same as an exam. Do others always do better than us, whether they work harder or smarter than us? in fact, I think there are many reasons. Of course, we can do better ourselves.

For example, for the same subframe, the design standard may be different, and the yield will have a lot of influence. For Weilai, the challenge of climbing the yield of the subframe will be greater. Weilai sent dozens of employees to help partners solve the problem of capacity climbing, and each family's process is still different, so when we look at the surface data, we should focus on the reasons behind it. I also know that many car friends are saying, why is the production capacity of Xilai pulling so hard? should I say that our team is still working very hard? after the quarantine was lifted in early November, we went to the factory, and more than 3000 colleagues lived in the factory directly. A lot has been paid to close production.

This is a more complicated thing, after all, there is a big difference between product and product, which we can understand. For example, in the early days of ES8 crawling, it was much more difficult for our all-aluminum body to climb and produce, and many of our connection processes were new. Of course, this is also good. Weilai has spent a lot of effort in many invisible places, so it is easy to be misunderstood as to why you are so slow.

For example, some friends in the group even asked me to stop being CEO and let them be CEO.

In addition, the market entry strategy of each company is different, because we produce vehicles according to orders, and we hand over as many cars as we climb. We will not put the cars together and hand them over. We have to get the delivery figures for a certain month. This is not our style of work, and each one is different.

In the long run, the problem of supply will certainly be solved, and the problem of subframe will all be solved. For a period of time, the epidemic situation will have a certain impact, and every family will have a certain impact.

Our strategy is to use richer models to meet the different needs of the market, and because there are more models; some friends have suggested that we should not make so many models, but everyone will take this road, and everyone will gradually have more models.

So, how do we produce according to order, and through personalized vehicle selection, such as ET5, a variety of body colors / interior colors, we can meet the needs of different users? this is our strategic positioning, which conflicts with today's very complex supply chain situation. Do you think our previous positioning is wrong? I think so, but it must be more difficult today.

Q: in the face-to-face interviews of previous users, it was mentioned that the release time of NOP + would be on Q3. At that time, the original words should be: either July or August, August or September, but now it is nearing the end of Q4. Is there a deadline inside Weilai? The information we have learned now is that the product function of NOP + is already available, but it has not been released for internal reasons, so it should not meet the internal expectations. Can we talk about this?

Li Bin: it is indeed a jump ticket. Now NOP + should be released on Q4 (estimated to be pilot / trial).

Starting from the second generation of products, the whole underlying logic of auxiliary driving / self-driving has been reconstructed. In the first generation of products, our perception is mbe, what we mainly do is control, and what we mainly do is auxiliary driving.

The second generation is self-developed except that the chips are used by suppliers; we have made a great contribution to the industry, so we pay much more than you think in many places that we cannot see. To take a very simple example, for example, the Orin-X chip we use, we all know that the first chip is very difficult. We are the first mass-produced chip in the world. We are about 6 months earlier than others. Basically, the chips we take are all chips that have just been lit up with suppliers. Our engineering team at the bottom has made great efforts. After the bottom layer is finished, the whole industry can use it. It was the same with Q4 chips at that time, about 10 months earlier than the industry.

On the application side, it is not the same. Some people may play tricks. There are many ways of software trickery, and we spend more time on it. In addition, our current technology line cannot only consider China, but we also have to consider how to reuse it in Europe. This is still very different, including how to connect the technology stack of auxiliary driving and self-driving. On the whole, I am quite confident, and I have invested in a lot of autopilot companies; now the overall ability of the AD team is among the best in the country.

The perception of the application side, we may need to continue to improve at the experience level.

In terms of release rhythm, we should respect the basic things, whether they meet the use standards, safety factors, and experience factors; we have our own standards. In November, I drove from Shanghai to Hefei and opened an ET5 with a NOP + version. The overall experience is still OK, and we are still doing some pilot tests.

There is one point I would like to say. Driving assistance is standard, and NP-related functions are used by everyone.

On the NT2.0 platform, whether the NOP belongs to the auxiliary driving part or to the autopilot part, we are still doing some internal discussions, and there is no final decision yet.

Why do you say so? I think the difference between auxiliary driving and autopilot is particularly simple. Auxiliary driving is still people's responsibility; autopilot is responsible for all responsibility; if something goes wrong, it is responsible for it.

NOP + has a lot of autopilot feelings, if it is simply regarded as a function, there are a lot of very complex legal and technical issues. We are still thinking about this, and the functions we promised to you have actually been delivered. (my understanding is LCC / ALC / parking)

It's just that how to provide services on autopilot and NAD needs to be further discussed.

The supplementary question is: does NOP + belong to NAD?

Li Bin: it depends on how we define it. It's not a technical problem; it's a matter of logic, commerce and regulations.

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