What are the main options for the development of new car makers?

"80 % to 90 % of new car building forces in the future will be eliminated by the market. In an exclusive interview with NBD on May 10, Shenhaiyin, co-founder and CEO of Singularity Motors, bluntly stated that he is now under great pressure.

"The Internet industry has seen half a year and will soon know the results, but building a car is different. "Shenhaiyin said that his current pressure is on the one hand from building cars, and on the other hand there is uncertainty about the future. He entered the automotive industry in 2014 and announced the construction of a car.

According to public data, the number of new domestic car building forces has exceeded 40, and competition has begun to appear hot. The company founded by Shenhaiyin, Singularity Motors, has now come to the key point of mass production.

Because Lei Jun decided to build a car

Compared to the founders of other new car companies, Shenhaiyin is not entirely an outsider. After graduating from University, Shenhaiyin joined Shanghai Delphi Automobile Air Conditioning Co., Ltd. to do supporting air-conditioning for the car. This brief experience in the car manufacturing industry, in Shenhaiyin's view, is both the starting point for the dream of making a car in the future and a major advantage for his transition from the Internet to the automotive industry.

In 2000, Shenhaiyin went to Japan to start a business. Later, he became an executive of Internet companies such as Kingsoft and spent 15 years in the Internet industry. Until 2014, after Shenhaiyin first met Tesla, he began to have a new understanding of automotive products.

"After experiencing Tesla's car, I had a feeling that the car industry was bound to change. " said Shenhaiyin.

Despite seeing the new wind, but from the familiar Internet field to the unfamiliar car manufacturing industry, Shenhaiyin also hesitated, in the process, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun's entrepreneurial experience has a great impact on his decision to build a car.

"In 2010, no one in the industry was optimistic about Lei Jun.. Nokia's factory is very good. Tens of thousands of R&D teams, chips, and OS(operating system) are all made by themselves. There are a lot of reasons why people don't like Xiaomi, but in the end we all saw it. "Shenhaiyin said that the situation in which he wanted to move to the automotive field is not much different from that of Lei Jun in 2010, and even has some advantages.

Shenhaiyin has had three entrepreneurial experiences in Japan, and at worst, staff pay is a problem, allowing him to anticipate the pressure of failure. The work experience of Internet companies such as Jinshan has allowed Shenhaiyin to have management experience. As a result, under repeated consideration, Shenhaiyin finally decided to challenge himself again to seize the new wind of the automotive industry.

Hand in hand with traditional car companies will become the mainstream of the choice?

Shenhaiyin was not the only one who found the new wind. In recent years, with the help of the wave of electric vehicles, new car building companies have sprung up. The outside world is accustomed to calling it "new forces for car building." However, Shenhaiyin does not like this title. He prefers to call the "smart electric car company".

"Old companies can also do new things as long as they think about reform. In turn, a new enterprise, even if it has only been established for two or three years, may not necessarily be able to do something new. Mr Shenhaiyin said that, at present, most new car makers are not doing smart cars, but just oil-converted(gasoline-powered) products, and that 80 per cent to 90 per cent of new car makers could not survive in the future.

In Shenhaiyin's view, the core competitiveness of the new car building company lies in intelligence, not electromagnetism. "Electro-electricity is still a hardware upgrade and is a manufacturing sector. New car makers have no advantage over traditional car companies in this regard. With the massive development of traditional car companies and the completion of the 'elephant turn', those new car makers that are electrically centered may be eliminated from the market. " said Shenhaiyin.

In Shenhaiyin's view, the reason why Xiaomi can defeat Lenovo depends essentially on genes. "Lenovo's supply chain management level and bargaining power must be stronger than millet from 2011 to 2012, but Xiaomi has opened the market with new software functions and good customer experience. This is essentially a genetic problem. Shenhaiyin believes that just as Xiaomi surpassed old companies such as Lenovo and ZTE in the past, the new car makers now want to open the market. They also need to rely on primitive genes to continuously upgrade the functions of automotive software to create a better customer experience.

Despite the emphasis on software advantages, Shenhaiyin does not believe that this factor alone can revolutionize traditional car companies. In his view, software is more strategically important, but tactically, software and hardware need to be parallel to each other. Good software requires good hardware carriers, and traditional car companies have rich experience in hardware. Therefore, at the beginning of the venture, Shenhaiyin put forward the development slogan of "reverence for tradition and bold innovation."

At this year's Beijing Auto Show, Singular Auto announced that it has cooperated with Beiqi New Energy. In the future, the two sides will cooperate in the development of smart car technology, construction of charging and replacing facilities, distribution network, and manufacturing resource sharing. At the same time, Singular Auto will join the national new energy vehicle technology innovation center led by BAIC New Energy.

In Shenhaiyin's view, holding hands with traditional car companies to develop together, this model will become the mainstream choice for the development of new car companies.

Cooperation with Beiqi has a long way to go

In fact, the cooperation between singularity and BAIC is not accidental. As early as when Shenhaiyin was still working in an Internet company, he had contact with Beiqi. In a meeting with Xuheyi, chairman of Beiqi Group, Xuheyi said in person that if Shenhaiyin's company wants to expand its car business, Beiqi can develop cars for it and provide contract workers for later mass production.

Xuheyi's proposal was very much touched by Shenhaiyin. "This proposal has inspired me and perhaps we can work with traditional vehicle factories. "Shenhaiyin said that many years later, he still remembers what Xuheyi said at the time.

Still, singularities and BAIC's new energy partnership did not happen overnight. NBD vehicles learned that previously, Singularity Motors had contacted a number of traditional car companies, but in the end Shenhaiyin found that Beiqi, which holds a shared open strategy, is the ideal partner for Singularity.

In January this year, Beiqi New Energy officially announced that from 2018 to 2025, it will implement a comprehensive "open and shared" strategy in technology, research and development, manufacturing, capital, supply chain, and post-market.

"The final choice of Beiqi New Energy is also attracted by the 'open and shared' strategy. "Shenhaiyin admitted that in the contact, he found that some car companies are willing to cooperate with new car makers is only short-term tactical behavior in order to temporarily solve the problem of excess capacity. But BAIC's "open and shared" strategy shows that the company is "thinking clearly" about future industrial development.

It is understood that in the future, Singularity will cooperate with Beiqi New Energy in many aspects. In addition to making full use of the latter's manufacturing resources, it will also make full use of its post-sales network.

Previously, Singularity Motors had announced the implementation of a new sales model, that is, the creation of experience centers, delivery centers and service centers, completely separating pre-sale, in-sale and after-sale work. Through cooperation with Beiqi New Energy, Singularity Automobile plans to use Beiqi New Energy's 4S store as its own service center to complete after-sales service for vehicles.

"Most car 4S stores are currently not saturated with work. Through cooperation with Beiqi New Energy, on the one hand, it solved the problem of after-sales service at odd points, and on the other hand, it also improved the utilization rate of after-sales service resources at 4S stores. " said Shenhaiyin.

Not only that, in the future, Singularity Motors and Beiqi New Energy will also share charging networks and cooperate in the field of technology opening up to achieve the development purpose of improving the operational efficiency of both parties.

Shenhaiyin admits that another major reason for the cooperation with Beiqi New Energy is also related to the production qualification of Singularity Cars. The iS6, the company's first mass-produced car, is scheduled to go public in the second half of this year, but the door to new energy car companies 'production qualifications appears to be temporarily closed. In order to ensure foolproof, the singular-point car has two hands preparation: First, actively cooperate with Beiqi New Energy; Second, speed up the construction of their own production bases.

The NBD car learned that the singularity car is located at the production base of Tongling in Anhui Province and will be put into production in the second half of 2019. At the same time, the singularity car also planned a second production base in Suzhou.

"The Suzhou production base was signed at the end of March this year. The ground has not yet been obtained. It will be a long time, but this base is not particularly urgent. " Shenhaiyin said the most important test results for the odd-point car will be revealed with the iS6 launch. Shenhaiyin is leading his team in the final push for this important moment.

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.