The German company Audi, part of the Volkswagen Group, is forced to borrow Chinese technology, so the development of its own next-generation electric vehicles has been delayed, and the market will not wait.
Last week, business media cited insiders as saying that Audi and China's state-owned automaker SAIC were close to a deal, when Audi was supposed to buy SAIC's IM Motors EV platform from SAIC. Yesterday, SAIC Vice President and Chief Engineer Zu Siji confirmed to a number of Chinese media, including China Daily, that Audi and SAIC have indeed agreed to jointly develop electric vehicles, but the IM Motors platform did not appear in his statements, saying that a specific form of mutually beneficial cooperation has yet to be determined. Audi representatives interviewed by foreign colleagues do not comment on the new round of partnership with SAIC at all.
SAIC already has successful existing joint ventures with General Motors Corporation and the Volkswagen concern, it is SAIC that produces the Audi Q5 e-tron crossover specially designed for China, but for some reason it and other Audi electric cars turned out to be uninteresting to the Chinese consumer. The Chinese are much more willing to buy electric vehicles of their own, Chinese brands. So, in June, sales of Audi in China, according to CAAM (China Association of Automobile Manufacturers), decreased by 10.8% compared to June last year to 66,552 units, while the current leader of the Chinese car market, BYD, sold 220,600 cars (+66.5%). In general, CAAM statistics show that Chinese brands are mainly increasing sales, while foreign brands are mainly declining. Even Tesla recorded a 4.8% drop in sales in China in June to 74,212 units.
IM Motors Platform
The fact is that the largest Chinese automakers have entered the age of maturity and no longer urgently need foreign technologies, although it is IM Motors that boasts that it has attracted the British engineering company Williams Advanced Engineering (WAE) to develop its electric vehicle platform and uses Bosch, Continental and Brembo components in this platform. The strength of Chinese companies lies in their quick response to market needs: they can release a new model, and if it does not sell well, then carry out a complete restyling of it within the first year of production. For Western companies, such a speed of updating is simply unthinkable, it does not fit into their management style, which assumes that plans are built for many years ahead and are rather rigidly executed. >Planned management of the Volkswagen group has repeatedly failed, the last such major failure happened last year, when it turned out that the digital division of Cariad, which develops a new generation of integrated operating system for all brands of the concern, boiled the schedule, and the main electrical innovations of Audi, Porsche, Bentley and Volkswagen will have to be postponed because of this for a year or two. Due to the Cariad crisis last summer, Volkswagen Group chairman Herbert Diess resigned, and the life cycle of the obsolete MEB electric vehicle platform had to be extended. While the new modular SSP (Scalable Systems Platform) is stalled due to raw software, Audi, in an effort to maintain its share in the Chinese market, is forced to ask for help from Chinese partners — hence the new deal with SAIC. .jpg» />IM LS7
IM Motors, whose platform is matched by Audi, was founded in 2020 as a joint venture between SAIC, IT giant Alibaba and real estate developer Zhangjiang Hi-Tech, with SAIC holding a 54% stake. The letters IM in the company name stand for Intelligence in Motion, which can be translated into Russian as «intelligence in motion.» IM Motors has only two models so far — the IM L7 business sedan and the IM LS7 crossover, in the first six months of this year, IM Motors sold 8552 cars in China, which is not bad considering the recent launch and rather high prices — both IM models are positioned in the premium segment.
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