Two days ago, Toyota showcased its electrification technology at the Guangzhou Tech Open Day, and the pressure on the joint venture is evident at a time when China's new energy penetration rate is about to exceed 50%.
Since the beginning of this year, the prices of all foreign brands have been lowered, from the top-level Porsche to the entry-level Volkswagen Toyota.
The core reasons are twofold:
1. Electrification has indeed seized the market share of fuel vehicles. 2. The continuous rejuvenation of consumers has lost the recognition of the joint venture brand.
However, as the world's top enterprise, Toyota will definitely not give up the huge domestic market of more than 20 million, after all, it still has more than 5 core business lines in China.
This includes, but is not limited to, the joint ventures of FAW and GAC, the import business of Lexus, the conventional transmission business, and the parts sales business of holding companies such as Denso.
For Toyota, China is a business market with a huge handicap, so in terms of product strategy and marketing adjustment, Toyota's action is far faster than that of other joint ventures.
After decades of development, Toyota's hybrid system has evolved to the fifth generation on the basis of safety, reliability, stability and durability.
In addition, it is compared with PHEV plug-in hybrids with different representatives and different paths in China.
Toyota put forward two points, its hybrid fuel tank is the smallest, and the battery pack is the smallest, and the fuel consumption performance is not high, in other words, Toyota believes that the current domestic "big tank, big battery" strategy is deformed, the reasons are as follows:
1. The long battery life of many brands is based on a large fuel tank, and it is of little significance for a hybrid model to be equipped with a larger capacity fuel tank than a fuel truck to improve the battery life.
2. The battery pack is getting bigger and bigger, and the battery pack capacity of many plug-in hybrid models has exceeded 10kWh, and the larger one exceeds 30kWh, which occupies more resources and has the risk of spontaneous combustion.
Toyota's strategy is to focus on weight reduction.
The so-called lightweighting is not to reduce the weight in a narrow sense, but to reduce the dependence on all resources in a broad sense, which is a strategy to reverse compress resources and effectively reduce fuel consumption.
Toyota's THS fifth-generation hybrid system, for example, has a fuel tank capacity of only 40L+ and a battery pack capacity of less than 2kWh, but it still has a combined fuel consumption of about 4L.
For Toyota, Diss China can get more attention, and its current dilemma is that the small battery pack of less than 2kWh means that it cannot enjoy the strong new energy subsidy benefits.
THS is indeed an excellent technology, but the need to pay purchase tax and mainstream city traffic restrictions are a disadvantage in the face of domestic new energy.
Is it true, as Toyota said, that China's new energy companies only have marketing, not technology?
Obviously not, China's new energy companies have their own merits, charging speed, battery density, internal combustion engine working form, transmission mechanism, motor system, more dependent on battery packs of China's PHEV route, in fact, brings the same good sense of experience.
Moreover, taking a step back, the power system is only a technical part of a car, and comfort, pricing, technology, and handling are also very important, which are also the product forces of China's new energy vehicles that continue to optimize and grow.
In fact, from a rational point of view, no one has ever denied the power of Toyota THS, especially in the case of relatively few products, relatively high prices, and certain shortcomings in intelligence and control, there are still a large number of consumers who choose Toyota's THS hybrid system.
It's just that Toyota's hybrid, which is increasing every year, really can't compete with the crazy growth of Chinese PHEVs in terms of absolute growth rate and ownership.