Does the skateboard chassis cause the car to lose its differentiation?

The skateboard chassis can be sold to different car companies, so that they can build different car bodies according to the chassis and user needs. The problem is that it is easy to get caught in a dilemma. The R&D cost of new cars has indeed decreased, but different brands and models share a chassis. How can we reflect our differentiation advantages? For example, Porsche and Wuling share a skateboard chassis. Even if Porsche is willing, I’m afraid Porsche owners are also unwilling?
Now let’s move on to another question – is today’s consumers still looking at chassis technology when buying cars?
If it is true that the era of fuel vehicles is not feasible, because one of the core differences in the era of fuel vehicles is the chassis, but adults, the era has changed. In June 2021, when asked whether SAIC Chairman Chen Hong would consider cooperating with Huawei and other third-party companies in terms of automatic driving, she said that the most sensitive “soul theory” issue among major auto enterprises was: “In this way, Huawei has become the soul and SAIC has become the body. SAIC cannot accept such a result, and should take the soul in its own hands.”
It can be seen that in the cognition of traditional car enterprises, the soul of a car has changed from chassis and other three major parts to software technology focusing on automatic driving.
Morgan Stanley estimates that 60% of the value of smart cars in the future will come from software. We used to think that chassis is a big part of cars and must be done by car companies themselves. But New Force and the latest user trends tell us the opposite. Tesla, New Force and BYD have not strictly copied the industrial chain layout of traditional auto industry giants, but they have succeeded.
We will not give up buying because of the chassis texture of Tesla. At best, it is just a roast. The core reason is that the purchase point of cars we choose has changed. Today’s users are most attracted to buying cars and cars. What makes them feel most pleasant is the screen with more and more functions, the ability to connect and coordinate cars and mobile phones, the voice assistant that can free their hands, the interior, the appearance, but not the chassis. In fact, most ordinary consumers may not even know what the chassis texture is.
Just like buying a mobile phone now, the most attractive things are the screen, the system and the photos, but not the call quality. Now that we talk about mobile phones, let’s take mobile phones as an analogy: the emergence of Android system has resulted in the “common prosperity” of mobile phone industry among mobile phone companies, and the emergence of a number of Android based smart phone companies from China has promoted the development of mobile Internet. Android has lowered the threshold and cost of developing smart phone operating systems, allowing mobile phone brands to focus more on doing things outside the system.
The skateboard chassis can be seen as “hardware Android”, which is the product of the new environment and new elements of electric vehicles, intelligence, electrification and software in the new era.
Every year, the entire industry spends tens of billions of research and development funds on automobile chassis, which can be said that these funds are not spent on cutting edges. Skateboard chassis can free up the hands of automobile enterprises to make more meaningful industrial chain attempts, such as the Internet of Vehicles, car bodies, self operated retail, etc. Because of this, the emergence of a professional skateboard chassis company is more valuable.
At the China Automobile Supply Chain Summit in 2022, Li Peng, the founder and CEO of Youpao Technology, said: Anyone who regards the chassis as a car factory with their own expertise is expected to be eliminated from the market in the next 5-10 years, because they still think they are an engineering company. The car factory in the next 5-10 years must be a technology company, a user company, and not an engineering company.
The appearance of the skateboard chassis is to tell the car enterprises that they can be your technology company and leave the chassis to me.
Back to our question, will the skateboard chassis cause the car to lose its differentiation? The answer is no, the main competition points of automobiles have changed from the traditional three major parts to factors such as intelligence, appearance, and connectivity. The differences between automobile enterprises are also reflected in intelligence, not chassis, so there is no need to worry about homogenization. In fact, automobile enterprises and even the entire automobile industry believe that in the future, automobile intelligence is more important than chassis.
Of course, chassis standardization does not mean that the chassis texture will be sacrificed. The premise that enterprises are willing to “outsource” the chassis is that the principle and nature of the chassis are recognized by consumers.