According to Wall Street Insights, after five years, Toyota Motor Chairman Akio Toyoda made a rare visit to China to show off his driving skills at the Shanghai GR Racing Carnival. Following him, there is also the trend of localizing Lexus.
It is reported that one of Toyoda's trips to China is to set up a Lexus factory in Shanghai to specialize in the production of high-end electric cars; and to seek similar treatment as Tesla, including tax exemptions, policy support, and land grants. and the conditions for sole proprietorship operations.
Regarding this rumor, Toyota China changed its previous attitude of firmly denying it and stated that it would "not respond". But it is undeniable that this is the closest Lexus has ever come to domestic production.
If the rumors are true, Toyota is preparing to follow Tesla’s path to success this time.
1. Lexus’ transformation
Right now, Lexus is encountering difficulties in the Chinese market.
After experiencing 17 consecutive years of positive growth, Lexus showed a downward trend in 2022, with sales in the Chinese market of 183,900 units, a year-on-year decrease of 18.6%; in the first half of last year, the sales crown of imported car brands in the Chinese market changed hands to Mercedes-Benz.
The decline in terminal selling prices has put even more pressure on front-line dealers. Toyota China executives have sounded the alarm, pointing out that due to market pressure, dealers' income has declined and even suffered losses. If this momentum continues, a large number of fuel vehicle dealers may exit in 2024.
Nowadays, new energy vehicles are accelerating to encroach on the share of traditional oil vehicles, and brands represented by Wenjie have begun to subvert the luxury car track pattern. This drastic change has made it difficult for Lexus to maintain the myth of "price increase king", and also pushed it to a point where it must break the situation.
The turning point in its fate lies in the Toyota Group’s electrification chess game.
In April last year, after Toyota Group’s leadership reshuffle, its ambiguous attitude towards electric cars finally changed. New president Tsuneharu Sato proposed to launch 10 pure electric vehicles by 2026, with sales of pure electric vehicles reaching 1.5 million vehicles per year; by 2030, this number will further rise to 3.5 million vehicles.
This means that Toyota will have an arm-wrestling relationship with Musk in two years, and Sato Tsuneji’s ambitions cannot be concealed.
At this year’s Tokyo Motor Show, Lexus announced that the brand will enter an electrification transformation in 2026 and released the LF-ZC concept car. The car will adopt a modular architecture, production methods will also undergo significant changes, and the software platform will be completely redesigned.
Lexus finally made up its mind to develop electric cars, which also became the foreshadowing of its localization.
If Lexus successfully builds a factory in China, a series of domestic mature new energy industry chains will become ready resources. In fact, Toyota has previously cooperated with partners such as BYD through diversified paths.
Amidst the rolling changes, Lexus and Toyota do not want to be left behind.
2. Price reduction
On the other hand, Toyota also seems to be learning from Tesla in terms of price reduction. A few days ago, news of price cuts broke.
For example, the manufacturer's guide price of Toyota Lingfang is 211,800-298,800 yuan. As a car with a length of 4755mm, the manufacturer defines it as a joint venture product of a medium-sized SUV. Nowadays, this car seems to have considerable discounts. I saw on the car portal website that the terminal discount of this car has exceeded 60,000 yuan, and the starting price has also reached the level of more than 140,000 yuan. For Toyota products, This is already a huge price reduction.
In addition, Toyota RAV4 Rongfang, Toyota's "ace SUV", originally had an official guide price of 176,800-263,800 yuan. Now Toyota has been cruel and has dropped it by more than 60,000 yuan, and the starting price has suddenly reached more than 110,000 yuan. The top configuration is just over 200,000 yuan, so this wave of operations is quite fierce.
In fact, as early as the 618 period, Toyota began to test the water and reduce prices.
On June 18, FAW Toyota released information related to the "FAW Toyota 618 Special Sale". Through limited-time comprehensive discounts, the price of the Toyota Corolla family sedan, which is highly recognized by the country, has been reduced to 79,800 yuan, and the Corolla E-Pan has been introduced, starting at 99,800 yuan.
It is worth mentioning that Corolla is FAW Toyota’s cheapest sedan, and Corolla Ruifang is FAW Toyota’s cheapest SUV. During the event, the starting price of Corolla is 79,800, which is the same price as BYD Qin PLUS DM-i and BYD Destroyer 05. The Corolla Sharp starts from 99,800 yuan, which coincides with the starting prices of BYD Qin L DM-i and BYD Seal 06 DM-i.
In this regard, some industry insiders commented, "In the past few years, Toyota's prices have been very stable. Occasionally there are price cuts, but the magnitude is not very drastic. This time, the Corolla's starting price of 79,800 yuan is the official event price, mainly It’s because the official wants to boost sales in the second quarter and prepare for the end of the first half of the year.”
In terms of price reductions, Toyota’s price reductions do not appear to be that “explosive.”However, several key steps have indeed been taken.
3. Intelligence
In the field of intelligence, Toyota is also keeping a close eye on Tesla.
It is reported that Tesla will soon release fully autonomous driving (FSD) and autonomous driving future scenarios, as well as Robotaxi, a new entry-level model Model 2, and the Cybervan concept car specially designed for online ride-hailing. Among them, Robotaxi is Tesla's fully autonomous driverless taxi. If its autonomous driving technology is recognized by the market, Tesla will once again become the target of various new energy vehicle companies.
However, before Tesla’s Robotaxi is released, Toyota plans to launch the first pure electric model equipped with an autonomous driving system similar to Tesla. At the same time, GAC Toyota also stated that it will launch a model equipped with an autonomous driving system in the Chinese market next year - —Toyota's 3X SUV can be widely used in high-end driving assistance parking and navigation functions on highways and urban sections.
Intelligence is a trend in the automotive industry, which is already a general consensus among people in the industry. Now that intelligence has become one of the decisive weapons for the future auto market, many domestic leading new energy car companies prefer to follow the self-research route in order to reduce their dependence on suppliers and maximize their profits. Suppliers are basically just suppliers of parts. character of.
However, as one of the world's largest automakers, Toyota chose to cooperate with a third party when facing the world's largest new energy market. It is reported that GAC Toyota is cooperating with Momenta, a domestic autonomous driving technology company, to develop an autonomous driving system.
Momenta currently has two major autonomous driving solutions, namely MSD (fully driverless solution) and Mpilot (mass production autonomous driving solution). Among them, MSD is an autonomous driving solution specially designed for L4 and above. It is mainly used in driverless taxi scenarios to achieve fully autonomous driving. It usually cooperates with car companies with Mpilot, which can provide different levels of autonomous driving functions.
However, in terms of sensor design, Momenta’s two autonomous driving solutions tend to be unified, mainly composed of millimeter wave radar, cameras and lidar. In other words, after cooperating with Momenta, GAC Toyota’s technical route is not in the same camp as Tesla.
Of course, consumers don’t care what technical route car companies take. Cheap prices and good experience are the last words.
In terms of functional experience, both driverless technologies provide high-speed navigation assistance functions and city navigation assistance functions, which not only enable automatic lane changes on highways, entry and exit ramps, etc., but also handle complex urban traffic scenes.
But objectively speaking, it is the public consensus that Tesla’s FSD intelligent driving system has stronger underlying technical strength in the industry, because its pioneering application of BEV, Transformer and end-to-end technologies has indeed led the industry forward. Considered a bellwether. In comparison, Momenta’s position in the industry is slightly lower.
In addition, although Momenta and Tesla have different corporate attributes, their autonomous driving technologies both emphasize the highlights of data-driven algorithms, and both use a large amount of driving data for algorithm training and optimization to improve the accuracy of autonomous driving technology. and reliability
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