谷歌Robotaxi使用中国吉利车体

[billwanhua]

Waymo To Use Chinese Geely Robotaxi Body. This Should Send Shivers Into Western OEMs

Waymo's choice of a Chinese car should be a major wake-up call for western OEMs of the greatest threat to their business to ever come along.

www.forbes.com

连对中国不感冒的谷歌都在用中国车？感觉中国又在切香肠弯道超车，找一个切入点。
Up to this point, western OEMs have not faced much competition from Chinese makers. Chinese cars are not made to fit US Federal Motor Vehicles Safety Standards and can’t be sold in the USA. Chinese brands have no reputation, or even have a negative reputation compared to top western brands — that’s even true in China though it’s been changing there.

This is why the shift to robotaxi is frightening to car OEMs. Customers don’t care a lot about the brand of the car that picks them up. While you might choose between Uber UBER, Uber Select or Uber Black to set the level of car, you don’t care whether your Uber Select is a Lexus PLXS or a Mercedes. You don’t care much at all what your Uber is. So while people might not be ready to buy a Geely or SAIC car in the USA, they won’t care about this when taking a ride. The brand they might care about is Waymo, and that brand will be on this vehicle.

It gets even worse for the OEMs. One way the top brands have gotten their reputations is by making quality, highly reliable cars. Chinese manufacturers are new to the game. They make lower cost cars but may not have yet reached the quality levels of a BMW, Mercedes or Toyota. When people buy cars, they care a lot about whether the car is going to break down or not. When your car breaks down, even if it’s under warranty, it’s a major burden. You can get stranded. You have to arrange to get the car to the shop. You’re possibly out a car while it’s in the shop or have to arrange a loaner. On top of all that is the cost of the repair if it’s not under warranty. It’s a bad day and people pay a lot to get cars from the brands that break down less often.

Contrast that with a breakdown in a robotaxi. It probably doesn’t happen when you’re in it, so you aren’t even aware of it, and you’re sent only a properly working taxi. But if it happens to breakdown while you’re in it, there’s no calamity. The car just pulls to the side of the road while a replacement taxi is dispatched. Within a few minutes, it arrives and you get in it, and continue your trip. That’s the sum total of your trouble.

This means you don’t need to make a car as well as a fine German or Japanese OEM can make one. You don’t even have to do it as well as American or other vendors do. You actually will pick the reliability to be most cost effective, which probably means cheaper parts with more frequent replacement for the minimum total cost. This is an area where the Chinese are well along and ready to play in the global markets. It’s not that they can’t or won’t develop the ability to engineer the same reliability as global leaders, it’s that they don’t need to pay the cost that comes with that.

It’s also a shortcut. Japanese companies took many decades to attain their current reputation for fine automotive engineering. The path to matching them directly is not easy.

 

[DavidWuu]

吉利电动车不错的

 

[春夏秋鼕]

好像沃尔沃是吉利买下品牌，在北美销售

 

[ccc]

肯定是同档次产品中吉利的便宜呗。