When the industry collectively turns to cutting-edge fields such as L3 autonomous driving and flying cars, the contradiction between automakers' investment cycle and profit pressure becomes more acute.
Data from the China Passenger Car Association showed that sales of new energy vehicles fell 40% month-on-month in January 2025, but Xpeng Motors topped the list of new forces with 30,350 deliveries.
However, He Xiaopeng clearly judged that "the elimination round has just begun." In an interview with the media, he said frankly: "Enterprises must make money first before they can spend money, rather than relying on raising money."
On November 15, 2024, He Xiaopeng, Chairman of Xpeng Motors, attended the Xpeng Motors launch conference at the 2024 Guangzhou International Auto Show.
Right now, when Tesla has launched a global price war and BYD has launched national intelligent driving, those car companies whose sales cannot match theirs are facing an increasing risk of being eliminated.
How to make money, He Xiaopeng prescribed the key prescription of "efficiency". In a recently exposed internal letter of He Xiaopeng, "efficiency" was emphasized more than 20 times, and cost reduction and efficiency improvement were regarded as the key to the survival of the enterprise.
In Xiaopeng Motors' plan, reducing costs and increasing efficiency starts with reconstructing the cost structure through self-developed technology.
According to the plan, it will invest 9.5 billion yuan in research and development in 2025, of which 4.5 billion yuan will be devoted to the field of AI. The self-developed Turing chip can be applied to cars, flying cars and robots at the same time. This technology reuse significantly dilutes the R&D cost of a single product category. It is reported that Xiaopeng's full-stack self-developed autonomous driving system has reduced its single-vehicle software cost by 30%.
The second is the improvement of organizational structure efficiency which lasted for 3 years.
He Xiaopeng adopted "workshop director management", personally participated in procurement negotiations, laid off 10 senior executives within two years, and rebuilt execution through more than 600 employee dinners. In addition, he also saved costs through meeting optimization. For example, there were 344 large meetings with more than 20 people and more than 90 minutes in a month. By the second half of 2024, 70% of the meetings were with less than 8 people and less than 60 minutes. At the same time, AI tools are also used extensively in meeting minutes. In his words, "Why should I spend energy to take notes in person?"
However, the limit of efficiency improvement will also approach the critical point.
As Xiaopeng admitted, in the process of reducing the employee turnover rate from a high level, "rebuilding confidence is more difficult than tackling technical problems." Can "improving efficiency" help Xiaopeng Motors win this elimination game? Industry insiders analyzed that the answer will be clear within three years.
