Tu & Lei start the show off with a recap of XPeng Q2'21 earnings and the effect of NIO's accident on He Xiaopeng's discussion about their ADAS solution during the call. They also go into how the launch of the XPeng P5 should affect XPeng's strategy and sales volume.Tu & Lei briefly discuss the launch of Volkswagen's subscription services and then move on to a deep dive into China's state-owned enterprise (SOE)  premium 6 brands. Lei gives a quick history lesson on the 6 SOEs and how they've evolved till now.

Lei & Tu go through the week's major announcements about investments in the EV/AV space including with Cruise, Waymo, and Hesai. Tu also goes through the announced investments into EVs from the legacies and the implications from those announcements. Tu & Lei get into details about the struggles that Polestar and VW are having selling their EVs in China. ***We apologize for the technical challenges we had recording this episode.***

Lei and Tu go over August sales numbers for China's current Big 5 of NIO, Li Auto, XPeng, Neta, and Leap Motor. Tu & Lei then move over to Li Auto's Q2 earnings and how the EV makers are starting to broaden their product portfolios with some moving up-market and some down covering the 150K-500K RMB band or what's the 'meat' of China's passenger vehicle segment. They spend some time to go over what was or wasn't unveiled at the Chengdu Motor show with Lei giving a bit of a history lesson on how important Chengdu the city and the Motor show has been historically to China. Finally, Tu & Lei discuss the seemingly constant stream of new brands being established in the EV space and how they think it may affect the sector. 

In Episode 27, Tu & Lei take a few minutes to unpack the July sales numbers from the CPCA & CAAM and the roots of the NEV sales surge. Tu & Lei also spend a few minutes to discuss Tesla's surprising numbers for July. Lei summarizes the most significant news coming out of NIO's earnings calls including the confirmation of a mass-market brand as well as 3 new products scheduled for launch before the end of 2022. Finally, Tu and Lei summarize the policy announcements made regarding utilizing OTA to update autonomous driving features as well as the restrictions on data collection and sharing.

In this episode, Tu & Lei unpack all of the announcements that came out of the Baidu AI World Conference. They also discuss NIO's recent ES8 accident that involved NIO's version of an autonomous driving system - Navigation on Pilot (NOP). Are the names for these L2 ADAS features misleading - they have an important debate about that. They finally have a discussion on Tesla's NHTSA investigation into their Autopilot feature.

July sales numbers have been released so Tu & Lei go over them and discuss the standpoints and the headscratchers. There is word that BYD & Tesla have been talking about working together and BYD supplying their blade battery to the US EV maker.Finally, the US is finally making its pivot to EVs and is bringing it's ambitions to match with a 50% of total sales by 2030 goal. How will unions play a role in achieving that goal, they discuss that as well.

Lei & Tu spend the first part of this episode talking about Stellantis, NIO, and VW Group's electrification strategies and how China will play a major role. They also try to make sense of all of the aggressive 2025 sales targets being announced by some of the major OEMs.They spend the last part of this episode deep diving on Leap Motor and discussing what's happening at WM Motor, an EV startup many thought would be a difference-maker.#ChinaEVandmore #SinoAutoInsights #NIO #VWGroup #Stellantis #2025 #NEVs #bignumbers #LeapMotor #WMMotor 

Tu & Lei get busy this week with XPeng finally launching specific pricing for it's recently announced P5 sedan and there is a lot for them to debate. Mercedes closely follows VW last week with their electrification plans and when they plan to be ALL-electric.Tu & Lei also take some time to talk about the drama that has historically followed founder of Faraday Future, Jia Yueting, till this week when Faraday became a US publicly-traded company. Now the hard work begins for them!

Tu & Lei talk about the media outlet that crashed a BYD Han which caught fire after 48 hours and BYD's reaction to the news hitting Chinese social media. They also debate whether the Huawei exec that made a controversial statement about Tesla should be fired or not. Finally, they unpack the sodium-ion battery that CATL made an announcement about this week. Will this ultimately help them with sales in the near term? Is it a game-changer?

In this episode, Tu & Lei talk about how the Tesla recall may actually have benefited them in China. They also unpack the monster ambitions that Great Wall Motors has laid out via their 2025 sales forecasts. Finally, Tu and Lei break down what to expect from the Didi US IPO and all the excitement that's been built up because of it.