Tu & Lei start out this week's pod going over January sales numbers which have been slow to trickle in. They move on to a discussion about BYD & Tesla and how they could get to their 2022 sales targets.
With the Beijing winter Olympics going on, the news cycle in China for the EV/AV space is a bit slow but Tu & Lei believe this to also be the calm before the Beijing Auto Show storm. With 11 weeks until the show, they both expect announcements to begin to increase significantly leading up to the show.
Tu talks about how to really measure strength when looking at 2022 by looking at an automaker's growth vs. the market growth. The way to measure individual OEMs' success is by looking at them compared their contemporaries in the same segment.
Tu & Lei move the discussion to the latest China EVs & More MAX episode with Maxwell Zhou, CEO of DeepRoute.
They end the pod talking about the MOBILIT/E Conference that Sino Auto Insights co-organized and kicks off this week. For those interested in learning more about the conference, you can head here: https://mobilit-e2022.climatetransformed.com/
Tu & Lei start out this week's pod going over January sales numbers which have been slow to trickle in. They move on to a discussion about BYD & Tesla and how they could get to their 2022 sales targets.
With the Beijing winter Olympics going on, the news cycle in China for the EV/AV space is a bit slow but Tu & Lei believe this to also be the calm before the Beijing Auto Show storm. With 11 weeks until the show, they both expect announcements to begin to increase significantly leading up to the show.
Tu talks about how to really measure strength when looking at 2022 by looking at an automaker's growth vs. the market growth. The way to measure individual OEMs' success is by looking at them compared their contemporaries in the same segment.
Tu & Lei move the discussion to the latest China EVs & More MAX episode with Maxwell Zhou, CEO of DeepRoute.
They end the pod talking about the MOBILIT/E Conference that Sino Auto Insights co-organized and kicks off this week. For those interested in learning more about the conference, you can head here: https://mobilit-e2022.climatetransformed.com/
Tu Le:
Hi everyone, welcome to China EVs & More where my co-host Lei Xing and I will go over the week's most important and interesting news coming out of the China EV, AV and mobility sectors. We will open the room up and around the 40-minute mark to anyone who's keen to ask us any questions. What Lei and I discuss today is based on our opinions and should not be taken as investment advice. If you enjoy this room, please find us on LinkedIn, get the word out to your friends and tune in again next week.
My name is Tu Le and I’m the managing director at SinoAuto Insights, a Beijing-based consultancy that helps organizations bring innovative and tech-focused products and services to the transportation and mobility sector. I write a free weekly newsletter that we pull many of our discussion topics from. You can sign up for it at sinoautoinsights.com, which I encourage you all to do. Lei, can you please introduce yourself?
Lei Xing:
I am your co-host Lei Xing, former Chief Editor of China Auto Review. This is Episode #52, our first episode in the Year of the Tiger. Happy New Year again, and as you've noticed, we cut the introductions a little bit shorter, so we have more time to discuss.
Tu Le:
Yeah, I stuttered on that one a little bit.
Lei Xing:
Yeah you all know us by now. So we felt like just trying to change some things in the New Year. So did you know that there's only 10 weeks left until the start of the Beijing Auto Show or Auto China 2022?
Tu Le:
It's the quiet before the storm.
Lei Xing:
Yeah I can feel the excitement build up. So it's been a relatively slow couple of weeks due to the Chinese New Year holiday break. The sales numbers reporting have been sporadic. We still haven't heard from the big guns, Tesla and Wuling on their sales, but I just tweeted the latest numbers as of today my time so we are going to talk about that a little bit.
Just catching up on some of the headlines going all the way back to, we start on the first day of the New Year. Interestingly enough, Daimler AG became Mercedes-Benz AG on the first day of the Year of the Tiger, so that was a big change. And recently we heard the big merger: Faurecia and Hella, two of the top suppliers combining into a group called Forvia, forward via right? And some of the recent headlines, I guess, for me, if you look at my friend's circle, my WeChat moments, it's been inundated with Winter Olympic Games and a lot of sports. So during the Chinese New Year, the national punchline of the Men's soccer team losing to Vietnam. And then the Women's team beating Japan and then Korea in crazy fashion, and then the Winter Olympic Games. With all these narratives, Eileen Gu. There's a lot of talk on that. I felt like there's less of an automotive feel. And then BYD came out with this new slogan or claim: technology, green future. ZEEKR recently joined the 10K cumulative delivery club.
Tu Le:
Let me add to that BYD slogan or kind of virtues, that it seems to be westernizing a little bit, right, simplifying and really starting to reach out towards the west.
Lei Xing:
Yeah, and just what happened today, with Xpeng, signing up those two dealer partners in the Netherlands and Sweden, they're already opening the experience center this week in Sweden.
Tu Le:
I’m thinking that He Xiaopeng and Brian Gu listen to our podcast with Alex Klose, and are like we got to get on this.
Lei Xing:
What else? The California DMV disengagement report with all the Chinafornia companies on there, doing actually pretty well in terms of this disengagement, and Cuise’s big investment, announcing it’s opening up to the public to try out their Robotaxis in San Francisco.
Tu Le:
If you read the small print on that Cruise, it's open at night, I think from like 11:00 pm or 10:00 pm to 6:00 am so it's not when San Francisco is at its highest traffic. So Cruise is actually playing wiffleball versus an AutoX or a DeepRoute or a Baidu who are, they are geofenced, but they are doing it during the day, during daylight hours, right?
Lei Xing:
Sure, and I think that's why they had what zero disengagements in their driverless mileage? I think they reported some mileage. Relating to what we talked about last episode, what's going on with JVs, Kia made a new announcement, this wasn't reported at all for some reason. I didn't see in the western press that they're investing $900 million into their JV which is announcing a new name, around the Auto China 2022 time, and they are planning to launch one EV every year until 2027, starting with the EV6 this year. And it's one of those things where the joint venture equity share is being changed. I think they'll make that announcement.
Tu Le:
So Hyundai’s fortunes are much different in China versus the U.S. In the U.S. they're firing on all cylinders. They both have commercials, Kia and Hyundai for the Super Bowl. And I just read that it's $6.5 million per 30 seconds. So that IONIQ 5, they're rolling that out. It's great looking car. It's a little expensive, I think, but it's a great looking car.
Lei Xing:
I just did a count. So GM, Hyundai, Nissan, Kia, BMW, Toyota and what do you know Polestar is making its first appearance in the Big Game. They're trying to, with their “No” message to the Status Quo.
Tu Le:
No super models. We should remind folks that Polestar is launching their vehicle manufacturing in the U.S. for the Polestar 3, which is an SUV.
Lei Xing:
And China this year. Actually I’m very much looking forward to that launch. Today also the 5-year $5 billion charging network announcement, allocating these different, what, first year is $615 million to build this network on the interstate highways, I guess. Texas, I think got almost 10% of that, like over $60 million for some reason.
Tu Le:
Think of it Lei, the F-150 (Lightning) is coming out, the Hummer EV is coming out, the Silverado EV is coming out, that’s where Ford and Gm are going to have a lot of their eggs in that basket. So it actually makes sense to me that they would do that because Texas is such an important State for trucks and SUVs.
Lei Xing:
Speaking of Polestar, Volvo made a couple of big announcements just a few days ago, the Northvolt, and the Mega Casting following the footsteps of Tesla. So that's pretty much the headlines.
January sales. I guess we can go into it a little bit. After the New Year's Day, Chinese New Year's Day with what eight or nine announcing, then it got pretty slow, BYD announcing theirs.
Tu Le:
Another monster number.
Lei Xing:
I guess the Big Six, one is missing, which is very concerning, it’s WM Motor. So in recent months, they reported numbers pretty much like everybody else on the first day of each month, but not this year. And then there was a lot of chatter on NIO.
Tu Le:
Let me add this comment about WM. There was an article that said that WM might be in trouble for reducing their range on their vehicles. It was a rumor, right?
Lei Xing:
No, I’m saying that they just haven't gotten into a good rhythm. You're supposed to look up like other brands. The sales are going up, right? It just doesn't feel the same way. And NIO, a lot of chatter on their going below 10,000 units, but I think for them, this is very normal based on the seasonality, based on their positioning, based on what they're setting up for the second half of this year. I'm not worried at all.
Tu Le:
Because you would normally expect a blowout month like December for most of these auto makers, especially January to be a slower month. But the only company that I know that's kind of bucked that trend is BYD
Lei Xing:
LeapMotor and NETA bucked the trend. BYD pretty much about the same, 92 or 93,000 units.
Tu Le:
We also have to really point back to perhaps there are still supply issues with the NIOs and some of these other companies, especially as they're filling the pipeline to ramp on some of these cars.
Lei Xing:
Going forward the interesting narrative for this year in the BYD Tesla rivalry. BYD officially announced their target of 1.2 million, and Tesla globally is supposed to be 50% up, so roughly 1.5 million. So that'll be interesting to see who's going to get to their numbers or whether it could be close, or whether BYD does much more than 1.2 million. And from what's happening in the rest of the global industry, there's been additional hiccups in the beginning of the year or beginning of the month. Toyota shutting down. The Canadian trucker (crisis) is affecting production at several companies. These things, and batteries CATL their valuation dropped by what, a couple of 100 billion RMB or something.
Tu Le:
Remember that January is kind of a notoriously slow month in the U.S. for car sales. So what they're probably trying to do is clean the house to set up for a good 2022, I would believe. I’ll say two things. BYD still has the benefit of the doubt from the market. So I think they're sand bagging on that 1.2, Tesla doesn't have that luxury, they're at 1.5. But we also need to look at the fine print when it comes to the Tesla, right? If they get to 1.5, but they're taking parts out of their car to build that 1.5, does that mean that the pressure is starting to get to them? I’ve been interviewed by Bloomberg about Tesla entering Japan and what I thought their sales was going to be, growing in Japan or not. And I think that 160,000 units being shipped to Europe last year, somebody's got to make up for that if Giga Berlin can get online pretty quickly and ramp. So I don't see 160,000 units being shipped to Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and Australia, so that 1.5 million, China domestic demand is going to have to make up for a lot of that.
Lei Xing:
And it looks like Giga Berlin is being delayed again based on the latest numbers. And Tesla is facing a lot of scrutiny. In recent days and weeks first, the FSD and then the recalls. I think they just announced their third recall, in like a week or something, something about windshield fogging up, if I remember correctly. And FSD regulatory scrutiny, right, our good friend Taylor has posted quite a few of the videos. Whatever and however you want to interpret it.
Tu Le:
But at the end of the day, at least in the U.S., it's almost like NHTSA playing catch up, because if Tesla really does have quality issues, it's going to catch up to them eventually. Because they go from half a million vehicles on the road to a million vehicles on the road and it's just more people, more of their products in the hands of more people. And if the failure rate on certain parts pretty high as a percentage, obviously, with more cars on the road, there's going to have more failures. So are we getting to a critical mass where we can point back to manufacturing and quality and engineering issues that are, akin to more traditional auto makers? I think we're going to see that Because we had the pleasure of speaking with him last week. He told us that one of the cars he drove, a Tesla, fit and finish was amazing. The other car that he had driven, I think it was a Plaid S, he thought it was like just okay. And so consistency is part of a good automaker’s calling card. Toyota is pretty consistent, consistently quality, high quality across the board, across products. So one of Tesla’s still growing pains, and it's not going to get any easier because they're putting two more manufacturing facilities online and this year, is having that global quality and reliability consistency.
Lei Xing:
At the same time, Giga Shanghai is adding capacity.
Tu Le:
One million units!
Lei Xing:
Yeah, that is interesting. And this year, if you remember, in the earnings call, it's all about capacity, it’s all about ramping up, no new models, what they're facing with Berlin delays. So I think Giga Shanghai in terms of capacity utilization is still going to be high. And then plus, now especially with the California DMV report coming out and all these companies and comparing Tesla, that was fun.
Tu Le:
Let me ask you on China social, that missing part didn't get picked up, did it?
Lei Xing:
The missing part, I think it's just starting to break.
Tu Le:
People too excited about Eileen Gu.
Lei Xing:
People excited about Eileen Gu and Hanyu, the Japanese male skater, more than anyone else for some reason.
Tu Le:
So for those that aren't familiar with the issue, I think CNBC had broken that Made-in-China Model 3s and Ys due to the chip shortage, the manufacturing team had decided to take what is supposedly a redundant control unit for steering out. There was no real announcement that it was being taken out. I guess the manufacturing teams signed off on it, believing that because it's redundant, there's very low risk, but that's pretty controversial. And if they're doing that, to make sure that sales volumes remain high, then that's kind of a red flag. So I was wondering if social media, Chinese social media was really going to pick up on that because the Chinese consumer could be pretty upset about them shipping a car with a missing part.
Lei Xing:
It is being reported more widely since yesterday. But you know what, remember the Shanghai Auto Show incident, I don't think that was still finalized, whatever decisions, final decisions that were made or whether they reached any agreement. I think that's still up in the air. I think Tesla for the foreseeable future is going to be facing these different types of scrutiny from all angles.
Tu Le:
In multiple languages now.
Lei Xing:
But so far it doesn't seem to affect really their sales, at least not yet. So that's the strange thing.
Tu Le:
The other strange thing, Lei, is that you and I agree that, I don't think it's going to be quality, I don't think it's going to be reliability, I think it's going to be competition, if they see weakness in the Chinese demand. Because there's so many products, because if there wasn't as many Chinese EV brands coming out with competitive products, for the 3 and Y segments, I think they would still sell really well. But, ET5, P7, G9, Xpeng and NIO, they are all coming out with great cars. LYRIQ is coming out, the Mustang Mach-E is gonna ramp. So there's some fierce competition here. I I think they're going to do fine in Europe in 2022. I think they're still going to do fine in the U.S., because just not as many products.
Lei Xing:
Yeah, I think they will be fine in an absolute sense, their volumes will be okay. But if you look at the overall market and the pie keep growing bigger to the forecasted 6 million vehicles, their share of the market will be smaller. So in that sense that'll be competition and I’m actually looking at a table of BYD, did you see BYD tweeted out a few sketches of their new models from the official account.
Tu Le:
Unlike them, this is unlike them.
Lei Xing:
The number of products, there's going to be…So they have in the Ocean network, they have the Dolphin, right? They're going to have a bunch of new Ocean animal-named vehicles come out this year and they will also have a bunch of, they have the Destroyer, the Cruisers, or ships named models come out.
Tu Le:
That's strange.
Lei Xing:
Plus the updated Han and Tang EVs this year. And also, you remember the Landing Ship, the trademark was given by GWM.
Tu Le:
They horse traded.
Lei Xing:
BYD gave away the WEY trademark. It's like a bromance or something.
Tu Le:
You highlighted the Han and the Dolphin. They're both selling at over 10,000 units a month. So I think that's going to be, just mark that down, at least 10,000 units a month for each of those for the foreseeable future, no problem.
Lei Xing:
Did you see the Chery QQ Ice Cream? It's already 10,000 units in the first month of full sales. The Wuling MINIEV style segment, so that segment is going to grow.
Tu Le:
Yeah, I think that little city car is going to be a thing in China for sure, there are so many lower tier cities that will use that car. And Sophia Yan, who's going to be the moderator for that panel that you're going to be on in the China Dominance panel for the MOBILIT-E conference that starts on Monday, I told you that she did a video in Liuzhou.
Lei Xing:
The “Liuzhou model” has been, it's a huge thing in China.
Tu Le:
They're allowing them to park them on the sidewalk. And so, it's a thing.
Lei Xing:
And looking ahead, February will be a tanking month because of the Chinese New Year. So if anybody does even better in February (than in January), I’ll give them a big thumbs up. But the trend should be that you see a huge decrease in sales in February, and then March should be another record because March and April are usually the high points of the year, at least in the first half. So expect someone one, one of these smart EV startups to hit 20,000 units a month sometime this year.
Tu Le:
Let me add to that. There's going to be multiple. To get to 6 million units is going to be multiple brands that need to get to 20,000 years a month, like consistently. And it needs to happen, to your point, I think you'd mention this two podcasts ago where December sales of half a million in 2021 that effectively needs to be every month in 2022 to get to the 6 million units, right?
Lei Xing:
So January total market is probably going to be somewhere between 400,000 to 450,000, then it will be much lower in February and March will be over half a million. Just watch. And then going forward, every quarter should be a bit higher based on what happened in 2021. But then the big caveat is, again, what's going on is it seems that the chip shortage still is affecting a little bit.
Tu Le:
The chip shortage and high demand will push prices higher.
Lei Xing:
Right, quite a few models, they raised their prices, MINIEV, I think Xpeng did they raise their prices?
Tu Le:
I think so. Not to mention the complete elimination of the subsidies. So they're trying to adjust pricing to post-subsidy final MSRP for a lot of their cars. Let me ask you this, Lei, SAIC I think reported 72,000 sales.
Lei Xing:
That's their Group (NEV) sales, including the JVs, including MG, Roewe, Wuling, everybody.
Tu Le:
Do you have any idea from a fleet standpoint, like, what's the percentage, or do you have any thoughts on that?
Lei Xing:
Fleet standpoint? I don't know. I would imagine, at least over 90% or 95% are private, fleet meaning their sharing platform.
Tu Le:
Or taxis or whatever.
Lei Xing:
Xiangdao and even the robotaxis. I don't know, I’d imagine it'll be minimal compared to private sales. Remember Shanghai is one of the cities with one of the higher penetration rates of EVs because of the license plate auction, right?
Tu Le:
And let's take a step back because I think this is worth telling the audience here, so a few different things. Because I’d also mentioned it in my newsletter. Let's be smarter about 2022, at least for China. Because if China is going to grow at 50% year-over-year 2001 to 2022, if these brands that we are tracking are growing less than 50%, they're actually losing share to the market as you had alluded to with Tesla,, which is not a bad thing. But if the brand is strong, then it would at least equal the market or be more than the market. Right? So that's number one. So when we're talking 21 versus 22, let's make sure that these brands are growing faster than the market. Or is there something to be concerned about? That's number one, number two, we also, and this is our part, this is our responsibility. So let's take this on. Let's also educate folks on not all cars are created equal, because the Han, the Dolphin, the price points are much lower than a NIO, than Li Auto.
So when we talk about these volumes, we're not talking about them, at least Lei and I aren't, and let's make sure we mention this that these mass market brands and I’ll include Xpeng because I would say they're premium, but they're not a NIO premium or a BMW premium, they are at much lower price point than a NIO, they're playing around the 3 and the Y range, from a pricing standpoint in China. So we would expect, Lei and I would expect, that eventually in 2022, Xpeng with the G9, with their new vehicles to outpace NIO, Li Auto eventually from a sales volume standpoint. So we should expect to see that if Xpeng is matching NIO on sales month over month, over the next 7, 8, 9 months, that NIO is doing really well, or Xpeng is not doing as well as we'd expect. Would you agree with that?
Lei Xing:
Yeah, I would agree. Even the Big 3, the Sansha: Xpeng, NIO, Li Auto, some people don't like them being compared simply because NIO’s average selling price is a bit much higher, especially compared to Xpeng. But Li Auto, the ONE is over RMB320,000, then NETA and LeapMotor they're completely in a different segment.
Tu Le:
They're closer to Wuling than they are to an Xpeng. BYD is almost in between a Wuling, kind of a NIO. Do you see the Han competing against the P7?
Lei Xing:
The Han is over RMB250,000, the flagship sedan, so in some way, yes. The P7 is what, RMB270,000 to RMB300,000, I think somewhat. And here's the amazing thing is, we've been doing this pod for a year now, and we keep talking about these brands and sales, the foreign brands have virtually been nonexistent They have not been in our conversation, except maybe Volkswagen.
Tu Le:
Not because we haven't wanted them to be.
Lei Xing:
So that's the amazing thing, is, you see all these sales numbers ballooning. But the foreign brands just haven't been in the game. This year, we are waiting for the LYRIQ, we are waiting for the Mach-E and several others. But, how much volume are they going to add? Not much. If you look at the grand scheme of things.
Tu Le:
This is driven, partly because they were slow to market towards EVs, they need these vehicles to be multi-regional, let's not say global, let's say multi-regional, so the level of complexity or degree of difficulty is much higher. And to be quite frank, they don't move as fast. But we're seeing this from China EV Inc. as they enter Europe. With the exception of the recent announcement, this week from Xpeng saying they're agressively moving into the Netherlands and what was the second country, Sweden, and everyone else said they're actually being pretty conservative about their move into Europe. Because they know that it's a really, really careful process. And you only get this one chance to make a great impression across these 27 countries. Not only that but, the legacies don't have the first mover advantage. They're just getting buried from a product level and a marketing level. The legacies with ICEs back in the day here in China, Buick was the surprise of the last 25 years from an automotive standpoint, one of the biggest surprises for China and GM, but now they need to rebrand effectively because they're moving from ICE to EV and they've been very slow, very deliberate. And I don't know if they're going to pay for that, right? Because Volkswagen initially 2021, for ID. series hasn't been great. So is that indicative of the rest of the legacies in 2022? We'll see. But if there are challenges, it could be hidden because the market’s getting 6 million units. So even if you're not doing that well, you could still sell 8, 10, 12, 13,000 units a month.
Lei Xing:
And if you simply look at the smart EV startups having sold nearly 100,000 units last year, quite a few of them, Volkswagen is going to get there this year. But they're not a premium brand position, so they're supposed to sell well.
Tu Le:
Remember what I said, are they growing faster than the market? That's one of the things, right? And remember, there's four cars that they're selling.
Lei Xing:
Right. Other than that, I think the California DMV disengagement report, I just wanted to say that this is regularly published in February of every year of disengagements in their operations from December the year prior to November of the year that's being reported. But I wouldn't read too much into these mileage per disengagement that remember, AutoX actually was first on that list in terms of MPD, miles per disengagement. I don't think it means that much to be honest, and even Waymo, mileage is important, they accounted for more than half of the 4 million miles reported. It's important, but it's also meaningless in the sense that I guess we have to look at the whole picture. So you've done tens of millions of miles, but who's the first to commercially operate?
Tu Le:
Let me understand this, Lei, isn't that self-reported and kind of self-defined what the disengagement is? There's no universal definition, at least for the DMV it's self-reporting.
Lei Xing:
So there's a lot of how it's defined to looking at these numbers that you don't, oh Waymo is the best, and then you have that Guidehouse Insights table.
Tu Le:
which nobody understands.
Lei Xing:
So you look at these in a comprehensive way and you try to makes sense.
Tu Le:
Because I've never met a Guidehouse employee in China ever.
Lei Xing:
But one of these, shall we mention that one of these companies, are we publishing tomorrow, the pod?
Tu Le:
I'm trying to publish it tonight, maybe tomorrow. So let's just tell them. So our next MAX episode is with the CEO and co-founder of DeepRoute.ai which was incorporated in 2019. One of the co-founders, his name is Maxwell Zhou, very entertaining, very intelligent person. And he was so refreshingly honest about all the questions and answers that he gave us to the questions that we asked. It was funny, we laughed a lot, some of the information was not publicly available.
So we will leave some of that out. But other than that, he and his company is pushing the sector forward.
Lei Xing:
Yeah, he's probably the most interesting and provocative guest that we've had so far. And he's young, he's only 35. And he's has a doctor's degree. When he was younger, he won a robot competition. I mean he’s just, the whole background is, just crazy.
Tu Le:
For those that aren't familiar with DeepRoute, in December, they announced a $10,000 hardware/software stack, and with using three solid-state LiDARs.
Lei Xing:
He actually broke down how the $10,000 (came about). So make sure to listen to the pod.
Tu Le:
He admitted that we're not going to be able to get cars enough cars on the road to hoover up all the data that we need. We need to partner with OEMs. And this goes back to Tesla. If they get FSD right? If they move over to LiDAR, they are going to be in the driver's seat because they sell a million, maybe in 2022, a million and a half cars a year. It's not as easy as that, but it is a numbers game, it's just how many cars are on the road, and a thousand cars is not going to get it done.
So the last thing we'll talk about, Lei, is?
Lei Xing:
Maybe you want to mention the MOBILIT-E Conference.
Tu Le:
So Sinoauto Insights and Climate Transformed are co-organizing a massive, likely one of the largest mobility conferences this year, maybe ever. Completely virtual, completely online. It is totally ambitious. We have a lot of friends of Sinoauto Insights and China EVs & More that will be participating, panelists, moderators, Lei has graciously accepted a panelist role for the China Dominance. We have Michael Donne, John McElroy, we have Mujeeb Ijaz from Our Next Energy, we have Henry Sanderson from Benchmark Minerals. There’s way too many to name. The keynotes are going to be Arianne Walker from Amazon Alexa Auto, which is going to be an amazing presentation, because I heard she's very high energy, and they've recently made huge announcements with partnerships, with some auto makers, including our other keynote speaker, who is Stellantis, the global head of e-mobility, her name is Anne-Lise Richard. She will be also presenting again completely virtual. And if you want more Information, DM me, we've been tweeting about it on Sinoauto Insights. So I invite you all to join. There's going to be over 30 hours of content, over 65 panelists from the 14th to the 25th. So I guarantee you there's going to be something for you. We have a connected panel. We have an autonomous panel, a chip panel, batteries, Roger Atkins.
I didn't think we could pull it off, but right now we're just tying up some loose ends, and we're blasting out notices. So please help support it. I think you'll get a lot out of it. And there should be probably 3 or 4 or 5 panels that'll be very interesting for the folks who are listening, especially our loyal listeners. The other one panel that Lei is participating on is the Traditional panel, I think that's going to be a rock star panel because John McElroy is going to talk about the U.S. traditional automakers and what they're doing there. We have Victor Irle, who's going to talk about Europe, and Lei’s going to be the China rep for discussing what the traditional are doing, so it’s going to be great. I really think it's going to become an annual thing, I hope so.
Lei Xing:
And you have to be up at 1:00 am? Is that correct? Because the time zone difference accommodating mostly the West, I guess Europe?
Tu Le:
Because this is not a China specific conference. This is a global conference. We have people from Asia, Brazil, Germany, UK, we have strong contingent from Michigan. So that's super cool because I'm originally from Michigan myself. So thanks for your support, Lei. And we're burning on both ends because we're working on one or two projects together during the day. Yeah, no rest for the wicked, but thanks for giving me that few minutes to talk about the conference. I'm pretty excited about it.
Tu Le:
That brings us to the end of this week show. Lei and I thank you for tuning in. My name is Tu Le. And you can find me on Twitter @sinoautoinsight. You find Lei on Twitter at @leixing77. If you wouldn't mind rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you grab your podcasts from, we'd appreciate that as well. Even better if you enjoy the show, please tell your friends about it. Please join us again next week as we track down all the latest news on China EVs & More.