Subsidies retreat, high-end car sales exploded?

As soon as the subsidy goes downhill, the new energy vehicles can't be sold? Just after the end of the first quarter, I opened the consumption scale and looked at the sales volume of new energy vehicles, which can be said to be a double day of ice and fire. BYD NEV passenger car sales, down -52.9%. Gili Galaxy, down -29.9%. Tesla, down -16.2%. Wuling, down -52%. Xiaopeng Automobile, down -40.8%. The biggest contrast to this is that mid-to-high-end brands are soaring against the trend. NiO, volume growth +114.5%. Formula Leopard, +188.1% growth. borderline, +63.8% growth. Polar Krypton, +48.3% growth. QUERY LENGTH LIMIT EXCEEDED. MAX ALLOWED QUERY : 500 CHARS How can the more expensive the car, such as Weilai, Qi Jie, Ji Krypton, the better it sells? What the hell is going on here? In the first year of the negative growth of the new energy vehicle market in 2026, the sales volume of new energy vehicles has not been optimistic. After all, the subsidy policy in 2026 has declined sharply. The purchase tax will be completely exempted from 2025 and reduced by half this year. Do you know how much impact this has? For 50,000 cars, you have to pay 2500 more for the purchase tax; for 100,000 cars, you have to pay 5,000 more; for 200,000 cars, you have to pay 10,000 more. Basically, it accounts for about 5% of the selling price of your new car. Coupled with the policy of replacing old cars with new ones in 2025, many people who plan to buy cars in 26 years have tried to buy cars as much as 25 years ago. That demand was overdrawn in advance, so in the first quarter of 2026, the growth of new energy passenger cars also turned negative for the first time in many years, and sales fell by 21%. In one quarter, more than 500,000 cars were sold less than last year. What is the concept of 500,000 cars, presumably BYD and Geely, the two brands combined. Looking at it like this, do you really feel that you have fallen a lot? A brand with high sales drops first? Then many people asked, the big market only fell by more than 20%, how can BYD, Wuling Hongguang, Geely, these high-volume brands, how can sales fall worse than the big market? Feeling, the more the brand that walks, the more severely it falls. You really have no problem with this feeling. You know BYD and Wuling, what do you rely on to beat the world? It relies on low-priced walking. Suppose you want to buy a car, you can get 100,000 yuan in 25 years, and it will cost 105,000 yuan this year. Did you place an order directly in 25 years? The people who bought BYD's Qin and Seagull, and Wuling's Hongguang mini, all thought so. If they could buy it last year, they would not consider buying it this year. Therefore, when subsidies are still in place, big brands are the biggest beneficiaries, because subsidies directly make these otherwise inexpensive cars more competitive. But when the subsidy was withdrawn, the willingness of this part of users to buy fell faster than anyone else. Therefore, in the first quarter of 2026, the logic of low price travel suffered a double blow: policy decline and demand overdraft. Of course, when you see sales dropping sharply, don't gloat. It feels like people will soon be finished. The subsidy policy in the field of home appliances has declined, and sales have fallen sharply in the short term. As long as the time is prolonged, sales will slowly return. High-end brands rising against the tide? Returning to our second question, why is the same market environment, the sales volume of Weilai, Formula Leopard, and Interview, actually rising? The growth of these three companies is actually three logics. Let's talk about NiO first. NiO's main model, the average selling price is more than 300,000, the new purchase tax in 26 years is 15,000, this is not a lot to listen to. But think about the difference between the people around you who spend $300,000 on a car and the people who spend $50,000 on a car. They are actually less sensitive to subsidies and value brands, services, and experiences more. The subsidies are gone, and the impact on them is limited. Moreover, the new NiO ES8 was released in the second half of last year, and the product cycle is in an upward phase. Driven by the sales volume of ES8, the sales volume of NiO continued to rise, reaching 45,000 units in a single quarter. NiO brand first quarter sales Vehicle series name 2025Q1 2026Q1 NiO EC6 4326 1463 NiO EC7 405 20 NiO ES6 9150 4017 NiO ES7 335 NiO ES8 1439 45160 NiO ET5 3269 1888 NiO ET5T 7453 5612 NiO ET7 847 52 NiO ET9 193 Data source: The sales volume of the Association has soared, which is largely a double blessing of the product cycle and the high-end customer base. Speaking of the interrogation boundary, behind the interrogation boundary is Huawei's intellectual driving technology endorsement. According to the data of the Automobile House, nearly 80% of users choose to buy new energy vehicles, and the first consideration is a higher degree of intelligence. The boundary is labeled Huawei, which is the strongest moat. Of course, there are many partners who work for Huawei, but it has to be said that sales at the border have soared by 64%, relying on technical labels to maintain the premium. Finally, there are the Formula Leopard and the Master. He belongs to a small base with high growth. Although the growth rate looks particularly exaggerated, we should look at it rationally. Formula Leopard only sold more than 19,000 units in the first quarter of last year, and 55,000 units in the first quarter of this year, an increase of nearly 2 times. Mingjue even more exaggerated, from more than 1,300 units to 28,000 units, an increase of nearly 20 times. However, this growth needs to wait for the sales base to rise, and it is not yet comparable to the growth of these brands. [Conclusion] You think that when China's new energy vehicle market bids farewell to the era of subsidies and low prices, and really enters the deep water area of brand competition - who can finally laugh at the end?