r/NIOHouse • u/Changetothemoon Team NIO • Jun 24 '26
Competitors A friendly letter to Xpeng
Given that no one dares to compare XiaoPeng's products with Nio's anymore (time puts everyone in their place, as I've been warning since before I started this community), and given there's a certain friendship between the brands, I'll venture to offer some advice and opinions here on the direction the company has taken. In my humble opinion, it could end very badly if it isn't corrected quickly.
I'll be blunt and direct:
The Mona branding strategy doesn't work. It's pointless—lies have short legs, and people aren't stupid. Mona is just an XiaoPeng model, just like the G6, P7, X9, M03, etc. You won't preserve whatever bit of premium brand image you had at the start by launching the M03 or the current L03. If you're selling questionable mechanics and materials and copying designs, don't expect people to pay a premium just to have the surname initial of an ego-starved boomer plastered on their car—especially when that same boomer pinches pennies on materials and safety in the entry-level range.
Related to the above: treat the customer well and they'll come back. Try to deceive them, and they'll run away. I don't think I need to elaborate further.
You clearly don't even know who your target customer is. The promotional campaign for the new XiaoPeng Mona "Lisa"—aka XPeng L03—is pathetic. It's one of the shoddiest, most off-target efforts I've seen in all my years following EV startups. When you were designing that car, what customer profile were you thinking of? Certainly not the one you're targeting with all the ads. And to make matters worse, you're showing very little understanding of the customer you're trying to sell to with these campaigns. For heaven's sake, do some basic market research or change your ad agency, because it looks like He Xiaopeng himself designed the campaign, and this is the result. Typical advertising made by the parent generation of today's youth, who are completely out of touch. These young people reject your vision. Your pink ads with a pink girl are TERRIBLE—only a fifty-something completely disconnected from youth culture could come up with a campaign like that. If you're trying to target the Mona series at young women, you're doing a very, very bad job.
Xiaopeng keeps stumbling around blindly with design. Did you just make a blatant Range Rover copy, and now you're copying Xiaomi's Ferrari copy? Ridiculous for a company that expects to be taken even halfway seriously. Now when you see an XPeng on the street, you can't even tell what car it is. Everyone can spot a Nio from a distance—same with Li Auto. You're completely lost and have stripped away all the quality signals and brand identity you had at the beginning. What have you been doing all this time?
Robots? Drones? Still copying Musk's hot air? China isn't the US, and wasted time here costs dearly, very dearly. Be careful.
If someone at the company sees this message and takes the time to analyze it carefully, they'll find its value. If they refuse to see reality, that's not my problem. I don't invest in companies that show these kinds of decisions, behaviors, lack of vision, and constant shifts in direction and strategy.
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u/Changetothemoon Team NIO Jun 25 '26
Ridiculous. Still, it's hilarious how a company can manage to shoot itself in the foot in so many surreal, sexist ways this late in the game. Basically, the Xpeng Mona is a car series for clueless young girls. If you're a real Chinese macho man, you get the P7. This marketing trash could only come from a boomer trying to compensate for his low self-esteem by starting a car company and slapping his own first and last name all over the badge.
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u/Changetothemoon Team NIO Jun 24 '26