Stakeholder 1: Owners of a certain Toyota model
Stakeholder 2: Families with a certain domestic new energy vehicle
The first article of 2025 is surprisingly not a year-end summary? Hehe, the document is created, but the content is not yet written, so let’s write something else first.
Regarding the "Three Big Aunts of the Road," drivers should be quite familiar with this meme, and even those who don’t drive might have heard of it. To briefly explain, the so-called Three Big Aunts refer to the Toyota Levin, Nissan Sylphy, and Toyota Corolla, which are commonly driven slowly and have earned the nickname "aunts."
This is a meme, but many people also misunderstand it as "everyone who drives these cars is slow," leading to jokes like "remember to buy the sunroof version, otherwise you can't stand up to step on the gas."
A car that doesn't drive fast can be attributed to two types of reasons:
- The vehicle's configuration is insufficient, making it unable to drive fast.
- The driver is unable to drive fast.
In fact, there are almost no qualified motor vehicles on the road that can't drive fast; at most, they may accelerate a bit slowly. So, it's not that the car can't drive fast, but that it doesn't drive fast; not driving fast is a driver issue.
So why are these three models specifically? I think there are the following reasons:
- Probability issue: These three cars are durable, entry-level models, and have a high ownership rate, thus they appear frequently.
- Binding of people and car attributes: These three cars have low fuel consumption, and some buyers are particularly concerned about fuel efficiency, so they deliberately pursue low fuel consumption, which occurs when the vehicle speed and RPM are low.
- Many novice drivers: Many new drivers may inherit a family car or buy one from the second-hand market, and there is a large supply and demand for these three cars in the second-hand market.
To support my hypothesis, I’ll share a personal experience. In the past two years, I’ve driven on highways for medium to long distances quite often, and I always encounter some "Three Big Aunts." According to my observation, most of the "aunts" on the road now are new energy vehicles rather than these three models.
Why?
The three hypotheses above can indeed hold. In recent years, domestic new energy vehicles in the price range of around 100,000 have become very competitive, offering low prices with high configurations, making them the first choice for many people's first car. The number of novice drivers has increased, and many people pursue low energy consumption and have range anxiety, frequently using energy recovery, which leads to slower driving, thus gradually becoming the "aunts" on the road.
In the future, some new energy models may become the new "Three Big Aunts." If someone around you chooses to buy such models, the rational you should not mock them by saying "you should buy one with a sunroof so you can stand up to step on the accelerator," right?