For more than 20 years, luxury brands, fast fashion and catering businesses have occupied the shopping malls in the best downtown areas. Now, the self-confidence and abundant rental budget have been transferred to the electric car brands. Each mall has only one first floor, with only a few good spaces available, and maybe one or more of them are now slated for a new experience store for electric cars at any time.

"HKRI Taikoo Hui", a shopping center on West Nanjing Road in Shanghai, opened at the end of 2017. In the early stage of investment attraction, the original intention was to attract only one electric vehicle brand. However, within a few hundred meters of this shopping mall, several brands such as Tesla, Nio, SERES, Xpeng, Byton, and Weltmeister have opened, or once opened, retail experience stores since then.

Tesla was the first comer. When the company first entered China, it was once proud of online ordering and word-of-mouth recommendation, but soon realized that "opening stores in the most golden area of the city" was more in line with the sales strategy of the Chinese market.

HKRI Taikoo Hui, a shopping center on West Nanjing Road

International real estate service provider Savills helped Tesla select a ground-floor space along the street in the middle of Taikoo Hui. The space, while not large, offered the possibility to set up two superchargers beside the store, which were still rarely seen in the city at that time.

The Nio House showroom inside HKRI Taikoo Hui

In the second half of 2016, Nio, which was just established at that time without any mass production vehicle, followed suit. The staff who participated in the early stage of this project recalled that in order to open its first flagship retail store "Nio House" in Shanghai in HKRI Taikoo Hui, Nio pulled all the strings and finally convinced the shopping mall by promising "lifestyle" would be the core of the store. Nio promised to devote a lot of space to serving its members, offering anything from parenting areas, libraries, activity places and coffee bars, while the actual space used for car sales is not big. In order to achieve a satisfactory decorative effect, the store, which cost 30 million RMB when it was first completed, was knocked down and rebuilt and finally opened eight months later on May 26, 2018. Money also played a big role. While Nio could afford 1.38 million RMB for Nio House’s monthly rent for 5 years since 2017, its "competitor" for the space, a bookstore, could afford at most 1/7 or 1/8 of this figure then.

Club-style space with a number of dedicated areas for Nio members

Such an approach to an open experience store in core commercial areas has inspired many other electric car makers to ramp up efforts to open such stores in China’s shopping malls to tap into the power of footfall amid an even hotter electric car boom nationwide. An earlier report in January quoted Jones Lang LaSalle 's Shanghai retail team saying that EV car makers have entered into more than half (47) of 93 shopping malls in Shanghai tracked by them.

Just like luxury brands and fast fashion, most electric car brands prefer ground floor spaces with transparent showroom facades, preferably along the street, which can offer high footfall and convenience for vehicle transportation.

Now, even giants like Tesla won’t have as many options in new mall openings as earlier. For example, the ground floor of the newly opened Nanxiang Incity Mega, the largest single-structure shopping mall in Shanghai, has seen the presence of five electric car makers including Tesla, Nio, Xpeng, Li Auto, and SAIC’s R brand. Tesla’ s store isn’t the biggest one among them, with a showroom space slated only for two cars, and even seems noisier than its tea shop neighbor during peak business hours.

The ground floor of the newly opened Nanxiang Incity Mega, has ushered in five electric car makers

But it has its advantage. Tesla’s store, is in a prime location inside this 340,000 square meters mega mall, which is a unit facing the escalator with the highest footfall and at the intersection of two main entrances.

In these retail stores, these electric vehicle brands often take the trouble to emphasize that the main job of the staff is not to facilitate the kind of transactions commonly seen in the traditional 4S stores, but rather to introduce the brand, products and features to each potential consumer, induce curiosity and favor, and strive to promote a test drive. Sometimes it's even a good thing to meet other competitors in the same shopping mall – more potential electric cars consumers will be lured there, finally choosing either this brand or that brand.