As the penetration rate of NEVs (New Energy Vehicles) exceeds 52% and that of L2 advanced driving assistance surpasses 70%, the competitive logic of China's automobile industry is quietly shifting.
At the 22nd TEDA Automotive Forum, guests from the policy, industry, and distribution sectors engaged in discussions around a core proposition: When leading in scale is no longer the only answer, what will drive the continuous upward momentum of China's automobile industry next?
Leading in Scale, Technological Innovation Steps into the Deep Waters of Systemic Integration
At the opening ceremony, a set of data presented by Gong Jinfeng, Deputy Party Secretary and General Manager of China Automotive Technology and Research Center Co., Ltd. (CATARC), set the tone for the day's discussions.
From January to August 2026, China's NEV sales exceeded 10.65 million units, with the market penetration rate rising to 52.4%; the penetration rate of passenger cars equipped with L2 combined driving assistance functions reached 70.5%, and the first batch of L3 conditional automated driving models has begun operating in specific areas; from January to July, automobile exports reached 6.41 million units, a year-on-year increase of 54%, and the annual export scale is expected to break through 10 million units.
"China remains the world's largest single market for NEVs, with domestic NEV passenger car sales accounting for over 50% of the global share," said Gong Jinfeng. He added that while the market scale continues to lead, a breakthrough has been achieved in multiple areas of key core technology research.
The energy density of semi-solid-state batteries has exceeded 400 Wh/kg, R&D for all-solid-state batteries has achieved phased progress, the localization process in core areas such as domestic high-computing-power automotive-grade chips and vehicle-mounted intelligent operating systems has accelerated, and technologies such as megawatt-level supercharging and vehicle-to-grid interaction are accelerating their commercial application.
Wang Fang, Chief Scientist of CATARC, further refined this judgment from a technical dimension.
She pointed out that global NEV sales reached 20.7 million units in 2025, with a penetration rate of 23.6%. Among them, China accounted for 70% of the scale, with sales of 13.36 million units, ranking first globally for 11 consecutive years. In the field of intelligentization, the penetration rate of L2 passenger cars has rapidly climbed from 25% in 2021 to over 70% currently.
She summarized the current technological innovations as follows: battery technology continues to break through around three key keywords: safety, energy replenishment, and solid-state development; intelligent connected vehicle technology advances in depth in four directions: intelligent driving, smart cockpit, chassis, and vehicle-road-cloud coordination.
Tian Jietang, Director of the Department of Industrial Economy at the Development Research Center of the State Council, approached the topic from a more macro-industrial perspective. He pointed out that China's manufacturing industry accounts for 27% of the global share, and the country is at the forefront of the world in the AI (Artificial Intelligence) field. "AI + Manufacturing" is forming a unique comparative advantage.
"Manufacturing and innovation are closely integrated, with over 60% of global R&D investment occurring in the manufacturing sector," Tian Jietang stated. He added that AI's empowerment of manufacturing is moving from single-point applications such as visual quality inspection, process parameter optimization, material R&D, virtual factory optimization, and predictive maintenance, towards deep integration across the entire chain.
He specifically mentioned that the automobile industry is shifting from selling standard products to selling scenario-based solutions. In the future, cars will become the "third space" besides home and office, and may even extend to mobile shops. "In the next five years, whoever can solve the problem of motion sickness well may find it to be a major selling point for automobiles."
In Gong Jinfeng's view, there are also multiple challenges behind these achievements: the global competitive landscape is undergoing profound adjustments, and technological barriers, rule games, and standard competition have become the core forms of industrial competition among major powers. He proposed four suggestions: focus on core technologies to continuously consolidate leading advantages, deepen cross-boundary integration to accumulate ecological growth potential, strictly adhere to the bottom line of product safety to safeguard healthy development, and adhere to openness and win-win cooperation to enhance the international competitiveness of the industry.
From Function Stacking to System Reconstruction: Enterprises Compete in the Second Half of Intelligentization
As the marginal effect of "function stacking" diminishes, how to reconstruct competitiveness from the underlying system level has become a common proposition for all participants.
Currently, intelligentization has entered the era of the "whole-vehicle intelligent agent." Chen Xiaofeng, Vice President and Chief Scientist of Great Wall Motor Technology Center, proposed that traditional intelligentization follows the logic of function stacking, where various functions are isolated from each other and respond passively. Driven by AI, intelligentization is moving towards a whole-vehicle intelligent agent—capabilities in various fields such as powertrain, chassis, cockpit, and intelligent driving are broken down into underlying atomic capabilities that can be called at any time, allowing the intelligent agent to understand scenarios and intentions in real time and complete tasks in a closed loop.
Based on this concept, Great Wall Motor launched the Coffee AI OS 4 system, building a technical architecture of "large model + AI subsystem + multi-agent + AI interaction," achieving a triple leap: a "1+N" architecture with collaboration between the central brain and vertical domain experts, open orchestration of over 4,000 MCP atomic capabilities, and an experience evolution from "humans finding services" to "services finding humans."
Zhang Xiaoyu, Executive Vice President of Changan Automobile, gave a similar judgment. He defined the essence of intelligentization as "vehicles possessing self-evolution capabilities and keeping core technologies in their own hands." The Tianshu large model released by Changan has integrated perception, audio-visual processing, and motion control, and upgraded the industry's traditional "Clip" (driving segment training) to "Episode" (complete closed-loop training)—from seeing road conditions, understanding intentions, vehicle execution, perceiving the environment, to writing back to the model, forming the underlying logic of continuous evolution.
Zhang Xiaoyu revealed that Changan and BAIC jointly obtained the first batch of L3 autonomous driving product access licenses in the country; as of early September, Changan's cumulative user mileage reached 1.539 billion kilometers, with AEB active obstacle avoidance triggered 15.2 million times and automatic parking triggered 12.43 million times.
Wang Chao, Vice President of Huawei Digital Power Technologies Co., Ltd., turned his attention to the long-neglected motion domain. He judged that innovation in the intelligent motion domain follows the paradigm of "AI + embodied intelligence," and the horizontal cross-domain integration among various domains is the key to the second half of intelligentization.
Wang Chao proposed a three-level evolution path for the motion domain: the 1.0 stage builds distributed experiences based on instinctive safety and super components; the 2.0 stage adds redundant safety and near-end closed loops, introducing predictive algorithms; the 3.0 stage explores full-domain safety, achieving real-time integration with the intelligent driving domain and cockpit domain. In terms of range efficiency, Huawei has the technical readiness capability of 12 km per kWh in 2025, will mass-produce pure electric models with 12 km per kWh in 2026, and will explore 14 km per kWh in 2027.
Liu Zongcheng, President of SERES Group Technology Company, demonstrated how the industrial brain reconstructs the entire car-making process from the perspective of cross-boundary integration of "Automobile + X." SERES has built a "1+2+N" strategic cooperation pattern. Its industrial brain possesses a knowledge graph with 2 million nodes and 100P computing power, improving R&D efficiency by 20% and increasing the on-time delivery rate of orders by 13%.
Liu Zongcheng proposed the "Three Integrations" path: product integration breaks down barriers between technology and business, manufacturing agglomeration forms a 1-hour supply chain, and industrial integration builds a division-of-labor and collaborative ecosystem with leading enterprises as the chain owners. He specifically emphasized the "Five High Standards": high safety, high reliability, high performance, high quality, and high value, believing that "the biggest risk in the automobile industry is not being slow, but rushing to success."
Zeng Qinglin, General Manager of the Yijing Auto brand, shared the practice of Dongfeng and Huawei Qiankun jointly building a high-end NEV brand. He pointed out that the industry faces three major dilemmas: the product dilemma, where the parameter arms race is intensifying, but "parameters are the enterprise's technical language, while scenarios are the users' real language"; the demand dilemma, where family users have become the main consumer force, pursuing fairness in the experience of all passengers in the car; and the brand dilemma, where the model of fighting alone has reached its capacity limit.
Yijing's answer is the "Three Dimensional Upgrades": upgrading safety technology to create the "Sky Dome Shield" all-time-space safety architecture; upgrading scenarios to establish a full-cycle user co-creation system, taking the lead in incorporating children's vision protection into the forward development of the whole vehicle; and upgrading the brand to achieve two-way empowerment with Dongfeng's decades of manufacturing heritage combined with Huawei's top intelligent technology.
Zhang Xiaoyu summarized Changan's strategy as "Three No's"—No intelligence, no Changan; no safety, no Changan; no ecosystem, no Changan.
In terms of safety, Changan has built a pan-safety system with three major processes: risk awareness, risk avoidance, and risk escape, achieving full-domain linkage at the 10-millisecond level, and can still actively stabilize the vehicle body at a speed of 225 km/h under a tire blowout condition. In terms of the ecosystem, he judged that the automobile industry is leaping from a "big industry, small ecosystem" to a "big industry, big ecosystem," requiring the integration of the innovation chain, industrial chain, capital chain, and talent chain to leverage large investments for great benefits.
The Two-Way Journey of Ecological Globalization and a New Industrial Ecosystem
As the domestic market enters stock competition, global layout and industrial ecosystem reconstruction have become the next proposition for China's automobile industry.
Chen Xiaofeng pointed out that the overseas market's impression of Chinese automobiles is undergoing a fundamental change—Chinese intelligent cars are called "smartphones on wheels," with system fluency and localization adaptation even surpassing local brands.
He divided Great Wall Motor's globalization journey into three stages:
The 1.0 stage (before 2023) involved hardware export, characterized by severe homogenization and competition on cost-effectiveness; the 2.0 stage (from 2023 to present) involves technology export, doing localization adaptation but facing huge global differentiation; the 3.0 stage (from this year) involves ecosystem export, building globally reusable vehicle-mounted intelligent systems based on AI capabilities, and gradually gaining the dominant power of global ecosystem rules.
Currently, Great Wall Motor has independently developed the "1+N+AI" intelligent autonomous service architecture and deployed multiple products overseas, such as ORA 5, ChuLian, and Haval H7.
Liu Zongcheng defined the overseas market as SERES' "must-win main battlefield in the new decade," proposing to build a globally unified product quality and service system with European high-end quality standards as the core foundation.
He specifically appealed that Chinese automobile export cannot fight alone; it must achieve "ecosystem export and overall export," promoting mutual recognition of testing, joint standard setting, supply chain coordination, and service network sharing, to realize the leap from product export to brand export, capability export, and standard export.
The sharing by Sunon Sansanit, Chairman of the Thai Electric Vehicle Association and Executive Vice President of SAIC Motor-CP, provided a vivid sample of the ASEAN market for Chinese carmakers going global.
He introduced that the share of fuel vehicles in newly registered vehicles in Thailand has dropped from over 90% in 2021 to 44.7% from January to August this year, with the total share of NEVs reaching 55.3%, of which pure electric vehicles account for 29.2%. Pure electric vehicle sales increased from about 2,000 units in 2021 to 149,000 units in the first eight months of this year.
Thailand's policies are evolving from "stimulating market demand and attracting industrial investment" to "improving the local supply chain and building long-term competitive advantages," hoping to accelerate localized manufacturing. Currently, Chinese enterprises such as Geely, BYD, and GAC Aion have already built factories and invested in Thailand.
Sunon stated that Thailand not only serves domestic demand but also regional export markets, with new opportunities in areas such as batteries and key components, charging and energy services, electrification of commercial fleets, software and intelligent mobility, and recycling and circular economy.
The speech by Wang Du, Vice President of the China Automobile Dealers Association, brought the vision back to the "second half" of the domestic market.
He pointed out that the national automobile ownership has reached 371 million units, and NEV ownership is rapidly increasing. The focus of the industry is shifting from front-end manufacturing to back-end services and the stock market.
However, the distribution sector is experiencing labor pains: the average gross profit margin of new cars is -21.4%, the average inventory cycle is 1.58 months, and dealer satisfaction with OEMs is only 56.3%, the lowest in recent years.
"Selling cars is no longer a tool for dealers to make money; it is merely a traffic entry point," Wang Du judged. The industry has officially entered an elimination round, and the dealer profit model must be reconstructed, shifting from "selling cars" to "operating users" and pursuing the maximization of life-cycle value. He emphasized that although the models are changing, with direct sales, agency, and hybrid models all being explored, the essence of distribution remains unchanged: connecting supply and demand, and service-oriented.
From the policy suggestions in the morning to the corporate practices in the afternoon, multiple guests pointed to the two keywords of "standardization" and "open ecosystem" simultaneously.
Standardization and openness being the key to breaking the deadlock has become an industry consensus. "Competition determines how fast we can run, while symbiosis determines how far we can go." This quote from Liu Zongcheng can perhaps serve as the best footnote to this clash of ideas.
From scale leadership based on intelligent and green foundations, to systemic innovation accumulating ecosystem momentum, and then to global layout of co-creation and win-win, China's automobile industry is standing at a new starting point for the "15th Five-Year Plan," using technology as the pen and ecosystem as the ink, writing a new answer sheet for advancing from an automobile giant to an automobile power.
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