A senior member in the development team of a Chinese car maker told Autocar the story - on condition of anonymity - of when a storied German engineering consultancy visited earlier this year to offer their services. “They told me we can cut vehicle development times from five years to three years and I said 'we can’t work to those speeds'”. He paused for effect. “'That electric car we picked you up in, we developed that in 18 months'.”
The problem of how to keep pace with the Chinese has been gnawing away at Western car makers as they strategise how to avoid getting left behind in the race to build modern, electrified cars.
Many of these car makers have a ringside seat on the pace of development as they watch their joint-venture partners in China go from being essentially contract manufacturers to fully fledged automotive powerhouses with desirable brands of their own.
Now those Chinese cars are coming here, with the likes of MG, BYD and Chery (parent of Omoda and Jaecoo) all posting phenomenal sales gains across Western Europe for high-tech models that undercut the price of incumbent cars at a quality close enough for buyers to make the leap.
To avoid the same market-share erosion, established car makers must learn to adopt the same nimble approach. “They need to do a lot,” Eric Zayer, head of autos for Europe at consultancy Bain, told Autocar.
Bain research shows that 20 to 24 months is considered a regular development time for a new vehicle in China, compared with between 36 to almost 50 months for Western car makers.
Moving faster has lots of obvious advantages, including the one most prized by car makers faced with financial pressures on a level rarely experienced before. “A difference in speed directly translates into a difference in cost,” Zayer said. The longer a car takes to develop, the longer engineers are tied up on a project that can’t be monetised and might be using out-of-date tech when it finally arrives.
There are other benefits too. Those who develop faster can more quickly react to trends and in China those trends manifest themselves incredibly fast: witness the craze for camping developed during Covid that led to the explosion of chunky off-roaders such as the iCar V23 and MG Cyber X at this year’s Shanghai motor show.
But how does China manage it? And how can Western car makers follow their lead?
One way is to develop more of a software mindset. “Western manufacturers create a generation one, put that aside and start with generation two,“ said Klaus Stricker, global head of automotive at Bain. “But the Chinese are continuously developing things further. That comes from the software world as compared to car world, where development processes are centred around the start of production.”
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