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longer a car takes to develop, the longer engineers are tied up on a project that can’t be monetised and might be using out-of-date tech when it finally arrives.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.”

If something goes wrong, for example on software, “they have to pause the car and cannot launch,” Stricker said.

He didn’t name examples, but a good one might be the slow roll-out of Stellantis’s Smart Car platform, due to software issues, which delayed the launch of crucial cut-price EVs such as the Citroën ë-C3 and Fiat Grande Panda Electric.

The Chinese are also helped by the fact they essentially started from scratch, meaning many platforms are optimised for a modern software age, rather than carrying over previous architectures.

Chinese development teams also tend to be younger, Bain research shows. They lack the experience of say, a German team, but what experience they do have is in future technologies such as the battery, the electric drivetrain and the software.

“These are disciplines where the Western manufacturers typically are not so strong, meaning that they have to educate and reskill their team, which is very hard if your team is of a certain age,” Stricker said.

One obvious difference is the hours clocked. “To be very honest, in terms of speed, it's not only great technology; sometimes Chinese people just work harder,” said Volkswagen Group CFO Arno Antlitz on his company’s first-quarter earnings call.

Everyone in the automotive industry has a story about their Chinese counterparts working unfeasibly long hours. “Our China team got 10 days holiday a year, but they rarely took it, because it was frowned on,” one industry executive told Autocar. 

The standard working pattern is ‘996’, meaning 9am to 9pm six days a week. High levels of competitiveness in the market means the boss is likely to be working just as hard, if not harder, helping to engender a loyalty among staff keen to see their company succeed.

Replicating that work rate is difficult in Europe – but not impossible. The Volkswagen Group is looking to copy the Chinese two-shift R&D system by using its global network, for example.

“We could develop things in Wolfsburg and then push it in the evening to our development headquarters in Mexico and Brazil, use the time there and get it back the next morning,” Antlitz said.

Another way is to just develop cars in China. “We are basically ramping up a local R&D centre in China with global responsibility,” Antlitz said. 

The Volkswagen Group is changing its working strategy by collaborating with its Chinese manufacturing partners SAIC and FAW on development and bringing in Xpeng as well.

Volkswagen unveiled three concept cars at the Shanghai show, previewing new Chinese-market models coming next year that utilise the country’s faster development speed and cheaper supply chain.

That ‘China speed’ thinking is then being applied to the new ID 2 and ID 1 small electric cars going on sale next year, of which the ID 2 at least is promised to be the first VW EV to deliver margin parity with an equivalent ICE model, specifically the T-Cross.

Renault meanwhile thinks it has already cracked the secret to fast development, promising that development of the new electric Twingo due in 2026 will take just 21 months under a programme it calls Leap 100, named for the target number of weeks for development.

“I think we've just moved to Chinese speed,” Renault CEO Luca de Meo told investors back in February. A new Twingo-based Dacia model will be developed even faster in just 16 months, he promised. “I defy any competitor in the world to do that, including the Chinese when they come to Europe,” he said.

Almost all car makers are promising faster development times. Nissan, for example, says the first model based on its new ‘family’ platform (which will spawn a new global compact SUV) will be developed in 37 months, down from 55 months now. Subsequent models will bring that time down to 30 months.

The tricky part is to raise the speed without losing the quality.

“Western manufacturers have a tendency to be lax on deadlines. If they feel that the performance is not there, then they will just go back and repeat one step. They will try different things in an attempt to develop the perfect product,” Zayer at Bain said. “Whereas the cost discipline and the process discipline is just much higher for some of the new players that value speed and cost over maybe the perfection in the product.”