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"The boss told me, you need to push reliability forward." At the recent 2026 China Auto Forum, Wang Yan, Director of Quality at Great Wall Technology Center, recalled saying this when taking charge of the reliability system construction.
But this task has no ready-made answer.
When Wang Yan first took on the task, he discovered, that understanding of "reliability" within the R&D system was not fully consistent. Engineers know how to solve problems that have already occurred, but it is difficult to answer, how to identify potential risks in advance before the product launches.
This confusion is becoming a common problem faced by many car companies in the new energy vehicle era.
With the rapid development of electrification and intelligence, cars have changed from traditional mechanical products into complex systems with high integration of hardware and software. A software issue, a battery risk, a functional failure under complex scenarios, may all come from the combined effect of multiple links.
The quality management method formed relying on experience accumulation is facing new challenges.
Therefore, Chinese car companies are starting to rebuild quality capabilities: moving risk identification forward, expanding the verification scope, and constantly extending the boundaries of reliability.
And when Chinese brands go to the global market, this capability will face even more complex tests. Whether a car can adapt to roads, climate, and usage environments in different countries, will become the key to deciding whether a brand can develop long-term.
Image Source: IC Photo
Redefining Reliability
For a long time in the past, car quality relied more on manufacturing experience accumulation. Whether a car is reliable depends largely on the engineer's understanding of mechanical structure, component performance, and production processes. After years of accumulation, the Chinese automotive industry has gradually established a mature manufacturing system and formed a set of methods to solve quality problems.
But the development of new energy vehicles is changing this logic. With the deepening of electrification and intelligent technology, cars are no longer just mechanical products in the traditional sense. New technologies such as power batteries, electric drive systems, smart cockpits, intelligent driving are continuously added, the complexity of the whole vehicle system is rapidly increasing.
In the past, if a component had a problem, it could often be solved by replacing the part or optimizing the process. Nowadays, a fault may involve hardware design, software logic, material performance, and even supply chain coordination. The mechanism of quality problem generation is changing, also requiring companies to rethink quality management methods.
Chinese car companies are moving from "meeting standards" to "defining standards". Companies like Great Wall Motor, Geely, Changan no longer wait for external standards to answer "what is reliable", but establish a baseline themselves.
Great Wall Motor promoting reliability system construction is an embodiment of this change. Wang Yan mentioned that a practical problem Great Wall faced during reliability system construction was, how to identify risks in advance during the product development stage. And this requires a new set of methods and systems support.
Therefore, Great Wall began to build a reliability system from 0 to 1. In this process, enterprises built around reliability standards, analysis methods, and toolchains, integrating FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis), risk identification, verification methods, etc., into the product development process. The core idea of this system is: moving the starting point of quality management from "repairing after finding problems" forward to "preventive measures in the design phase".
In actual quality problem analysis, some seemingly simple problems often involve deeper system factors. For example, some vehicles experienced multimedia black screen problems, after inspection, it was found not to be a single component damage, but related to chip design, temperature and humidity environment, material changes, and other factors. If similar problems only stay at the after-sales maintenance level, it is hard to solve from the root.
This also shows that the quality competition in the new energy vehicle era has extended from pure manufacturing links to more underlying capabilities such as R&D, materials, electronic systems.
Geely's practice verifies the same logic. At the end of 2025, Geely launched the Global All-Domain Safety Center, with Phase I investment exceeding 2 billion yuan, covering multiple dimensions such as passive safety, active safety, battery safety, information security, health safety. Starting from the product definition phase, Geely decomposed safety goals to each subsystem, each component, forming a complete chain from goal setting to solution design, to verification confirmation.
Image Source: Geely
Geely has cumulatively applied for more than 150,000 patents in the safety field, among which 1,562 safety-related patents have been made public to the industry. This set of data shows that Chinese car companies are moving "safety" from a regulatory compliance requirement, into an actively built capability.
Meanwhile, the boundary of quality management is also extending from vehicle enterprises to the supply chain. The new energy vehicle industry chain is longer and more complex, any weak link in any link may affect the final product performance. Like Changan Motor, is trying to use AI tools to assist in auditing 8D reports submitted by suppliers, judging problem description, root cause analysis, and rectification measures, improving the efficiency of quality problem closure.
This is because many software reliability problems are not entirely caused by code quality, but because the identification of usage scenarios during the development phase is not complete enough. If these scenarios are not defined completely, the software design itself has blind spots. This is also the core challenge faced by traditional quality management methods: reliability is not something that can be "tested out", it must be "defined in" during the design phase.
From risk identification at the R&D end, to verification system construction, to supply chain coordination, Chinese automotive enterprises are gradually building a quality management system adapted to the new energy vehicle era.
For Chinese car companies moving towards the global market, the significance of this capability has gone beyond the domestic market. The challenges faced by Chinese automotive enterprises overseas are no longer simple geographical expansion, but need to establish quality assurance capabilities covering the product lifecycle in a more complex market environment.
The Threshold is Going Overseas
Gou Bin, Deputy General Manager and Technical Head of China Auto Safety Research Institute, said a sentence at the forum: "The domestic new energy vehicle market is already very competitive, profits are very thin. But when everyone talks about overseas, their eyes are shining."
Overseas is incremental growth, but incremental growth must be built on the basis of products adapting to the local environment. Currently, there is a phenomenon that many enterprises have completed product verification in China, and all indicators meet requirements. But after entering the overseas market, they will still encounter some unexpected problems.
Some problems almost never appear in China. For example, in winter in Russia, de-icing agents are used in large quantities, and body anti-corrosion requirements are far higher than in China. Cars built according to domestic standards going there, corrosion speed may be much faster than expected; In the Middle East, high summer temperatures last for half a year, and user requirements for air conditioning performance are extremely high. If cooling is not fast enough, users may directly give up choosing; In Europe, roundabout road conditions are dense, and traffic sign rules differ significantly from domestic ones.
The root cause of these problems is that the vehicle verification system is designed based on domestic usage environment, with a large difference from overseas users' actual usage scenarios. Road conditions, climate environments, and user habits of different countries and regions are all different. Different road conditions and traffic rules will also affect the actual performance of vehicle chassis durability and intelligent driving functions.
Only after vehicles enter specific markets and undergo real usage will the above problems gradually be exposed. Some enterprises' exploration direction is to convert overseas complex usage environments into reproducible verification conditions at the R&D stage.
They collect road data, climate information, regulatory requirements, and user usage scenarios from different countries and regions, build an overseas automotive scenario database, convert problems in the real market into test cases, helping enterprises identify risks in advance during the domestic R&D stage.
Gou Bin's team has sorted out typical problems in major markets such as Southeast Asia, Middle East, Russia, Europe. For example, speed bumps in the Middle East region are higher and wider than in China, and chassis interference or underbody scraping is easy to occur when vehicles pass through. This type of scenario can be reproduced in domestic test sites, no need to wait until vehicles are shipped overseas to discover. Charging pile standards in different countries also have differences, and charging compatibility issues also need to be tested in advance during the development stage.
Shang Jiao, Director of Industry Development Department of China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, pointed out that laws and regulations and entry requirements in overseas markets are becoming more complex. Euro 7 emission standards, Battery Act, etc., regional regulations, propose differentiated requirements for export product development.
Image Source: Huaban
This trend means that completing overseas adaptation verification in advance is changing from an "extra item" to an "entry threshold". This change also pushes the verification logic of automotive overseas to change. Now enterprises hope to consider scenarios that might be encountered in the global market during the product definition stage through data accumulation and scenario analysis.
From this perspective, going overseas is not simply copying domestic mature models to overseas markets, but a re-calibration of the R&D system. The questions enterprises need to answer have expanded from "whether this car can be sold" to "whether it can adapt to different climates, roads, and regulatory environments, and maintain stable performance in long-term use".
Localization is one of the means. Shen Xinghua, General Manager of Changan Quality Department, mentioned the localization practice of the Thailand factory, local employee ratio has reached 90%. In his view, going overseas cannot rely only on trade thinking, the R&D, manufacturing, and quality systems must be built locally.
This move echoes the view that "verification needs to be front-loaded". Because only after truly entering the local market and understanding the local environment will enterprises discover problems that cannot be seen in China. After all, the endpoint of going overseas is not shipping cars to the port, but making products, manufacturing, and talent operate locally.
The Bottom Line is Safety
When a car enters a real usage scenario, the most extreme tests often come from those unpredictable situations.
China Merchants Vehicle Research Institute found in electric vehicle fire safety research that new energy vehicle risks are often not caused by a single factor, but the result of multiple links acting together. A battery pack performs well in component level testing, but after being installed on the whole vehicle, may expose completely different risks.
Image Source: IC Photo
Chen Bin, Senior Expert at China Merchants Vehicle Research Institute, shared some cases encountered in actual testing at the forum. One car, after triggering battery thermal runaway, the battery itself did not catch fire, but the carpet at the driver's seat caught fire. Post-analysis found that the heat insulation design of the battery pack was insufficient, high-temperature smoke generated by thermal runaway was not discharged in time, heat conducted into the cabin, igniting a carpet with insufficient flame retardant performance.
Another case is, three cells thermal runaway simultaneously, the battery pack controlled the fire, but the sprayed high-temperature smoke accumulated at the bottom of the front engine compartment, igniting flammable materials on the protection plate. The battery itself did not catch fire, but the car burned.
There is also a case, after battery thermal runaway, the vehicle did not issue any alarm, car doors did not automatically unlock either. The reason is the sensor harness was arranged on the smoke flow path, high-temperature smoke directly burned the harness, the signal was not sent out at all.
The common characteristic of these cases is: the battery itself has no problem, component testing is also qualified, but after being installed on the car, the interaction between systems produced new risks.
China Merchants Vehicle Research Institute's conclusion is, new energy vehicle safety cannot look only at components. No matter how well a battery pack is made, if heat conducts into the cabin through the vehicle body structure, if high-temperature smoke will accumulate in some corner, if sensor harness will be burned at critical moments, then the safety of the entire system is incomplete.
Image Source: IC Photo
This explains why the automotive industry is shifting from component testing to whole vehicle system-level evaluation. Because, components made well does not equal whole vehicle safety, single item indicator qualified does not equal system reliability. This is exactly the core proposition of quality management in the new energy vehicle era: when vehicle complexity far exceeds traditional cars, safety must be defined and verified from the perspective of the whole vehicle.
Some enterprises insight into demand, established Electric Vehicle Fire Safety Index, can view whole vehicle overall performance in extreme conditions.
For Chinese car companies moving towards the global market, the importance of this capability is more prominent. Laws, climate, usage habits of overseas markets differ hugely, if quality management stays only at the component level, those unexpected risks after vehicles arrive overseas are hard to discover in advance.
You should know, a car's true safety bottom line, is not how many tests it can pass in the lab, but after experiencing extreme scenarios in the real world, still able to protect personnel inside the vehicle.
Conclusion
Overall, Chinese automotive industry is experiencing a transformation from "made" to "made stably, made for long".
In the past 30+ years, the Chinese automotive industry solved the manufacturing capability problem. This road went very fast, and also very successful. Engine, transmission, body, chassis... Every link has formed a mature supply chain and production system.
But new energy vehicles changed the dimension of competition. When hardware convergence, technology convergence becomes an irreversible trend, the difference of a car starts to be reflected in lower-level places:
Is its reliability defined in during the design phase, or relying on user feedback to patch up slowly after launch? Can its verification system cover usage scenarios of different global markets, or is it only applicable to domestic familiar environments? Its safety performance in extreme situations, is it the result of system design, or a patchwork of various components fighting their own battles?
Great Wall Motor, Geely, Changan, China Auto Safety Research Institute, China Merchants Vehicle Research Institute, etc. enterprises and service institutions, are doing the same thing: pushing the quality standard of Chinese cars from "meeting requirements" to "defining baseline". This change is more profound than many imagine.
It is not repairing past loopholes, but redefining the competition dimension of Chinese cars going overseas. When the advantage of price and configuration is gradually leveled, the true moat is the stable performance of products after long-term operation in the global market.
The endpoint of going overseas is not to sell more cars, but to establish long-term trust on "Made in China" in the world market.
