GM's China-only Buick Electra E7 topped 10,000 sales in its first month, a rare win for an American nameplate in that market. Despite the badge, the car was designed entirely by GM's China engineering team working with SAIC. GM is reportedly planning to bring the platform underneath it to a future Cadillac Optiq, and may export the Electra itself to South Korea.
That's not outsourcing in the old sense. That's China's engineering team setting the technical roadmap for vehicles headed everywhere else.
The R&D Pipeline Is Tighter There, and That's the Whole Story
We think the real headline isn't which car sold well. It's what this says about where automakers go when they need to move fast.
The R&D process in China is simply tighter than it is anywhere else right now. If a manufacturer wants to shorten its development pipeline and understand what's actually buildable today, that's increasingly where the answer comes from.
Legacy automakers are manufacturing companies trying to adapt to a world of tech. They went to the place, China, where they know they're going to find tech talent.
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This Isn't a Talent Shortage. It's a Talent Location Problem.
The engineers who design and build things exist everywhere. The vast majority of the research and engineering talent that actually figures out how to make new technology work at scale increasingly sits in China.
That's not a small distinction. Volkswagen, Renault, Hyundai, and Audi are all giving their Chinese engineering teams more autonomy for the same reason. German automakers now conduct roughly one-third of their R&D in China, up from just 12% two years ago.
