Selling cars overseas is easy, but making the world trust buying Chinese cars is difficult?

Gasgoo Munich- "My boss told me to push reliability upstream," Wang Yan, head of quality at Great Wall Motor's technical center, recalled at the recent 2026 China Automotive Forum, describing the moment he took charge of building a reliability system.

But there was no playbook for this task.

When Wang first took on the role, he found that the R&D system didn't even have a unified definition of "reliability." Engineers knew how to fix problems that had already occurred, but struggled to answer how to spot potential risks before a product hit the market.

That confusion is becoming a shared challenge for many automakers in the era of new energy vehicles.

With the rapid rise of electrification and intelligence, cars have evolved from traditional mechanical products into complex systems where hardware and software are deeply integrated. A software glitch, a battery risk, or a functional failure in a complex scenario can stem from the interplay of multiple factors.

Quality management methods, built on years of accumulated experience, are now facing new tests.

As a result, Chinese automakers are rebuilding their quality capabilities: moving risk identification upstream, expanding the scope of verification, and constantly pushing the boundaries of reliability.

As Chinese brands go global, this capability faces even stiffer tests. Whether a vehicle can adapt to the roads, climates, and usage environments of different countries will determine if a brand can survive long-term.

Image Source: VCG

Redefining Reliability

For a long time, car quality relied heavily on accumulated manufacturing experience. Whether a vehicle was reliable depended largely on the engineer's understanding of mechanical structures, component performance, and production processes. After years of buildup, China's auto industry has established a mature manufacturing system and a set of methods for solving quality issues.

But the rise of new energy vehicles is changing that logic. As electrification and intelligent technologies deepen, cars are no longer just mechanical products in the traditional sense. The addition of power batteries, electric drive systems, smart cockpits, and intelligent driving has rapidly increased the complexity of the entire vehicle system.

In the past, a faulty component could often be fixed by replacing the part or optimizing the process. Today, a single failure might involve hardware design, software logic, material performance, or even supply chain coordination. The mechanism behind quality issues is shifting, forcing companies to rethink how they manage quality.

Chinese automakers are shifting from "meeting standards" to "defining standards." Companies like Great Wall Motor, Geely, and Changan are no longer waiting for external standards to tell them what is "reliable"; they are establishing their own baselines.

Great Wall Motor's push to build a reliability system reflects this shift. Wang noted that a practical challenge Great Wall faced during this process was how to identify risks early in the product development phase. This requires a new set of methods and a supporting system.

So, Great Wall started building its reliability system from scratch. In this process, the company focused on reliability standards, analysis methods, and tool chains, integrating FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis), risk identification, and verification methods into the product development workflow. The core philosophy of this system is to shift the starting point of quality management from "fixing problems after discovery" to "prevention at the design stage."

In actual quality analysis, seemingly simple problems often involve deeper systemic factors. For example, some vehicles experienced multimedia screen blackouts. Inspections revealed it wasn't a single damaged component, but rather an issue related to chip design, temperature and humidity environments, and material changes. If such problems are handled only at the after-sales repair level, they are difficult to solve fundamentally.

This illustrates that in the NEV era, quality competition has extended beyond simple manufacturing to deeper capabilities like R&D, materials, and electronic systems.

Geely's approach confirms the same logic. In late 2025, Geely launched its Global Holistic Safety Center, with a first-phase investment exceeding 2 billion yuan, covering passive safety, active safety, battery safety, information security, and health safety. Starting from the product definition phase, Geely breaks down safety targets to every subsystem and component, forming a complete chain from target setting and solution design to verification and confirmation.

Image Source: Geely

Geely has applied for over 150,000 patents in the safety field, 1,562 of which are safety-related and have been disclosed to the industry. These figures show that Chinese automakers are transforming "safety" from a requirement to meet regulations into an actively built capability.

Meanwhile, the boundaries of quality management are extending from the OEM to the supply chain. The NEV supply chain is longer and more complex; a weak link in any link can affect the final product. Changan Automobile, for instance, is experimenting with AI tools to assist in auditing 8D reports submitted by suppliers, judging problem descriptions, cause analyses, and rectification measures to improve the efficiency of closing quality loops.

This is because many software reliability issues aren't solely caused by poor code quality, but by incomplete identification of usage scenarios during development. If these scenarios aren't fully defined, the software design itself has blind spots. This is the core challenge facing traditional quality management: reliability isn't something that can be "tested out"; it must be "designed in."

From risk identification at the R&D end to the construction of verification systems and supply chain collaboration, Chinese auto companies are gradually establishing a quality management system adapted to the NEV era.

For Chinese automakers going global, the significance of this capability goes beyond the domestic market. The test overseas is no longer simple geographic expansion; it requires building quality assurance capabilities covering the entire product lifecycle in more complex market environments.

The Real Threshold is Going Global

"The domestic NEV market is already fiercely competitive, and profits are razor-thin," Gou Bin, deputy general manager and technical lead at Zhong An Zhi Yan, told the forum. "But when everyone talks about overseas markets, their eyes light up."

Overseas markets represent growth, but that growth must be built on products adapting to local environments. A current phenomenon is that many companies complete product verification domestically with all indicators meeting requirements. Yet, after entering overseas markets, they still encounter unexpected problems.

Some problems rarely appear in China. For example, Russia uses massive amounts of de-icing salt in winter, requiring far higher body anti-corrosion standards than at home. Cars built to domestic standards may corrode much faster than expected there. In the Middle East, high temperatures last for six months, and users demand extreme air conditioning performance; if the cooling isn't fast enough, they might simply reject the car. Europe has dense roundabouts and traffic rules that differ significantly from China's.

The root cause is that vehicle verification systems are designed around domestic usage environments, which differ vastly from actual overseas scenarios. Road conditions, climates, and user habits vary by country and region. Different road conditions and traffic rules also affect chassis durability and the real-world performance of intelligent driving functions.

These issues only gradually surface after vehicles enter specific markets and undergo real-world use. One direction companies are exploring is converting complex overseas usage environments into reproducible verification conditions during the R&D phase.

They collect road data, climate information, regulatory requirements, and user scenarios from different countries and regions to build an overseas automotive scenario database. By transforming real-world market problems into test cases, they help companies identify risks early during domestic R&D.

Gou Bin's team has already analyzed typical issues in major markets like Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Russia, and Europe. For instance, speed bumps in the Middle East are higher and wider than in China, making vehicles prone to chassis interference or bottoming out. Such scenarios can be replicated in domestic proving grounds without waiting for the car to be shipped overseas. Charging pile standards also differ by country, requiring compatibility testing to be done early in development.

Shang Jiao, director of the Industry Development Department at the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, pointed out that overseas regulations and access requirements are becoming more complex. Regional regulations like Euro 7 emissions standards and the Battery Regulation impose differentiated requirements on the development of export products.

Image Source: Huaban.com

This trend means that completing overseas adaptation verification in advance is shifting from a "bonus" to an "entry threshold." This change is also driving a shift in the logic of export verification. Companies now hope to use data accumulation and scenario analysis to factor in potential global market scenarios during the product definition phase.

From this perspective, going global isn't simply copying mature domestic models to overseas markets, but a recalibration of the R&D system. The question companies need to answer has expanded from "Can this car be sold?" to "Can it adapt to different climates, roads, and regulatory environments, and maintain stable performance over long-term use?"

Localization is one means to this end. Shen Xinghua, general manager of Changan's Quality Department, mentioned localization practices at the Thailand factory, where local staff account for 90%. In his view, going abroad can't rely solely on a trading mindset; R&D, manufacturing, and quality systems must be built locally.

This move echoes the view that "verification needs to be upstream." Because only by truly entering the local market and understanding the local environment can companies discover problems invisible at home. After all, the finish line for going global isn't shipping cars to the port, but getting the products, manufacturing, and talent to operate effectively locally.

The Bottom Line is Safety

Once a vehicle enters real-world usage, the most extreme tests often come from unpredictable situations.

Research on electric vehicle fire safety by China Merchants Automotive Test has found that risks in NEVs are often not caused by a single factor, but by the combined effect of multiple links. A battery pack may perform well in component-level testing, but once installed on the whole vehicle, it may expose completely different risks.

Image Source: VCG

Chen Bin, a senior expert at China Merchants Automotive Test, shared cases encountered during actual testing. In one vehicle, after a battery thermal runaway was triggered, the battery itself did not catch fire, but the carpet on the driver's side did. Post-analysis revealed that the battery pack's thermal insulation design was insufficient; high-temperature smoke generated by the thermal runaway wasn't vented in time, and the heat conducted into the cabin, igniting the carpet, which lacked sufficient flame retardancy.

In another case, three battery cells simultaneously underwent thermal runaway. The battery pack contained the fire, but the ejected high-temperature smoke accumulated at the bottom of the front compartment, igniting combustible materials on the protective plate. The battery itself didn't catch fire, but the car burned.

There was also a case where, after a battery thermal runaway, the vehicle issued no alarm and the doors did not automatically unlock. The reason was that the sensor harness was placed in the path of the smoke flow; the high-temperature smoke burned through the harness directly, and the signal never got out.

The common feature of these cases is that the battery itself had no problem, and component tests passed, but once installed on the vehicle, the interaction between systems created new risks.

China Merchants Automotive Test concludes that NEV safety cannot be judged by components alone. Even if a battery pack is made perfectly, if heat transfers to the interior through the body structure, if high-temperature smoke accumulates in a corner, or if sensor harnesses burn out at critical moments, the safety of the entire system is incomplete.

Image Source: VCG

This explains why the auto industry is shifting from component testing to whole-vehicle system evaluation. Good components do not equal a safe vehicle, and passing individual indicators does not mean a reliable system. This is the core proposition of quality management in the NEV era: when vehicle complexity far exceeds that of traditional cars, safety must be defined and verified from the perspective of the whole vehicle.

Some companies, sensing this need, have established an electric vehicle fire safety index to examine the overall performance of vehicles in extreme situations.

For Chinese automakers going global, this capability is even more critical. With vast differences in regulations, climates, and usage habits overseas, if quality management remains only at the component level, those unexpected risks are hard to detect before vehicles reach foreign shores.

The true safety baseline for a vehicle isn't how many tests it passes in a lab, but whether it can still protect the people inside after experiencing extreme scenarios in the real world.

Conclusion

Overall, China's automotive industry is undergoing a transformation from "just building cars" to "building cars that are stable and durable."

For the past thirty-plus years, China's auto industry solved the problem of manufacturing capability. That path was fast and successful. Engines, transmissions, bodies, chassis—every link formed a mature supply chain and production system.

But new energy vehicles have changed the dimension of competition. As hardware convergence and technological similarity become irreversible trends, the difference in a car begins to show in deeper places:

Is its reliability defined at the design stage, or slowly patched up after launch based on user feedback? Does its verification system cover usage scenarios in different global markets, or is it only suitable for familiar domestic environments? Is its safety performance in extreme situations the result of system design, or a patchwork of individual components fighting their own battles?

Companies and service institutions like Great Wall Motor, Geely, Changan, Zhong An Zhi Yan, and China Merchants Automotive Test are all doing the same thing: pushing China's automotive quality standards from "meeting requirements" to "defining the baseline." This change is more profound than many imagine.

It isn't about patching past loopholes, but redefining the competitive dimension of Chinese cars going global. When the advantages of price and configuration are gradually leveled off, the true moat is the stable performance of the product after long-term operation in global markets.

The finish line for going global isn't selling more cars, but establishing long-term trust in "Made in China" in the global market.