Abstract:
576 models, with an average of more than 3 models per day. This is the data of new passenger car launches in the first half of the year compiled by Bitauto.com. Among them, there are only 75 new models and 480 models are annual minor facelifts, but the rapid pace of new models is evident. At the same time, quality problems with new cars are also being exposed. From the brake pedal bracket of a nearly one-million-dollar luxury MPV breaking during testing, to turning off the headlights with a single word while driving, to the wipers failing in heavy rains, and the doors not being able to open after a collision and fire, these seemingly isolated incidents have drawn people's attention to an industry reality - quick-service cars.
Even foreign luxury brands, which have always been relatively restrained in marketing, have begun to fight back with "connotation". First, BMW released a series of short videos, which showed ridiculous scenes of using car models to hit durians and pineapples and artificially blowing air into simulated wind tunnels, insinuating that some car companies rely too much on simulation testing before going on the market. Then there is Mercedes-Benz, which frames a car on the screen, as if the car is being dragged by the mouse, but the car quickly drives out of the frame, proving that it is a real shot. The foreign language of the two companies is to remind consumers: Do you dare to drive a fast-moving car that has not been tested?
As the trend of quick-made cars intensifies, on October 10, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and the State Administration for Market Regulation jointly issued the "Notice on Further Strengthening the Management of Innovative Design and R&D Testing and Verification of Automotive Products (Draft for Comments)" to "put on the brakes" on quick-made cars. Is this crash race that has been going on for several years coming to an end?
1. “Weird” design
Have you also been stunned by the various hidden door handles?
When people stand outside the car and see the smooth door, they have to look for the button, wait for the door handle to pop out, and then pick at the gap to open the door. People who are not familiar with it often cannot find the opening position for a long time. Sitting in the car, the door handles are also deeply hidden. Some are hidden in blind spots, and some are designed as rotating cylinders. It is impossible to figure out how to open them for the first time.
These designs are not only inconvenient to use, but may also be life-threatening in the event of an accident. Xiaomi, Wenjie and other brands have all experienced collision accidents where the hidden door handles lost power and failed, making it impossible to open the door from outside the car, delaying rescue. Crash tests conducted by China Insurance Research Institute show that after a side collision, the success rate of purely electronically controlled hidden door handles is only 67%, which is 31 percentage points lower than traditional mechanical door handles.
In March this year, Wei Jianjun, chairman of Great Wall Motors, bluntly stated in a live broadcast that hidden door handles are a fake technology and can only reduce the wind resistance coefficient of the entire vehicle by about 0.001 at most, which translates into an electric vehicle with a range of 600 kilometers. At most, it can run 1-2 kilometers more, which is "not worth the loss."
Similar misalignment is more common in interaction design. Many new energy vehicles have canceled the physical buttons for lights, wipers, and air conditioning, and have them all integrated into the central control screen. If you want to use these functions while driving, you must first wake up the screen, find the menu, and then select operations, which greatly increases the time you have to take your eyes off the road.
Although voice control is simple, it is easier to operate incorrectly. In February this year, a Lynk & Co Z20 owner was driving at night and wanted to turn off all the reading lights on the car. However, the vehicle mistakenly recognized that all lights were turned off and turned off the headlights, resulting in a loss of vision and a collision.
These fancy features are the selling points at the press conference, which determines that car companies are more willing to invest resources, but they may ignore basic safety. A video taken by a car owner showed that when driving in heavy rain, the wipers failed and the road conditions were completely unclear. The car continued to drive on autonomous driving. The car owner originally wanted to lament that "smart driving is awesome", but netizens reacted calmly: I have never seen a car with its wiper broken so quickly...
What is even more worthy of questioning is that when the wipers failed and vision was lost, the smart drive should have prompted the driver to take over, but the vehicle continued to drive. Behind this is the current car-making logic of many car companies, which invest resources in selling points such as smart driving, lidar, and smart cockpits. However, when it comes to basic safety parts such as wipers, door handles, and pedal strength, they are not realistic enough.
There is also a type of design that directly costs the car owner a high maintenance bill. Many handlebar lights are made to protrude more than the bumper. If scratched at low speed, the integrated headlight will be damaged first, which can only be replaced but cannot be repaired. The bumper integrates radar, air suspension gas tank and other components, which will be completely damaged in a collision, greatly increasing the maintenance cost.
Putting these cases together, it is not difficult to see that in the past few years, new energy vehicles have sacrificed too many considerations such as safety redundancy and maintenance economy for innovative design. The "Draft for Comments" clearly requires that fully hidden door handles are prohibited; emergency escape, emergency braking and other control parts must retain physical parts and eye-catching logos; non-drivers are not allowed to control lights, wipers, and doors through voice or gestures while driving; for designs such as integrated lamps, maintenance economic evaluations must be conducted.
These regulations point directly at the current chaos of "crash cars" and bring the deviated design direction back to the origin of "safety first".
2. The wind of quick success
Why have these problems occurred in new cars in recent years? In addition to deviations in design orientation, the answer may also be hidden in the timetable.
The replacement cycle of traditional joint venture brand fuel vehicles is about five years, during which annual models are launched every year and usually only undergo a mid-term facelift. However, in recent years, the development pace of domestic car companies has been greatly compressed. Data from the consulting company Ai Ruibo shows that the development cycle of some car companies is as short as about 20 months, and some "new forces" even only have 18 months.
Quickness is originally a means for companies to cope with competition, but when speed reaches a certain level, the first to give in is often the most time-consuming and less visible place for users. On October 11, the "People's Daily" client stated in a commentary article that a new energy vehicle company tested new car door handles a total of 10,000 times, of which only 2,000 were physical tests, and the remaining 8,000 were all completed by simulations, with real tests accounting for only 20%.
Simulation testing can quickly eliminate problems during the design phase and is low-cost and fast, but it cannot simulate all situations in the real world. If real-life problems such as material fatigue, extreme working conditions, and long-term aging are not taken into account during modeling, they will not appear in the results. These defects that were not covered were eventually "detected" by users.
According to complaints on platforms such as Car Quality Network, since mid-May this year, many car owners have reported that the newly purchased Xpeng G7 has cracked paint and rust on the door. Although paint explosion is not a safety incident, car owners are worried that if even the basic paint is not done well, will there be more problems elsewhere? In response to this, Xpeng officials responded on May 22 that the problem stemmed from insufficient sealing of the sheet metal at the edge of the door's water-cut seal strip, and promised to repair the damaged paint surface free of charge.
These are not isolated cases. Recently, the "Research on China's Automotive Product Quality Performance in 2026" released by Car Quality Network and CareSach Consulting shows that the number of single-vehicle problems with new cars within one year of vehicle age has increased by 39%. The average time for the first quality problem of a vehicle has been shortened from 8.4 months in 2024 to 7.4 months in 2026. New energy vehicles are even shorter than this. The performance of software-related modules such as functional configuration, smart cockpit, and driving assistance has declined most significantly.
Research believes that this is directly related to the compression of the R&D cycle and insufficient verification. The verification that should have been completed in the factory was transferred to the user's real usage scenario. After a new car is launched, the data collected is used to make up for the tests that were not completed before the launch, but the cost is borne by consumers.
In this regard, the "Draft for Comments" requires that the reliability test of newly declared products must be no less than 30,000 kilometers, covering typical roads such as strengthened bad roads, general roads, expressways, and mountain roads; the environmental adaptability verification must be no less than one year, and must go through the complete cycle of "two winters and one summer." Corresponding to the most easily overlooked aspects such as anti-corrosion, aging, and sealing. In addition, even if the supplier provides a verification report, car companies must purchase and inspect key software and hardware themselves, and are not allowed to directly accept off-the-shelf verification reports.
A vehicle manufacturing practitioner said that only through a complete four-season cycle can problems such as battery attenuation, seal aging, and thermal expansion and contraction of electronic parts be exposed. The actual test of 30,000 kilometers was a new standard for car companies in the past, but now these regulations have been re-introduced as mandatory requirements.
Once these regulations are implemented, they will change the cost accounts of enterprises. When verification is insufficient, it is impossible to obtain an announcement and cannot be put on the market. The time and cost saved by compressed testing become the risk of not getting a marketing authorization. For those companies that are willing to do solid verification, this is equivalent to an encouragement and will not suffer in the competition due to "slow testing".
When bad coins cannot drive out good coins with great fanfare, only then can the trend of quick success be truly stopped.
3. What are the criteria for a good car?
In the past few years, new energy car companies have relied on rapid iteration and rapid innovation to seize the market, while traditional car companies were once "ridiculed" because of their slow pace and long decision-making chain. But in 2026, with the recurring problems of express vehicles, the direction of the wind began to change. The testing systems, supply chain management and quality standards that were once regarded as “burden” by traditional car companies are becoming cards that can be actively played.
For example, SAIC-GM's social account posted videos of Cadillac and Buick loading cars. Instead of highlighting the dazzling large screens and smart cockpits, they focused on several bolts that fix the anti-collision beams, with the text "Are these four bolts enough for you to build an anti-collision beam?" Netizens saw the overtone and complained in the comment area that the anti-collision beams of the friend's manufacturer were so thin that they could peel an apple.
If SAIC-GM is making a fuss about the materials used, FAW-Volkswagen directly disclosed the details of R&D and testing at the press conference. For example, the newly launched ID.AURA T6 vehicle went through four years of research and development and completed more than 1,800 tests; the vehicle's rain test lasted 1,600 minutes; it is equivalent to 15 years of use loss of 300,000 kilometers; it completed 30,000 kilometers of high-temperature and low-temperature real vehicle road tests in Turpan and Heihe respectively.
The data may seem mundane, but the timing and manner of release are intriguing. Some netizens commented that if these testing processes were placed at a press conference of new forces, they would be enough to become a core selling point. The implication is that basic verification, which traditional car companies used to regard as their own business, has now become a scarce commodity.
Coupled with the previous "connotation" short films of BMW and Mercedes-Benz, these actions appear to be marketing, but in essence they are competing for the definition of "good cars". In the past few years, "new forces" have defined it as labels such as high configuration, intelligence, and rapid iteration. Now, the tendency revealed in the "Draft for Comments" is undoubtedly to put "verification" and "solidification" at a higher priority.
The "Draft for Comments" covers the entire chain from product design, R&D and testing to marketing and publicity, and after-sales service. On the access side, products that have not completed verification will not be announced; even models that are already on the market must complete the materials before July 1, 2027. If they are not modified after the deadline and have hidden dangers, they will be required to stop production and recall. On the marketing side, companies are not allowed to make false and exaggerated publicity; they are not allowed to use scenes that violate road traffic regulations to promote product functions.
This means that if it is officially implemented, supervision will advance the verification requirements to the access stage, directly blocking the product's listing qualifications and sales channels. In the short term, compliance costs will rise significantly for brands that rely on rapid configuration iteration and marketing drive. But in the long run, an enterprise's investment in verification is no longer just a "cost" but becomes part of an "asset". Enterprises with a complete R&D and testing system have a better chance of gaining competitive advantage.
On the new energy track, you need to compete for speed, but also for long-distance running strength. At present, the industry is experiencing a switch in competitive logic. Rapid iteration was once the most conspicuous label in the industry, but what determines how far a car company can go is the bottom line of safety and quality.
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