The mission of Chinese automotive design today

Over the past decade, Chinese automotive design has gradually moved away from the early simplistic and crude stage of "piling up configurations and styling." Despite the intense price competition today, a number of models have begun to achieve international competitiveness at the design level.

The next question is: what comes after "looking good"? How to build brand DNA? How to develop a distinctive design language? How to establish China's own automotive design discourse system?

Today's new energy vehicle models are becoming increasingly mature as individual products, but recognition across brands is declining, leading to homogenization.

As Chen Zheng put it, to break this homogenization, automotive design essentially needs to shift from "serving the product" to "empowering the brand." This is the challenge facing heads of design today.

Brand DNA is not a logo, nor is it a front-end face. It is an entire system of experiences and designs that can be repeatedly recognized.

The problem for many brands at present is: they can make a beautiful car and achieve individual model success, but they struggle to consolidate design into lasting value, to form stable design capabilities, and to develop a classic family design language.

Even after forming a mature family design language, when applying it to models across different price ranges (from 100,000 to 500,000 RMB) and different segments, designers must balance a consistent brand design core while making differentiated expressions based on target audiences, product positioning, and technological differences. This imposes even higher demands on the design capabilities of automakers.