Halt the Quick-assembled Vehicles: The Turmoil Triggered by a Single Pedal Bracket

"Core Takeaway" We must not let enterprises that are willing to carry out solid verification work suffer losses.

576 models, with an average of more than 3 new models launched per day, this is the statistic of new passenger vehicle launches in the first half of the year counted by Yiche Ranking. Among them, there are only 75 brand-new models, and 480 are minor annual facelifts, which fully demonstrates the surprisingly fast pace of new product rollouts. Meanwhile, quality problems of new vehicles are also emerging intensively.

From the brake pedal bracket of a nearly million-yuan luxury MPV breaking during testing, the front headlights being turned off by a single spoken word while driving, to the wiper failing on rainy storm days and the car door being unable to open after a collision fire, these seemingly isolated incidents all draw people's attention to a real industry phenomenon — rush-built vehicles.

Even foreign luxury brands that have always been relatively restrained in marketing have begun to fight back with veiled irony. BMW first released a series of short videos, using absurd scenes of a car model hitting durians and pineapples, and artificial blowing to simulate a wind tunnel, to satirize some automakers that rely excessively on simulation tests before launching new cars. Then Mercedes-Benz released a video that frames a car on the screen as if the car is dragged by a mouse, but the car quickly drives out of the frame to prove it is a real shot. The voiceover of the two brands reminds consumers: would you dare to drive a rush-built vehicle that has not passed real-world tests?

As the trend of rushing to launch untested vehicles becomes increasingly rampant, on October 10, four departments including 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 Automotive Product Innovative Design, R&D Testing and Verification (Draft for Comment)", hitting the brakes on rush-built vehicles. Is this several-year-long rush-to-launch competition coming to an end?

"Weird" Designs

Have you ever been confused by the various hidden door handles on cars?

Standing outside the car, facing the smooth car door, you have to find the button, wait for the door handle to pop out, then pry the gap to open the door. People who are not familiar with the design often cannot find the opening position for a long time. When sitting in the car, the door handle is also hidden very deep: some are hidden in the blind spot of sight, some are designed as rotating cylinders, and you cannot figure out how to open them on your first try.

These designs are not only inconvenient to use, but may even endanger lives after accidents. Brands including Xiaomi and AITO have experienced collisions where the hidden door handles failed due to power loss, making it impossible to open the door from outside the car and delaying rescue. The C-IASI crash test shows that the pop-up success rate of fully electronically controlled hidden door handles after side collisions is only 67%, 31 percentage points lower than traditional mechanical door handles.

In March this year, Wei Jianjun, Chairman of Great Wall Motors, said bluntly in a live broadcast that the hidden door handle is a pseudo-technology, which can only reduce the vehicle's drag coefficient by about 0.001 at most. Converted to an electric vehicle with a 600km range, it can only drive 1-2km more at most, which is "not worth the loss".

Similar misalignments are more common in interaction design. Many new energy vehicles cancel physical buttons for lights, wipers and air conditioners, and integrate all these functions into the central control screen. When driving, to use these functions, you have to wake up the screen first, find the menu, and then select the operation, which greatly increases the time your eyes leave the road.

Although voice control is simple, it is more prone to misoperation. In February this year, an owner of a Lynk & Co Z20 was driving at night and wanted to turn off all the reading lights in the car, but the vehicle misidentified the instruction as turning off all the lights, turned off the front headlights, causing the driver to lose sight and a collision accident.

These fancy functions are selling points at press conferences, so automakers are more willing to invest resources in them, but may ignore basic safety. A video shot by a car owner shows that when driving in a heavy rain, the wiper failed, the road condition was completely invisible, and the car continued to drive relying on autonomous driving. The car owner originally wanted to sigh that "intelligent driving is really great", but netizens reacted very calmly: no one has ever seen a car whose wiper breaks down so early...

What is more worth asking is that when the wiper fails and the driver's sight is completely lost, the intelligent driving system should have prompted the driver to take over, but the vehicle continued to drive. Behind this is the current manufacturing logic of many automakers: they invest resources in selling points such as intelligent driving, lidar and smart cockpit, but are not serious enough about basic safety components such as wipers, door handles and pedal strength.

There is another type of design whose cost directly turns into the car owner's high maintenance bill. Many cars design their headlights to protrude more than the bumper, so that the integrated headlight will be damaged first in a low-speed scratch, and can only be replaced instead of repaired; the bumper integrates components such as radar and air suspension air tank, which will all break 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 much consideration for safety redundancy, maintenance economy and other aspects in order to pursue innovative designs. The Draft for Comment clearly requires that fully hidden door handles are prohibited; operating parts for emergency escape, emergency braking and other functions must retain physical components and eye-catching identifiers; non-drivers are not allowed to control lights, wipers and car doors through voice or gestures while the vehicle is running; designs such as integrated lamps must carry out maintenance economy assessment.

These regulations directly target the current chaos of "rush-built vehicles", pulling the deviated design direction back to the origin of "safety first".

The Trend of Rushed Production

Why do these problems break out intensively on new cars launched in recent years? In addition to the deviation of design orientation, the answer may also lie in the development schedule.

Traditional joint-venture brand fuel vehicles have a generation replacement cycle of about five years, with annual facelifts in between, and usually only one mid-term facelift. But in recent years, the development rhythm of domestic automakers has been greatly compressed. Data from consulting firm AlixPartners shows that the development cycle of some automakers is as short as about 20 months, and some "new power" automakers even only take 18 months.

Speed was originally a means for enterprises to cope with competition, but when the speed is too high, the first concessions are often the most time-consuming parts that are not easy to be noticed by users. On October 11, People's Daily Client said in a commentary that a new energy automaker only carried out a total of 10,000 tests on new car door handles, of which only 2000 were physical tests, and the remaining 8000 were all completed by simulation, with real tests accounting for only 20%.

Simulation tests can quickly eliminate problems in the design stage, with low cost and high speed, but cannot simulate all situations in the real world. Problems such as material fatigue, extreme working conditions and long-term aging in reality will not appear in the simulation results if they are not taken into account during modeling. These uncovered defects are eventually "tested out" by users.

According to complaints on platforms such as 12365auto, since mid-May this year, many car owners have successively reported that their newly bought Xpeng G7 has problems of paint peeling and rust on the car door. Although paint peeling is not a safety accident, car owners are worried that if even the basic paint work cannot be done well, there may be more problems in other parts. In response, Xpeng officially responded on May 22 that the problem came from insufficient sealing at the sheet metal position on the edge of the door water seal strip, and promised to repair the damaged paint surface for free.

These are not isolated cases. Recently, the "2026 China Automotive Product Quality Performance Study" jointly released by 12365auto and Kailu Saichi Consulting shows that the number of problems per new car within 1 year of age has increased by 39%, and the average time for the first quality problem of a vehicle to occur has shortened from 8.4 months in 2024 to 7.4 months in 2026, with the figure of new energy vehicles even shorter. The performance of three software-related modules: functional configuration, smart cockpit and driving assistance has declined most significantly.

The study believes that this is directly related to the compressed R&D cycle and insufficient verification. Those verifications that should have been completed in the factory have been transferred to the real usage scenarios of users. After new cars are launched, the collected data is used to supplement the tests that were not completed before launch, but the cost is borne by consumers.

In response to this, the Draft for Comment requires that for newly declared products, the reliability test must be no less than 30,000 kilometers, covering typical roads such as reinforced bad roads, general highways, expressways and mountain roads; the environmental adaptability verification shall be no less than 1 year, and must go through a complete cycle of "two winters and one summer", which corresponds to the most easily ignored links such as anti-corrosion, aging and sealing. In addition, even if the supplier provides a verification report, the automaker must conduct its own incoming inspection of key software and hardware, and cannot directly adopt the ready-made verification report.

A person engaged in vehicle manufacturing said that only after experiencing a complete four-season cycle can problems such as battery attenuation, sealing aging, and thermal expansion and contraction of electronic components be exposed. 30,000 kilometers of real road tests were the standard action for automakers to launch new products in the past, and now these regulations are re-established as mandatory requirements.

Once these regulations are implemented, they will change the cost accounting of enterprises. When insufficient verification means that the product cannot get the official announcement and cannot be sold on the market, the time and cost saved by compressing tests will become the risk of failing to obtain the market launch permission. For those enterprises that are willing to carry out solid verification, this is equivalent to an incentive, so that they will not suffer losses in competition because of "slow testing".

Only when bad money can no longer drive out good money blatantly, can the trend of rushing to produce untested vehicles be truly stopped.

What is the Standard for a Good Car?

In the past few years, new energy automakers have seized the market by rapid iteration and fast new product launch, while traditional automakers were once collectively mocked because of their slow rhythm and long decision-making chain. But in 2026, as the problems of rush-built vehicles appear repeatedly, the trend begins to change. The test systems, supply chain management and quality standards of traditional automakers that were once regarded as "burdens" are becoming their competitive advantages that they can actively promote.

For example, the social account of SAIC General Motors released the assembly videos of Cadillac and Buick, which did not highlight the dazzling large screen and smart cockpit, but focused on several bolts fixing the anti-collision beam, with the caption "Are these four bolts enough for you to make an anti-collision beam?" Netizens understood the hidden meaning, and complained in the comment area that the anti-collision beams of rival brands are so thin that they can even cut apples.

If SAIC General Motors focuses on material quality, FAW-Volkswagen directly disclosed the details of R&D tests at the press conference. For example, the newly launched ID.AURA T6 has undergone four years of R&D and completed more than 1800 tests; the whole vehicle rain test lasts for 1600 minutes, which is equivalent to the usage loss of 15 years and 300,000 kilometers; in Turpan and Heihe, it completed 30,000 kilometers of high-temperature and low-temperature real vehicle road tests respectively.

The data seems unremarkable, but the timing and way of release are thought-provoking. Some netizens commented that if these test processes were placed at the press conference of a new power automaker, they would be enough to become the core selling point. The implication is that the basic verification that traditional automakers used to take for granted is now a scarce resource.

Coupled with the previous "veiled irony" short videos of BMW and Mercedes-Benz, these actions are ostensibly marketing, but essentially a competition for the definition standard of "a good car". In the past few years, "new power" automakers defined it as labels such as high configuration, intelligence and rapid iteration. Now, the tendency revealed by the Draft for Comment undoubtedly puts "verification" and "solid work" in a more priority position.

The Draft for Comment covers the whole chain from product design, R&D testing to marketing promotion and after-sales service. At the access end, products that have not completed verification will not be given official announcement; even for already launched models, they must complete the supplementary materials before July 1, 2027, and those that have not been rectified after the deadline and have hidden dangers will be required to stop production and be recalled. At the marketing end, enterprises are not allowed to carry out false and exaggerated publicity; they are not allowed to use scenarios that violate road traffic regulations to promote product functions.

This means that if it is officially implemented, the supervision will move the verification requirement forward to the access link, directly restricting the product's market launch qualification and sales channel. In the short term, brands that rely on rapid configuration iteration and marketing-driven development will face a significant rise in compliance costs. But in the long run, the investment of enterprises in verification is no longer just a "cost", but part of the "assets", and enterprises with complete R&D and test systems will have more opportunities to gain competitive advantages.

The new energy track requires speed, but more importantly, the strength to run a long race. At present, the industry is experiencing a switch of competition logic. Rapid iteration used to be the most prominent label of the industry, but what determines how far an automaker can go is the bottom line of safety and quality.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Leopard Change" (ID: baobiannews), written by Chen Fashan, published with authorization from 36Kr.