Written by Meng Wei
Editor / Zhang Nan
Design / Zhao Haoran
In 2024, Chinese cars will once again reach a crossroads.
For Chinese car design, it is also experiencing a collision of two different directions, is it original or a tribute to the classics?
Such ideological collisions and questions are precisely one of the manifestations of the serious "involution" of China's automobile industry today.
On the one hand, under the "sales-only theory" under the competition of the stock market, automobile design has to obey those models that have been proven successful in the market, and lose the courage to take a step forward;
On the other hand, the tragic price war has also been passed on to automobile design, and cost priority has become a high-obstacle mountain before design innovation.
Volume cost, volume technology, volume price, volume user, volume relationship, volume public opinion, China's car monster phenomenon of the 6 kinds of involution, to the industry to bring more is reverse growth, as its English Involution explained.
The real evolution, the real prosperity of species, is that everyone needs to find their own ecological niche, each in place, the species continue to be enriched, a hundred flowers bloom, and "each is beautiful, the beauty is the same".
How to break the involution and move towards evolution and prosperity?
Jia Ke, chairman of the China Automobile Blue Book Forum, elaborated on the theme of "imagination" at the 16th China Automobile Blue Book Forum, saying that looking around the current world, if China's new cars want to really gain a firm foothold and want to go to the next level, they need a real reflection and a carnival of imagination. Imagination is not to avoid reality, lying flat is to avoid reality, imagination is to transcend reality, to transcend involution, and to face the essence.
Within Geely Auto Group, design has always been regarded as Geely's core competitiveness.
They believe that in the involution market, among the products that compete with each other, rough and low-dimensional competition methods can only be a long-term strategy. If we want to cultivate more world-class enterprises, the way to win is to imagine.
"Design is 99% of the careful logic and strategic choices, plus 1% of the inspiration;
Design is not only about modeling, but also about the imagination of the times;
Design is not a passive response to the present, but a long-term approach to actively grasp the future;
Design is the key to breaking the situation for Chinese car companies. ”
On June 14, on the first day of the 16th China Automotive Blue Book Forum, Chen Zheng, vice president of Geely Automobile Group, gave a speech entitled "Design, that is, Strategy", and told how Geely Automobile used design to promote China's automobile industry to continue to move upwards and new, and outperform the in-depth thinking of the second half of the intelligent electric era.
The following is the full text of Chen Zheng, Vice President of Geely Automobile Group:
Hello everyone! I'm Chen Zheng of Geely Automobile.
At this time last year, Dr. Jia and I reflected on why car design, when everyone thinks it is so important, is always on the last day of the forum. Unexpectedly, he was very attentive. This year's Blue Book really put the design session on the first day. It's a joke, though. However, it can also be seen from the change in the ranking that in today's highly involuted automobile industry, the status of design has really improved.
I am very grateful to Dr. Jia Ke, because he has been thinking about solutions to the difficulties and even chaos he has encountered in every era, and the theme of "imagining" today is very much in line with the current state I also think that many of his views this morning also coincide with mine.
Now the "involution" is so serious, but what is the end of the volume? It's up to us to imagine. Because I firmly believe that people need to have imagination to live. It's like 16 years ago, I was in Italy with a group of foreign designers to design for Chinese cars. At that time, I firmly believed that in a few years, Chinese cars will be able to go global, and the imagination of 16 years ago has come true.
Now, I am designing cars for the world in China, and I can say that I have witnessed the whole process of the confident rise of Chinese automobiles. In my opinion, design is the key to breaking the situation for Chinese car companies.
Design, i.e. strategy! "Good design is good business", in the 50s of the last century, the importance of design to business management has been clearly proposed. It is not only the pursuit of aesthetics, but also a strategic tool to design, to help enterprises, to win the overall advantage in the competition.
Looking around today's Chinese automobiles, volume price, volume configuration, volume speed, volume flow, volume public opinion, and even volume boss...... "vigorously produce miracles" involution means emerge in endlessly. Some people want to show their cards in the fastest way in the knockout round, but in my opinion, this is not the final game, it may just be overtime.
When the global market becomes a bigger arena, the rough and low-dimensional competition can only be a long-term strategy. If we want to cultivate more world-class enterprises, the way to win is to imagine. Because, with good design, you can achieve a good enterprise.
In 1924, different design languages were created for different users, from flagship to entry-level, and the car was positioned in different market segments. Later, the world's first concept car was launched, not to express the advanced design, but to visualize and concretize the company's strategy.
Use design to show the future direction of the brand. "Design strategy", a successful example of leveraging enterprises, has been repeatedly staged in the automotive industry.
Geely, on the other hand, has taken this strategy to the extreme, and we continue to turn the "imagination" in the concept into the "experience of the prototype".
In 2023, Geely Galaxy Light will be released, and we will propose a new paradigm of Chinese design, with culture as the root and photoelectric as the medium, to help the brand renew.
In 2024, we will release the Galaxy Starship, which is the carrier of Geely's technology masterpiece, moving towards a new pattern in the AI era. We use design to continuously lead the "high value" of the brand to iterate upward.
When design becomes a strategy, the production relationship also changes accordingly, which is the key to the success of the enterprise's strategy, the pillar, and the whole path. Looking at the market pattern, Chinese automobiles are in an era of great self-confidence. However, being the first is not the time to rest, it is the time to invent new rules, and there must be no low-dimensional disorderly involution, because originality is the biggest rigid need of a brand.
At the Beijing Auto Show more than a month ago, 117 new cars were released, independent brands were "blooming", and foreign brands were also "making efforts to break the game". I believe that this is the "Cambrian" period of the great explosion of species before the advent of a new era. Unprecedented diversity, it will inevitably detonate the ultimate competitive pressure. Design, the first major challenge to face in the future, is the "battle royale" in the era of diversity. In the Chinese market, different groups of people have different preferences for aesthetics.
Chinese consumers alone can be divided into 10 categories, and the diversity generated between different aesthetics, different scenes, and different cultures around the world will surely be more astonishing "exponential" growth. So, how to solve the problem of diversity?
"Design is 99% of the careful logic and strategic choices, plus 1% of the inspiration"
Here we propose that the first element of "design as strategy" is that when we mentioned design in the past, we thought of "imagination". But we believe that "design is 99% of careful logic and strategic choices, plus 1% of inspiration".
The birth of the Geely Galaxy family is Geely Automobile's strategic choice of "comprehensive innovation". Here, I would also like to report to you the achievements of the Galaxy Family in the past 1 year.
At the beginning of 2023, after the debut of the Galaxy Light, L7 and L6 were mass-produced, and it took only 8 months to complete the cumulative sales from 0 to 100,000, which is a remarkable achievement.
In January this year, the Geely Galaxy E8 was released and launched, and in just one quarter, it won the top five international design awards, becoming the only "single model" of China's independent brand to win the Grand Slam. In 12 months, 6 models were released, which is Geely's "Galaxy Speed", and the world's martial arts are only fast and unbreakable. Speed is a weapon for business competition. Speed is more of an ability.
Designing a product, thinking is actually a system, therefore, in the pure electric products of the same Galaxy family, E8 chooses the addition of humanities combined with science and technology in design, continuing the charm of the ripple grille of the beautiful Chinese car, and using the intelligent electric design of science and technology to interpret the technological inspiration of the Chinese national gift "exquisite porcelain". On the four-layer material of the front protection, more than 15,000 exquisite eyes are micro-carved with a 0.2 mm needle using exquisite porcelain engraving technology, creating the "world's first integrated luminous front face" that is highly recognizable to the brand.
In the DNA of Geely Galaxy, different strategic choices can also evolve different expressions, as the so-called "dragons give birth to nine sons, and the children are different." ”
It is also inspired by the design of "porcelain", the Galaxy E5, as the first global model of the Geely Galaxy family. However, we chose "restraint", the subtraction of design, minus a lot, personalized, regional design features, presented, like porcelain, can cross the time, space, cultural barriers, through the cycle, elegant and common appreciation of the global beauty.
Porcelain is concise, smooth, without too much decoration and complex form, showing the unique visual experience of porcelain "running jade streamer" and "vivid rhyme", creating a "common aesthetic" that can be appreciated by various regions, cultures and people around the world.
It can be said that whoever grasps the strategic weapon of design will grasp the winning factor in future competition.
In addition to the current competitive battle royale, we are also facing the impact of future technology, in the era of digital power replacing horse power, the emergence of AI, the impact on human society, it can be said that far more than the sum of the two industrial revolutions, AI has also become our design industry, the hot topic in the past two years, but I think, it is not the computing power of AI that determines the upper limit of design, but our imagination.
In the same era, the final path of technology will eventually converge. How can Chinese auto brands use design strategies to break through the homogeneous design of automobiles in the AI era?
"Design is not only about modeling, but about imagination ahead of the times"
The second element of "design as strategy" is that "design is not only about modeling, but also about imagination ahead of the times".
Let's look at this one, the world's first award-winning work created through AI. Behind it, the designer tried 900 iterations, weeks of PS manual intervention adjustment, not everyone thinks, input a few instructions, anyone can get such a satisfactory result. The process of innovation is trial and error. How to discern pearls? This requires more experienced designers to operate, select and implement.
AI is a design resource, and the designer of the future may be an AI trainer or even a poet. is like Li Bai's "Near Wine", which gave birth to the beautiful highlight clip of "You don't see, the water of the Yellow River comes from the sky" in the movie. The Galaxy Starship we released this year is designed based on Geely's self-developed "Xingrui AI model".
Artificial intelligence has been integrated into Geely's product development design process. This image was the first inspiration image created by AI and designers at the end of last year, and there was nothing at that time.
Based on this sketch, we began to diverge and rehearse, which triggered our thinking about the space of "water boat shore", in which all the grand natural values were incorporated, and the space became the cornerstone of the design concept of the Galaxy Starship, "opening up the imagination and reaching the world" in the AI era.
Using humanity to lead all changes, and using technology to express the imagination of innovation, AI has been empowered into our actual operations, forming a "large-scale innovation". Perhaps the next generation of design language is co-created by our designers and artificial intelligence.
Technology has opened up a greater creative space for us, and Chinese automobiles are also ushering in a broader "global market". Design is the external embodiment of a country's comprehensive strength in terms of culture, economy, technology, etc. Throughout history, strong economies have been "exporting aesthetic standards" to the world.
"Design is not a passive response to the present, but a long-term approach to the future."
Chinese design, self-confidence rises, Chinese car companies auspicious time has arrived. The new pattern of the global automotive industry depends on the future of Chinese automobiles, which is full of unlimited imagination. Geely Automobile's globalization strategy is to "go global" to drive the common growth of the industry, "go in" to globalize the local layout, and "go up" to globalize intensively. When you look at the world and the future, you will find that "design is not a passive response to the present, but a long-term approach to the future", which is the third element of "design as strategy".
In the face of global competition, the design strategy is no longer just to make one or two popular products, but to do a good job in the long-term layout of design, in 2023, we will be running non-stop for the precipitation and development of Chinese automobile design, and unlock the commonality of global aesthetics through global fieldwork and cultural traceability. In addition, it has teamed up with top scholars at home and abroad and senior experts in the field of automotive design to open an unprecedented industry and education system in the industry to jointly explore the design theory and forward-looking thinking of Chinese automobiles.
At the "International Automotive Design Forum" at the end of December last year, we released the "White Paper on China's Automotive Design Discourse System 1.0", which is a "masterpiece" of Chinese and Western ideas, just like the "harmony and difference" in Chinese values, inclusive, inheritance and innovation.
The design of the era of Zhidian is about to transform, and in this era, it is no longer one or two star designers who can turn the situation around. Therefore, Geely has set up four design centers in Shanghai, Gothenburg, Coventry, and Milan, Italy, bringing together more than 1,000 top design talents from more than 20 countries and regions, just like Dunhuang 1,600 years ago, bringing together completely different races, beliefs, cultures, and languages to aggregate all ideas, and burst out a civilization that penetrates the thousand-year-old historical cycle. In the future, where is the end of the involution?
I think the ultimate form of Chinese cars is "Designed by China" rather than "Manufactory", which highly integrates design thinking and product definition. In the same way, the product manager will also be the ultimate form of automobile designers, standing at the height of corporate strategy, from the perspective of long-termism, to innovate, to break through, to find the key factors for business success, this is, my imagination of future designers, is also, the end of all involution, design, will be upgraded.
Of course, we welcome more design forces from all over the world to join in to build the discourse system of Chinese automobiles.
Each is beautiful, and the beauty is the same. Imagine and experience.