The Chinese approach is a product of the extraordinarily fast rise of its auto industry. As the country opened up to the West, car makers were faced with relatively poor customers at home and sophisticated products made abroad. Global automakers could sell their pricey cars to rich Chinese, but local Chinese automakers had to come up with cheap cars for the masses.
Rapid growth in the economy spurred the creation of more than 100 registered automakers across China by the early 2000s - but they lacked expertise. Their solution in coming up with affordable cars was simple: copy the designs of foreign makers.
"Around 2000, China began embracing an approach it described as ‘reverse-engineering.' It was essentially a fancy word for copying," says Dai Ming, a senior engineer at CH-Auto Technology Corp, an independent design and engineering company based in Beijing. "The problem with those copied cars was that the Chinese were able to emulate the shape of a foreign car, but not its soul."
Chinese car makers tended to sift through a foreign vehicle to identify expensive, non-critical features and functions to skimp on or eliminate, such as a door that closes with a proper "thump," as well as power windows and passenger-airbags. The result was often dubious quality and durability. After a few years of use, bumpers and door handles would start falling off.
Dai says of the typical cheap knock-off model: "It didn't drive well like the foreign car, either, and in some cases it was a safety hazard on the road."
OUTSOURCING DESIGN
A clutch of design firms is driving the advances in affordability and quality in the industry, including CH-Auto, where Dai works; IAT Automobile Technology Co. of Beijing; and TJ Innova Engineering & Technology Co. of Shanghai.
China's indigenous automakers are so new many have not had time to groom their own engineers, and their best engineers are usually occupied more with manufacturing than design. Companies thus often outsource product design and development to outside engineering houses filled with Chinese engineers trained overseas.
Automotive analysts say these houses are responsible for helping engineer seven to eight out of every 10 cars China's indigenous car makers sell here. By using the same few design and engineering firms, Chinese car makers have effectively created a shared pool of home-grown automotive technology.
CH-Auto, for instance, has helped design an array of cars over the past decade, each time gaining fresh expertise, which it deploys for its next project - in most cases for a different company. CH-Auto was established in 2003 by a small group of jobless Chinese engineers who had trained with Beijing Jeep, a now-defunct joint venture set up initially by Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Co. and American Motors Corp.
CH-Auto and its rivals say they have moved beyond aping foreign designs. Instead of copying the shape of a component or an entire foreign car, they try to match its performance as well - often successfully - even as they improvise and simplify the original design to cut costs. The aim is to make cars affordable to China's emerging middle class, people who are earning 50,000 to 60,000 yuan a year ($7,900-$9,500).
"It's not copying. It's not that simple anymore," said Wang Kejian, president of CH-Auto, a former Beijing Jeep engineer who was trained for a time in Detroit by Chrysler. "Since Chinese car makers have no accumulated vehicle design technology or know-how, we have to develop our own by studying foreign cars and use local parts suppliers to approximate the components and the cars."
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