The 76-second car: how China rewrote the rules of car making

 Honda's chief executive toured a supplier's factory in China this year and confessed his company had ‘no chance against this’. Here is the secret sauce behind those astonishing Chinese cars.

In February this year, Honda chief executive Toshihiro Mibe visited an auto parts supplier’s factory in China. From parts procurement to logistics, everything was automated, and there was not a single human on the production floor.

His verdict, as reported by Nikkei Asia, was brutal in its honesty: “We have no chance against this.”

I knew that feeling long before Mibe did. During my years working in the robotics industry in China, I toured plants in Shenzhen that were frantic with activity yet almost entirely empty of people – with welding arms, assembly robots and driverless carts humming around the clock while a handful of humans mostly just watched.

In my previous column, I wrote about how Geely’s engineering transformed Proton’s fortunes. But that left the bigger question hanging: how did Chinese cars get so good, so fast?

How does the BYD Seagull sell in China from around RM42,000 (69,900 yuan), with a rotating touchscreen as standard and lidar, the laser sensor for assisted driving once reserved for luxury cars, offered on higher trims, while legacy carmakers struggle to build any electric vehicle (EV) at twice that price? The answer is that BYD is a machine with four gears.

Gear one: speed as religion

A legacy carmaker in Europe, Japan or America typically takes four to five years to develop a new model. Chinese firms routinely do it in as little as 18 months.

They manage this by treating the car like a smartphone. Software is designed in from day one rather than bolted on at the end, engineering teams work in parallel rather than in polite sequence, and a model gets refreshed the moment the market demands it.

The Japanese and Germans perfected the flawless five-year product cycle. The Chinese looked at it and decided five years was three and a half too many.

Gear two: own the whole stack

BYD, China’s biggest carmaker, makes its own batteries, motors and semiconductors, right down to its own seats. The battery alone can account for around 40% of an EV’s cost, so making yours in-house means pocketing the supplier’s margin and never being held hostage by a shortage.

The results are stark. Ford chief executive Jim Farley has estimated that Chinese carmakers can build EVs for roughly 25% less than their American rivals.

And this dominance runs through the entire supply chain. In 2025, Chinese manufacturers produced about 69% of the world’s EV batteries, with Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) and BYD alone supplying more than half the global market.

Gear three: factories that barely need people

Xiaomi was a smartphone maker that had never built a car. Yet its Beijing plant now rolls a new SU7 off the line every 76 seconds, with more than 700 robots, and automation rates near 90% in its body and paint shops.

This is what Mibe saw, and what I saw in Shenzhen years earlier. China did not just automate carmaking. It reimagined the factory itself as a product to be engineered, iterated and perfected.

Gear four: Darwin, with subsidies

Yes, the state helped enormously. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, an American think tank, estimates Beijing poured at least US$230.8 billion (RM943 billion) into its EV industry between 2009 and 2023.

But subsidies alone explain nothing, because America and Europe subsidise their carmakers too. The difference is what Beijing did next: it let loose roughly 200 EV makers in the world’s largest car market and allowed a ferocious price war to cull them.

The companies now conquering the world are the survivors of that gauntlet; battle-hardened in ways no protected Western incumbent can match. In 2025, China exported 8.32 million vehicles, its third straight year as the world’s largest car exporter, and BYD alone sold 4.6 million vehicles, more than Ford.

Contrast all this with the legacy giants. They carry a century of glorious baggage: combustion engine supply chains, dealer networks and decades of sunk investment that make reinvention feel like self-harm. Their instinct was to protect what they had. China had nothing to protect, so it leapfrogged instead.

The view from Malaysia

Here is the good news: Malaysia is not watching this revolution from the grandstand. Through Geely’s 49.9% stake in Proton, we are sitting in the passenger seat.

The e.MAS 7, a twin of the Geely Galaxy E5, became Malaysia’s bestselling EV, and the new EV plant in Tanjung Malim plugs us directly into the Chinese production system. Every car it builds transfers a little of that method into Malaysian hands.

And the method, not the car, is the real prize. Speed over ceremony, owning the critical components, automating relentlessly and letting competition do the culling: that playbook applies as much to our semiconductor ambitions as it does to SUVs.

Mibe looked at a workerless factory and saw the end of his era. I looked at mine in Shenzhen and saw the beginning of one.

The difference between despair and opportunity, it turns out, is simply which side of the robots you are standing on. - FMT

The writer can be contacted at kathirgugan@protonmail.com.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.