China News Service, Haikou, September 23 (Reporter Zhang Qianyi) As automobiles accelerate their evolution towards mobile intelligent terminals, energy storage units and digital space, global automobile industry cooperation is facing new issues. At the 2026 World New Energy Vehicle Conference being held in Haikou, people in the Chinese and German automobile industries released a common signal: Facing the wave of electrification, intelligence, and low-carbonization, Sino-German cooperation has gone beyond market and technological complementarity and is turning to innovation collaboration, ecological co-construction, and value sharing.
Currently, the global automobile industry is undergoing profound changes. China is accelerating in the scale of new energy vehicles, market innovation and digital ecology; Germany has a profound foundation in vehicle engineering, quality and safety, system integration and global operations. The cooperation between the two parties has extended from vehicle manufacturing and parts procurement to joint research and development, standards and regulations, talent training and resilient supply chain.
Muxia, chairman of the German Automobile Industry Association, said that China is not only an important sales and procurement market for the German automobile industry, but also an important innovation base. Germany and China can complement each other's strengths in battery technology, charging infrastructure, smart manufacturing, software-defined cars, autonomous driving, hydrogen energy and AI-based smart travel to promote future travel in a more sustainable and smarter direction.
From an industry perspective, standards are a key component. Zhang Jinhua, Chairman of the China Society of Automotive Engineers, pointed out that the Sino-German automotive industry has always been developing in an open manner, from technology introduction to joint research and development, from market cooperation to ecological co-construction. Focusing on key issues such as L3 autonomous driving, carbon footprint accounting and mutual recognition, cross-border data flow, and charging and swapping standards, a smoother dialogue mechanism should be established to promote the co-construction of standards and compatibility of rules.
The cooperation model at the enterprise level is also quietly changing. Zhuang Mude, senior executive vice president of Mercedes-Benz (China) Investment Co., Ltd., said that China is no longer just an important market, but an important part of the global automotive innovation network. Mercedes-Benz is cooperating with ByteDance, AutoNavi, Tencent, Tsinghua University, etc. to jointly develop, verify and iterate in areas such as AI, smart cockpits, and assisted driving.
Wang Xiaojuan, director of Geely's Foreign Cooperation Research Institute, proposed that cooperation in the AI era requires openness and collaboration while also maintaining respective advantages. The deeper the cooperation, the more it is necessary to clarify the boundaries of intellectual property rights, brand differences and core capabilities, while respecting the boundaries and retaining differentiated advantages.
The industry believes that competition in smart electric vehicles has gone beyond the vehicle itself and extends to batteries, chips, software, AI, charging facilities and digital services. China and Germany should strengthen coordination of standards and regulations, data governance dialogue and talent cultivation, and respond to changes with openness, trust and collaboration, so as to inject more certainty into the transformation of the global automotive industry.
