From directors to policymakers and strategic researchers, everyone is trying to understand the Chinese automotive advantage.
China’ s automotive R & D superpower
China is an extremely complex cultural and operational environment, but one element of the Chinese automotive miracle is easy to understand. It is the China Automotive Technology & Research Center( CATARC).
CATARC is crucial to China’ s success in automotive development and a symbol of its comparative advantage. Founded in 1985, CATARC functions as a third-party technical resource for the Chinese auto industry. Instead of having individual Chinese car companies trying to interpret African, American and European automotive trends, evolving specifications, and regulations, those functions are handled by CATARC.
The technical capabilities of CATARC have grown with the Chinese automotive industry. It has four dedicated centres throughout China, including a 60 km proving ground with mixed terrain for testing. In 2019, CATARC expanded into Europe, opening a technical office in Erding, a suburb of Munich, in the centre of Germany’ s automotive hub, Bavaria. It also has a compliance and policy office in Geneva, Switzerland.
Decoding standards
CATARC’ s value to the Chinese auto industry is creating the technical foundation for OEMs to develop new vehicles without wasting time seeking clarity on regulatory standards.
Vehicle crash testing and safety engineering are among the most arduous engineering tasks for any new model towards the end of the development cycle. And CATARC takes a huge amount of pressure off Chinese OEMs by administering the C-NCAP( China New Car Assessment Program) and the C-ICAP( China Intelligent Connected Car Assessment Programme).
CATARC also helps Chinese OEMs understand the exact technical standards and components needed for homologation in various global markets. That allows OEMs to focus their engineering and assembly resources on product execution and scaled manufacturing, rather than dealing with standardisation issues.
Centralised auto research
Many legacy automotive industries in Asia, Europe and North America have advanced automotive research and development centres. But those belong to OEMs and function in silos, working on specific issues and outcomes for their own OEMs.
CATARC is an all-China automotive industry resource. That means it has the scale and influence to help each Chinese OEM reduce their burden of homologation compliance for global markets, freeing-up internal engineering and technical research capacity.
It is a model that requires central control, but it has allowed the Chinese automotive industry to dramatically shorten its product development cycles, to nearly half those of legacy OEMs. And that’ s why Shenzhen speed, in new model development and technology deployment to market, has been so successful for Chinese automakers.
WORDS IN ACTION 28 JUNE 2026