Shao Jingfeng of SAIC talks about Chinese design, the Roewe brand and the impending influence of 5G
The changes in the Chinese automotive market have been profound over the last ten years. We still face fierce competition and the issue remains for Chinese brands, how do we catch up with brands based in regions that have been designing cars for much longer?
Having good quality design and a holistic design language is a basic necessity, but if we only focus on those things we are still following, catching up. China faces big challenges over the next decade. The big challenges are uncertain Chinese aesthetics, a long history, big regional differences and fast development, too fast I think sometimes. In addition to these China-specific challenges, the industry as a whole is at a turning point with a lot of technology, uncertain power, autonomy and car sharing. There is a lot of financial risk in play at the moment.
We need to face these uncertainties and fierce competition from German, Japanese and US cars, who all want a slice of the Chinese car market. We need a breakthrough and I think that comes with internet-enabled technology in car design.
China leads the world in internet-enabled technology and solutions. Why is it developing so fast in China? I am not sure but it connects individuals spread across a huge country.
“Having good quality design and a holistic design language is a basic necessity, but if we only focus on those things we are still following, catching up”
The internet turns the brand from being important, to the experience within the car being most important. The integration of internet and car brings new experiences. In the future I believe we will focus more on service design, proactive services in an open ecosystem and also on simplified user interactions. There is an opportunity here for Chinese brands.
The Roewe Vision-i concept we unveiled at the 2019 Shanghai show is a 5G car. As well as exploring new packaging solutions, it showcases new 5G connectivity solutions with its screenless smart cockpit.
We call it an SPV, a ‘smart, proactive vehicle’. It is a four- seater SUV/MPV which explores what is possible with a Level 4 autonomous vehicle. If the car is fully 5G-enabled, the possibilities for in-car streaming, video conferencing, gaming and all forms of entertainment are there and give us the opportunity to rethink the traditional seating arrangement.
The Vison-i has a full-cabin intelligent interactive system with full-chamber interaction capability that can realise the content required by the user. The user interface is not tied to a screen in the cockpit, but rather integrated throughout the cabin, with the ability to project information on to the windows and other spaces. Facial recognition technology replaces the key to unlock the car and it should be an extension of your personal and home technology. I anticipate that we will see much more focus on 5G-enabled cars in coming years.
2020 is going to be a crucial year for the Roewe brand. In May 2019, we announced that the Roewe would get a new brand, the R brand, which is for the fully-electric products for Roewe. The Marvel R was the first product and launched a new design language, ‘integrated intelligence design’. Roewe now has two brands and logos, the Lion and the R. The key product featuring the new Lion logo is the Roewe RX5 Plus and two other production cars. The R brand marks the start of SAIC’s new pure EV strategy, which also stems from SAIC’s four business strategies – intelligent, electrified, shared and globalised. Because we are developing future pure EV products and the specific product attributes and design characteristics of pure EVs differ from traditional ICE vehicles, we thought it was important to establish an electrified sub- brand based on the main Roewe brand to differentiate the new EV product models.
The R brand image is designed to reflect a clean, simplified and powerful message. It is a strong symbol, which is easily recognisable. The design philosophy of the R brand logo was inspired by the ancient Chinese symbol for ‘human’ – we wanted to put our customers at the heart of the identity for the new brand. There is a geographical connection too though, the R brand shape is abstracted from the running Huangpu River in Shanghai, the home of this brand. As well as the Roewe strategy, we have been working on new MG products too, which will also be revealed in 2020. 2019 has been a very busy year.
When I began my career as a designer, it was a very different environment. The government had just started to push the production of cars for the domestic market and I enrolled in the Industrial Design College of Jilin University in 1995, graduating with a degree in industrial design in 1999. After that I studied for a Masters in Industrial Design at Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University in 2007 and I am currently finishing work on my doctorate at Tongji University, started in 2017.
As a Chinese designer, my design philosophy is rooted in my culture. My comprehension of people, society and aesthetics, along with my interpretation of those in our designs for SAIC, all come from my Chinese cultural background. I think this is important and something Chinese designers are getting better at expressing through their designs. Internet technology is now a big part of that Chinese culture. I think the future, with 5G and artificial intelligence based on mega-data, will bring more focus on digital design, and the possibilities it opens up in the automotive industry. Each vehicle could be defined and then redefined by software updates over its whole lifecycle. Automotive design is quite different from when I began my career but there is so much opportunity now.
This article first appeared in Car Design Review 7.
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