There were no flashy light shows, no exaggerated marketing rhetoric, and no eye-catching "marginal" performances. At this year's Shanghai Auto Show, SAIC Volkswagen not only launched three heavyweight new cars, but also set up a booth with the lowest "car content". Engineers directly presented engine parts, battery pack anatomical models, body safety structural parts, and an array of crash test dummies costing over 100 million yuan to the audience. This "transparent kitchen" style of honesty is the most vivid interpretation of "German quality" by SAIC Volkswagen.
When "national intelligent driving" encounters the "strongest supervision" and power batteries meet the "strictest new regulations", this joint venture car company is taking quality as the starting point and showing the results of the implementation of the company's joint venture 2.0 strategy to the public.
Full potential layout: let users not make choices
At this year's auto show, Volkswagen's first full-size extended-range SUV concept car ID.ERA made its global debut. This model, which means "era", is a major breakthrough in the power technology route of joint venture automakers and a major achievement in the rapid implementation of corporate strategies. While the industry is still arguing over "Which is more advanced, pure electric or extended-range", SAIC Volkswagen has proved with practical actions that the right to choose a technology route is ultimately based on user needs.
This "equal rights for all categories" thinking runs through SAIC Volkswagen's full potential layout. At the booth, the streamlined body of the Audi E5 Sportback and the coupe posture of the new A5L Sportback form a wonderful echo. The former's 800V high-voltage architecture built on the Advanced Digitized Platform can achieve rapid energy replenishment, and the latter, as the world's first fuel vehicle equipped with a localized intelligent driving system, has an assisted driving capability that subverts the intelligent cognition of traditional fuel vehicles. The appearance of the Touron Pro off-road modified version "Conqueror" and the ID.3 GTX kit version, the former challenges the hard-core off-road market with its powerful power output, and the latter awakens driving passion with sports design. This collision of fuel and electric, hard-core and fashion is a vivid footnote to SAIC Volkswagen's "full potential" strategy.
According to official plans, by 2030, the Volkswagen brand alone will launch more than 20 new models, building a full-category product matrix covering fuel, pure electric, plug-in hybrid, and extended-range vehicles to meet the differentiated needs of different consumer groups. In the hybrid market, SAIC Volkswagen's extended-range models built on advanced platforms will be mass-produced next year; in the pure electric field, the ID. family is building a complete product matrix covering multiple price ranges through price reduction and intelligent upgrades; even in the fuel vehicle market, the Pro family trilogy is defining the new value of traditional categories with "smart fuel vehicles", and the Touron Pro is equipped with the fifth-generation EA888 engine, so fuel vehicle users still have new product options.
Joint Venture 2.0: From Technology Introduction to Value Co-creation
This year's auto show is the first large-scale auto show for SAIC Volkswagen since its 40th anniversary last year. In this home venue, it will bring the achievements of the joint venture 2.0 era to the booth one by one. From Volkswagen's extended-range SUV concept car ID. ERA to Audi E5 Sportback, in less than a year, a number of new cars that integrate the cutting-edge technologies of Sino-German R&D teams and global suppliers and technology companies have been intensively unveiled, which shows the speed and quality of SAIC Volkswagen's strategic implementation.
Different from the one-way technology introduction in the 1.0 era, the joint venture has entered the 2.0 era, and the Sino-German sides have evolved into a deeply integrated "technology co-creation" - the A5L's smart cockpit has the underlying architecture provided by local technology companies, but its interaction logic has been specially optimized by SAIC engineers for China's road conditions; the battery pack of the new AUDI brand Audi E5 Sportback uses the latest battery technology, but the thermal management system retains the strict requirements of German cars for extreme working conditions.
This deep integration of partners also extends to the deep integration of SAIC Volkswagen's industrial chain ecology. When the curved integrated screen of the SAIC Audi A5L SportBack is turned on, the icons of the advanced operating system and the smart assistant appear on the screen at the same time. This cross-ecological integration benefits from the smart technology "circle of friends" built by SAIC Volkswagen. During the auto show, SAIC Volkswagen signed strategic cooperation agreements with a number of leading technology companies, covering the entire chain of smart driving, smart cockpit, battery technology, etc. This cooperation is not a simple supplier relationship, but a deep binding based on "open innovation + quality benchmarking".
Strict standards: continuing the quality story in the digital age
In the exhibition area of the quality laboratory, a cut-open Touron Pro body attracted the most attention. 26.8% of hot-formed steel, 82.3% of high-strength steel, and the improved connection strength brought by advanced welding technology, behind these data are the strict standards of German manufacturing. While some new brands are still using "all-aluminum body" as a promotional selling point, SAIC Volkswagen's engineers are more willing to show their original manufacturing process. This technology, which originated from luxury car manufacturing, has now been popularized to many models, significantly improving the performance of the body.
This extreme pursuit of quality has been given new connotations in the electric age. In the battery safety exhibition area, a battery pack that has undergone multiple charge and discharge cycles still maintains a high degree of health. The secret behind this is SAIC Volkswagen's original structural design: multiple layers of isolation are set between the battery module and the cooling system to ensure that the electrolyte does not leak even in extreme collisions. Even more expensive is the dummy test army. These expensive "digital passengers" cover all age groups, and their biological realism reaches an extremely high level, which can accurately simulate and feedback the human body's reaction during a collision.
at last
The 2025 Shanghai Auto Show is just the beginning for SAIC Volkswagen, a joint venture that is starting a second business. The joint venture 2.0 strategy, full potential layout and quality adherence have become the new driving force for SAIC Volkswagen's continuous transformation. This practice of injecting quality genes into intelligent blood and integrating global wisdom with an open attitude may be the key code for China's automobile industry to move from "scale leadership" to "value leadership".
