The 2026 World New Energy Vehicle Congress (WNEVC) was grandly held in Haikou, Hainan. As a bellwether of the global new energy vehicle industry, this year’s congress focused on global collaboration, cross-domain integration of intelligent technologies, and the deep-water transformation of the automotive industry.
At the high-level China–Germany automotive industry roundtable moderated by CGTN’s renowned finance anchor Wang Guan, Ivo Muth (Executive Vice President of Audi China R&D), Wang Weiliang (President of the Board of Bosch Mobility China), Yin Xiaoying (Director of Overseas Government Affairs at CATL), and Zhang Yang, CEO of AutoCore.ai, were invited on stage for an in-depth discussion on intelligent vehicle underlying architecture, cross-border ecosystem collaboration, and engineering implementation standards.
▲ Key Guests of the CGTN “Biz Talk” China-Germany Automotive Industry Roundtable
As the only automotive system software innovator invited to the roundtable, AutoCore clearly articulated the core proposition of next-gen automotive software: a complete transformation from a traditional supplier that merely delivers code into a strategic technology foundation that helps OEMs take ownership of software sovereignty and jointly evolve E/E architectures.
▲ 2026 WNEVC Roundtable: “A New Paradigm of Sino-German Cooperation”
Automotive electrical/electronic (E/E) architectures are evolving from distributed designs toward central computing and cross-domain integration, while software codebases are expanding rapidly from hundreds of millions to several hundred million lines. During the roundtable, moderator Wang Guan addressed the industry’s pain point head-on: in such a volatile market environment, how exactly should software companies position themselves?
In his remarks, AutoCore CEO Zhang Yang offered a clear industry definition:
“A healthy, long-term automotive ecosystem should never be built upon technological hostage-taking by a single supplier. AutoCore is not positioned to deliver closed, black-box off-the-shelf products, nor is it merely to dispatch outsourced engineers; rather, leveraging our proprietary core patented technologies, we assist OEMs in building, controlling, and continuously evolving software platforms over which they retain complete and independent sovereignty.”
Zhang Yang emphasized that amid increasingly intense industry competition and the lessons of recent supply chain shortages, OEMs’ demand for control over platform architectures has never been more urgent. The value of a technology partner lies in providing highly interdependent yet non-exclusive foundational support, helping customers achieve autonomous, controllable technology moats without sacrificing architectural flexibility or long-term profit margins.
The industry standing of an underlying infrastructure software company is determined by the intensity of industrial validation it has withstood. At the roundtable, AutoCore demonstrated the depth of its integration into the global automotive value chain:
Early-stage capital endorsement from top industrial groups: When roundtable panelist and Bosch China President Wang Weiliang reflected on global supply chain innovation, Zhang Yang noted that the Bosch Group had made a strategic investment in AutoCore several years ago, becoming a key industrial investor and shareholder — a clear vote of long-term confidence from a world-leading Tier 1 in AutoCore’s proprietary underlying technology.
Deep integration into the architecture core of leading global automakers: AutoCore is currently engaged in deep technical collaboration with CARIAD, the software company of the Volkswagen Group, participating in the joint foundational software development of its next-gen E/E architecture (EEA), while simultaneously serving multiple mainstream German luxury brands.
Battle-tested against the world’s most rigorous engineering standards: Zhang Yang acknowledged candidly that entering the systems of leading global OEMs is a profound “engineering health check.” Across its entire product line, AutoCore routinely complies with the highest-grade automotive functional safety certification (ISO 26262 ASIL-D) and cybersecurity management certification (ISO/SAE 21434), and has further passed the Volkswagen Group’s stringent TISAX automotive information security assessment and process audit.
Over 70% of business in overseas markets: Since its founding in 2018, AutoCore has consistently adhered to a global business vision. Today, overseas operations account for roughly 70% of the company’s business, while it concurrently supports mass production of core vehicle models for numerous high-volume domestic OEMs — building a rare dual moat combining global reach with large-scale local delivery.
Addressing OEMs’ core tension between “personalized customization demands” and “R&D efficiency at scale,” AutoCore shared disruptive underlying engineering practices on site:
As vehicles evolve into AI-native mobile computing networks, the very definition of software has been fundamentally rewritten. AutoCore revealed that internally it has already achieved nearly 85% of its engineering code generated efficiently by its proprietary autonomous AI agents (intelligent agent system).
By infusing AI-native capabilities deeply into the traditional automotive engineering V-model, AutoCore has achieved order-of-magnitude optimization of human engineering effort across the entire chain — from system requirements analysis and detailed architecture design to engineering code implementation, automated test and verification (SIL/HIL), and final system-level acceptance. More importantly, this transformation has been accomplished while ensuring that all outputs continue to meet the highest safety standards.
With this, AutoCore has formally entered a new evolutionary stage: from a supplier of underlying system software for automakers to an engineering infrastructure enabler that empowers OEMs to build their own “AI-native R&D paradigm.”
Responding to a question about the greatest future opportunities for China–Germany and global automotive cooperation, Zhang Yang anchored his answer in “a higher-dimensional balance between globalization and localization.”
As Chinese automakers shift from pure product exports to deep transnational operations, they inevitably face highly fragmented adaptation to overseas local languages and dialects, gaps in regional driving habits, and extremely stringent foreign data security and compliance requirements.
AutoCore’s proposed paradigm leverages next-gen AI and edge-cloud collaboration: under strict adherence to “Zero Data Retention” and regional data residency regulations, it uses only legally compliant local data to execute localized fine-tuning and rapid retraining of perception-interaction and assisted-driving models directly at the edge within security perimeters — completely eliminating the risk of cross-border data leakage in global expansion.
The once-in-a-century transformation of the automotive industry is, in essence, an upgrade from a hardware industry centered on mechanical manufacturing to a comprehensive technology and engineering endeavor built upon digital foundations and engineering safety.
▲ From left to right: Michael Wang (CGTN), Wang Weiliang (Bosch China), Ivo Muth (Audi China), Zhang Yang (AutoCore), Yin Xiaoying (CATL)
At this WNEVC summit in Haikou, the high-caliber sharing of the stage by AutoCore with Audi, Bosch, and CATL sent a clear and powerful signal to the industry: within the core discourse dominated by the world’s top automakers and supply chain giants, the hard-core force of China’s automotive system software sector, represented by AutoCore, has not only firmly secured its place at the center of the international stage, but is also profoundly reshaping the industrial landscape of next-gen intelligent vehicles through innovative, rigorous, and independently controllable technology practices.
AutoCore is an intelligent mobile computing platform product and solution provider. With the AutoCore.OS software platform at its core, the company serves the intelligent automotive, industrial automation, and intelligent robotics sectors. Its core products fully comply with the highest-level functional safety and cybersecurity standard requirements. AutoCore has received investments from renowned institutions including Bosch Ventures, Foxconn, Hillhouse Capital, and IDG Capital, and has established deep strategic partnerships with STMicroelectronics (ST), Tenstorrent, Qualcomm/Advantech, and others.
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