On October 10, four government departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a notice on further strengthening the management of automotive product innovation design and R&D testing verification, explicitly moving safety risk assessment to the source of R&D design and prohibiting innovative designs that fail assessment from being installed on vehicles. The notice set clear requirements for automotive product innovation design and R&D testing verification, which aligns closely with the long-standing vehicle manufacturing practices of GAC GROUP (02238.HK).

The practice of prioritizing safety and ensuring thorough verification has been upheld by GAC for nearly thirty years. In recent years, various innovative designs have been密集 introduced into vehicles, enriching the user experience while also bringing new safety challenges. GAC's stance has been consistent: user experience can be defined by users, but safety must be defined by the automaker. Any innovative design must pass the safety threshold before being considered for installation. Quality and safety are bottom lines that GAC will never compromise.

Since its founding, GAC has always adhered to the principle of "quality first." Building on the absorption of Honda's Total Quality Management and Toyota's Production System, GAC has established a high-standard quality management model centered on "integrated innovation." At the institutional level, GAC quantifies safety requirements into safety bottom-line design guidelines covering nine major dimensions including passive safety, active safety, high-voltage electrical safety, waterproof safety, functional safety, and information safety, constraining the entire vehicle development process. When safety conflicts with cost, weight, space, or functional convenience, safety has absolute priority, and no project team may override or exempt it.

GAC Group's quality management model centered on "integrated innovation" won the Nomination Award of the 5th China Quality Award.

In the R&D and design phase, GAC insists on forward development, building a "V-model" product development process covering software and hardware around user needs, forming a complete testing and verification system covering the entire vehicle, system level, and components. Every innovative design must complete failure mode analysis under complex operating conditions and extreme scenarios during the R&D phase; if the assessment fails, it is absolutely not installed. Take GAC's Xingling Safety Guardian System as an example, which builds comprehensive safety protection covering four major dimensions: intelligent driving safety, intelligent chassis safety, active-passive integrated safety, and battery safety. In the field of L3 conditional autonomous driving, GAC aims for aviation-grade safety standards, driving the failure rate of key system controllers down to 1 in 1 billion hours; dual-system redundancy is implemented for all eight key systems including positioning, perception, computing, power supply, braking, steering, parking, and communication, ensuring that backup systems take over immediately when any system fails.

GAC Group's V-model forward development system for complete vehicles and GAC Xingling Safety Guardian System.

In R&D testing and verification, GAC's standards remain consistent: every new vehicle strictly undergoes "two winters and one summer" verification, testing vehicle performance item by item in the extreme heat desert of Turpan, Xinjiang at 60°C, the extreme cold snowfields of Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia at -40°C, and Golmud, Qinghai at altitudes above 4,000 meters; on this basis, GAC also implements the stricter "five highs, one mountain, one dust" standard, adding high humidity, high corrosion, mountain area, and dust tests. Take the Trumpchi Yue 7 as an example: 685 actual vehicles were deployed for road testing, accumulating millions of kilometers of verification, and it was among the first passenger vehicles in China to complete a single-vehicle equivalent durability test of 500,000 kilometers, equivalent to circling the equator 12.5 times. Supporting these verifications are a vehicle wind tunnel laboratory built over 8 years, and R&D facilities such as the Southern Test Ground jointly built by five parties including China Automotive Research and GAC Group with a total investment exceeding 3.6 billion yuan. Relying on 12 major vehicle verification categories, over 1,500 verification sub-items, over 3,000 enterprise technical standards, and over 100 national and industry standards it has led or participated in, GAC continues to strengthen its systematic capabilities in product development and quality verification.

Vehicles that pass verification must also be delivered to users through manufacturing consistency. On the manufacturing side, relying on the GAC Production System and the digital intelligent manufacturing system of the "world's first new energy vehicle lighthouse factory," GAC practices "do not accept, do not manufacture, do not release defective products," with all thousands of key fastening points on the vehicle achieving lifelong data traceability, ensuring every vehicle off the line matches its announced parameters. On the service side, GAC was the first in the industry to launch the "three responsibilities" policy for its own brands, proactively covering battery and intelligent driving assistance issues of user concern to eliminate user worries. As of now, the Magazine Battery has been installed in 1.62 million vehicles, with 162.7 billion kilometers of safe driving; the Xingling Safety Guardian System has served 2.08 million users and avoided 6.93 million potential travel risks.

GAC deeply understands that quality is built kilometer by kilometer in laboratories and test grounds. The ultimate goal of everything is to build good cars that users can drive with confidence, use with peace of mind, and ride in comfort. The industry can develop faster, but users cannot pay for hasty iterations; technology can be more aggressive, but users cannot be test subjects. Safety assessment upfront, sufficient verification cycles, innovation with boundaries — this is what GAC has always done and will continue to do more solidly. Innovation changes in countless ways, but quality remains consistent. This is GAC's answer from nearly thirty years of vehicle manufacturing and its promise for the future.