The transformation of automotive production paradigms has entered a critical phase. Recently, Great Wall Motor Company Limited officially launched its "Origin Platform." This technical architecture is defined as the "world's first native AI full-power automotive platform," with plans to roll out 51 products encompassing 5 power types and 7 categories, covering the entire lineup from Ora and WEY to Tank and Great Wall Pickup. Chairman Wei Jianjun's interpretation of the platform's name is that car manufacturing must ultimately return to the fundamental principle that "cars serve people." In the past, Great Wall Motor's landscape for its new energy transition was characterized by a complex brand lineup and a fragmented technology stack. The market has consistently held doubts about whether Great Wall could maintain its profit baseline in the latter half of the intelligent vehicle era. By introducing the "Origin" platform, Great Wall clearly aims to provide a higher-dimensional response to the increasingly brutal competition in the stock market through extreme unification of its underlying architecture. It has been learned that under this platform, the commonality rate of vehicle components reaches 80%, and the R&D cycle is shortened by approximately 30%. This signifies significant reductions in everything from vehicle R&D and production to the total cost of ownership for users. If the Chinese automotive market in 2024 and 2025 was a carnival of marketing, then 2026 has starkly returned to the cold realities of manufacturing. The core characteristics of the Origin Platform can be summarized as extreme modularization and full-power compatibility. Drawing inspiration from ancient Chinese movable type printing, Great Wall has deconstructed the vehicle structure into reusable modules, achieving a "movable type" method of car building. The Origin Platform deconstructs a vehicle into 49 core modules and 329 shared components, including the engine, transmission, electric axle, and battery. This design allows vehicles to be derived like building with Lego bricks, creating various models such as sedans, SUVs, MPVs, and pickup trucks from a finite combination of modules. Based on an SOA architecture, the platform has consolidated over 2,000 standardized atomic capability tags. These tags transform disparate hardware capabilities into a "character library" that AI can understand and invoke, endowing the platform with strong growth potential and extensibility. Through this "movable type" deconstruction, the commonality rate of parts has been vastly improved. Against an industry backdrop where developing independent platforms for single models is common, Great Wall has chosen to use one underlying platform to address the diverse variables of the global market. This is not solely for cost reduction. A senior automotive industry insider pointed out that in a trillion-yuan market, when the R&D cycle can be drastically shortened, it means a carmaker's response speed to global market trends shifts from being "counted in years" to being "counted in months." This is a silent siege. Everyone is betting on who will be the first to grasp the ticket to profitability in 2026, deemed the "first year of stock market elimination." Great Wall Motor's timing for releasing the Origin Platform coincides with a critical juncture in its strategic transformation. Previously, Great Wall lowered the sales volume target for its 2026 employee stock ownership plan from no less than 2.49 million units to 1.8 million units, yet the net profit target of 10 billion yuan remained unchanged. This indicates Great Wall's determination to move away from scale dependence and instead explore a new path of leveraging higher profit margins with a limited market share. To achieve this goal, Great Wall must achieve a qualitative breakthrough in per-vehicle profitability. Premium brands like WEY and Tank will intensively launch products in the 200,000 to 400,000 yuan range. Wei Jianjun noted that Great Wall's current average selling price for domestic products is already as high as 200,000 yuan, while competitors average around 130,000 yuan. The Origin Platform not only shortens the R&D cycle but also reduces parts costs through its highly universal platform architecture. Lü Wenbin, General Manager of the Ora 5 brand, revealed that thanks to platformization, its maintenance costs are expected to drop by 15%, and repair efficiency is projected to increase by 40%. This not only enhances vehicle residual value but also translates into tangible competitive advantages for consumers. This logic stems from an instinct to survive on management dividends and a solid technological foundation. Gong Min, Head of China Automotive Research at UBS, stated that the upcoming competition is not about offering the cheapest price, but about providing better products, competing on quality, features, brand, functionality, technology, and innovation. It is noteworthy that the Origin Platform encompasses almost all power types available on the market, with the sole exception of range extenders. Amid the prevailing trend of range-extended vehicles in 2025-2026, Great Wall persists in not developing a range-extender solution. Wei Jianjun's criticism remains consistent: range-extender technology is backward and inefficient, with an overly long energy conversion chain. Great Wall places greater emphasis on its Super Hi4-PHEV system, which utilizes an 800V high-voltage architecture and a 4-speed dedicated hybrid transmission, achieving a pure electric range of up to 363 km and a comprehensive range nearing 1,400 km. Even in the niche segment of diesel hybrids, Great Wall attempts to break the stereotype of diesel vehicles being low-end, achieving a breakthrough with a 9% reduction in comprehensive fuel consumption. This choice of technological path essentially represents Great Wall's attempt to create distance from low-barrier competitors by raising technological barriers, thereby preserving its voice in the premium off-road and multi-purpose vehicle markets. Over the past decade, the industry chased explosive growth in single dimensions. However, the logic behind Great Wall's "Origin" platform suggests that post-2026 automotive competition will no longer be a single-dimensional price war, but will evolve towards an ecologically balanced state of multi-dimensional coexistence with efficiency as the priority. This constitutes a more resilient manufacturing system. Within this system, R&D no longer involves blindly burning money, and production lines are no longer fragile. The so-called "high-stakes gamble" on the Origin Platform is, in reality, Great Wall's attempt to use underlying simplification to resolve the challenge of catering to diverse and fickle front-end market demands. It uses the platform's universality to dissolve market fragmentation and employs the certainty of production efficiency to hedge against the volatility of future sales. This, perhaps, is the true form that major Chinese automakers should embody after their period of rapid expansion: returning to the origin is the way to see the finish line.
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