Wei Jianjun takes strong measures on efficiency.
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Author | Zhou Zhiyu
Editor | Zhang Xiaoling
The transformation of the automotive production paradigm has already entered deep waters.
Recently, Great Wall Motors officially launched the “Guiyuan Platform.” This technical framework is defined as the “world’s first native AI all-power automotive platform.” Relying on this platform, Great Wall plans to launch 51 products across 5 types of powertrains and 7 major categories, covering the full range of models from ORA, WEY, to TANK and Great Wall Pickup. Great Wall Motors Chairman Wei Jianjun’s interpretation of the name is that, ultimately, making cars should return to the original purpose: "cars are made to serve people."
In the past, Great Wall Motors had a complicated brand layout and dispersed technology stack in the landscape of its new energy transformation. The market has always had doubts about whether Great Wall could maintain its profit margins in the intelligentization phase. By launching "Guiyuan," Great Wall obviously aims to respond to the increasingly fierce stock competition with higher-level integration through extreme unification at the underlying architecture.
According to Wallstreetcn’s understanding from Great Wall Motors, under this platform, the commonization rate of vehicle components reaches 80%, and the R&D cycle is shortened by about 30%. This means that from entire vehicle R&D and manufacturing to users’ ownership costs, everything will be significantly reduced.
If 2024 and 2025 are the carnival of marketing in China’s automotive market, then 2026 will be the cold return to manufacturing.
The core features of the Guiyuan Platform can be summarized as: ultimate modularity and full-power compatibility. Great Wall drew inspiration from ancient Chinese movable-type printing, decomposing the whole vehicle structure into reusable modules, embodying the “active-shape car manufacturing” technique.
Guiyuan Platform divides the vehicle into 49 core modules (such as engines, transmissions, electric axles, batteries) and 329 common components. This design allows vehicles to be assembled like Lego blocks, generating sedans, SUVs, MPVs, and pickups from limited module combinations.
Based on SOA architecture, the platform has distilled over 2,000 standardized "atomic capability" labels. These tags transform scattered hardware capabilities into a “character library” that AI can understand and call upon, giving the platform powerful scalability and extensibility.
Through this “movable-type” decomposition, the commonization rate of components has been greatly improved. In an industry where it’s common to develop an independent platform for a single model, Great Wall chooses to use one underlying platform to address the multi-dimensional variables of the global market.
This is not just about reducing costs. According to a veteran automotive industry insider, in a trillion-level track, when the R&D cycle can be greatly shortened, the company's responsiveness to market trends shifts from "years" to "months."
This is a smokeless hunt. Everyone is betting—betting on who will be the first in 2026, the first year of stock elimination, to seize the ticket for profit entry.
Great Wall Motors chose to launch the Guiyuan Platform at a critical juncture in its strategic transformation.
Previously, Great Wall lowered its 2026 employee stock ownership plan sales target from no less than 2.49 million vehicles to 1.8 million, but the net profit target of 10 billion yuan remains unchanged. This means Great Wall is determined to bid farewell to scale dependence and instead seek a new path to leverage a limited market share for higher profit margins.
To achieve this, Great Wall must make a qualitative breakthrough in single-vehicle profitability.
WEY, TANK, and other high-end brands will launch products intensively in the 200,000–400,000 yuan price range. Wei Jianjun noted that Great Wall’s average domestic product price has reached 200,000 yuan, while competitors are around 130,000 yuan.
Guiyuan Platform not only shortens R&D cycles but also, through its highly universal architecture, lowers component prices. ORA 5 General Manager Lü Wenbin revealed that, thanks to platformization, maintenance costs are expected to fall by 15% and repair efficiency will increase by 40%. This not only improves vehicle value retention but also translates into a tangible competitive advantage for consumers.
This logic is instinctive survival driven by management dividends and technological foundation. Gong Min, Head of UBS China Automotive Research, told Wallstreetcn that upcoming competition is not about the lowest price, but providing better products and competing through quality, configuration, brand, function, technology, and innovation.
Notably, Guiyuan encompasses almost all powertrain types on the market—except for range-extended hybrids.
Despite the growing popularity of range-extended vehicles in 2025–2026, Great Wall insists on not pursuing the range-extender solution. Wei Jianjun's criticism remains unchanged: range-extender technology is backward and inefficient, with too many energy conversion steps.
Great Wall favors its Super Hi4-PHEV system, featuring an 800V high-voltage architecture and dedicated four-speed hybrid transmission. Its pure electric range reaches 363 km, and total range approaches 1,400 km. Even in the niche field of diesel hybrids, Great Wall attempts to break the stereotype of diesel vehicles as low-end, achieving a breakthrough in reducing overall fuel consumption by 9%.
This choice of technical route is essentially Great Wall trying to raise the technological barrier, to distance itself from low-threshold competitors and preserve its discourse power in the high-end hardcore and multi-purpose vehicle markets.
In the past decade, the industry pursued explosive growth in a single dimension.
But the logic behind Great Wall’s Guiyuan Platform signals that post-2026, automotive competition will no longer be a war over a single dimension of price, but will move toward a multidimensional coexistence and efficiency-first ecological balance. This is a more resilient manufacturing system. In this ecosystem, R&D no longer burns money blindly, and production lines are no longer fragile.
The so-called "all-in" bet on Guiyuan is actually Great Wall trying to simplify the complex at the foundational level, to resolve the diverse demands of the front-end market.
Solving fragmentation of the market through platform universality, offsetting future sales volatility with production efficiency certainty—perhaps this is what China’s major automakers should truly look like after years of racing ahead: returning to the starting point, only then can you see the end point.
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