Decision-making and development speed: European carmakers versus China

For its China Speed analysis, published in March 2026, Roland Berger compared the costs and development times of Chinese, European and other manufacturers, supplemented by its own benchmarking work; the press release does not say how many vehicles or companies were included. Chinese carmakers develop a new vehicle 25 to 30 per cent faster than European ones, and 20 to 30 per cent more cheaply. About 60 per cent of the cost advantage comes from design and system choices, such as standardisation and less complex products. According to the firm, the speed comes from much shorter strategy and decision phases, up to 80 per cent virtual testing, developing software and hardware in parallel, and involving suppliers early and systematically. One Chinese car manufacturer gained fourteen months against the global benchmark, mainly through changes in organisation and process. Even when Chinese companies move their development to Europe, they keep more than half of their efficiency advantage.

In July 2026 Capgemini Research Institute surveyed 800 executives from twelve countries: 400 at carmakers, 160 at large suppliers and 240 at technology companies. Six in ten blame delays in product development mainly on inefficient processes rather than on the limits of the technology, and 45 per cent still have no strategy or roadmap for AI in product development. The group getting the most value from AI develops 17 per cent faster and gets to market 19 per cent sooner. Capgemini attributes this to a better data foundation, clear business cases and disciplined governance and ways of working, more than to the AI itself.

In June 2026 KPMG surveyed 775 executives at carmakers, suppliers, dealers and mobility companies, 330 of them in Europe. Slow decision-making and governance emerge as the biggest internal barrier to strategy, cited by almost four in ten, with functional silos and resistance to change close behind. The trade-off between speed to market and quality is the tension most often named as the top priority for the next three years. Scaling up is slow: 92 per cent take twelve months or more to roll out a new digital, software or AI application after the pilot, and over a third take more than two years. KPMG recommends making deployment speed a leadership performance metric.

At the end of 2025 AlixPartners surveyed 1,002 executives at carmakers, suppliers and technology companies in the US, China, India, Europe, the United Kingdom, Japan and South Korea. Among Chinese carmakers, 41 per cent build the vehicle’s software mainly in-house, against 25 to 27 per cent in the West, and 36 per cent spend more than half of their R&D budget on software-defined vehicles, against 19 to 21 per cent in the US, Europe and the United Kingdom. Two thirds of carmakers need more than eight weeks to roll out a new software application after the last line of code is written. AlixPartners explicitly calls the shift to the software-defined vehicle a question of operating model as well.

How solid is this? In 2026 four independent firms, coming from different angles (a cost benchmark and three surveys), point to organisation and process as the brake on speed. The analysis of causes does, however, rest largely on executives’ self-reporting and a single published case; there is no second year of measurement for these questions yet, and Dutch figures are missing. So the picture is not yet settled.