The automobile at 140: From Mannheim to Haikou

Editor's note: Michael G. Wang is an anchor at CGTN. The article reflects the author's opinion and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

When Carl Benz patented his three-wheeled Motorwagen in Mannheim (present day Germany) in 1886, he would not have imagined what his invention would become, much less that 140 years later and some 9,000 kilometers away, executives and engineers would gather on a tropical Chinese island to debate the automobile's next transformation.

Despite the space between them, there is symmetry between Mannheim and Haikou, the provincial capital of China's Hainan Province.

Germany helped give birth to the automobile and spent much of the following century refining it into one of the world's most sophisticated industrial products. China arrived much later as a major automotive power, but has become the world's largest market for new energy vehicles and an important center for batteries, automotive software and rapid product development.

At this year's World New Energy Vehicle Congress (WNEVC) in Haikou, the intersection of those two industrial histories offered a window into where the automobile may be heading next.

One important shift is easy to miss if the industry is viewed simply as a race to replace combustion engines with batteries. At this year's WNEVC, a broader vision was articulated that went well beyond the car itself: how millions of EVs could help balance electricity grids, how AI and cloud computing could change the way vehicles operate, and what happens to batteries after their automotive life. Electrification, in other words, is only part of the transformation. The automobile is becoming intertwined with the energy and digital systems around it.

New energy vehicles accounted for 49.6% of China's total new vehicle sales in the first half of 2026, according to figures presented at the congress by Wan Gang, the WNEVC's chairman and a leading figure in China's electric vehicle development. But once EVs become commonplace, how should the infrastructure around them evolve?

Take electricity. China had nearly 49 million new energy vehicles on its roads by the end of June 2026. Wan described how, with the right charging infrastructure, market mechanisms and incentives, some of those vehicles could eventually do more than draw electricity from the grid. They could charge when power is plentiful and, when demand rises, reduce their consumption or return electricity to the grid.

The automobile would no longer merely use the energy system. It would become part of it.

The same logic applies to batteries. The challenge is no longer just squeezing more kilometers from a charge. Batteries increasingly have to be understood across their entire life cycle. How they perform in different climates, how their condition is tracked, how they might be reused after their automotive life, and ultimately how their materials are recovered.

Long-distance freight presents a different challenge. Wan noted that battery-electric vehicles are making headway on shorter commercial routes, but charging time, range and payload become more difficult constraints over longer distances. He sees a potential role for hydrogen fuel cells on heavily traveled freight corridors, where sufficient traffic could help support the cost of refueling infrastructure.

Then comes intelligence.

The automobile is evolving from a mechanical product containing software into a computing platform that happens to move. Wan described an architecture connecting physical vehicle controls with onboard computing, cloud systems and road infrastructure. Artificial intelligence could allow these systems to improve continually, but greater capability also raises the stakes for testing, cybersecurity and clearly defined safety boundaries.

Put these developments together and the automobile becomes a means of transportation, an energy asset, a computing platform and a node in a much larger digital and industrial network.

That helps explain why China-German automotive cooperation featured so prominently at this year's WNEVC and why that relationship itself is changing.

For decades, German companies brought engineering expertise, manufacturing systems and established brands into a rapidly expanding Chinese market. China supplied scale, manufacturing capacity and increasingly sophisticated consumers.

That model has not disappeared. But it is no longer sufficient to describe what is happening.

German automakers that once came to China primarily to manufacture and sell cars are increasingly developing them here as well, responding to a market where competition has compressed development cycles and raised consumer expectations for software and digital features.

Audi offers one example. Ivo Muth, executive vice president of Audi China R&D, told a panel I moderated that the company's cooperation with SAIC, one of China's largest automakers, is allowing it to develop vehicles and electronic architectures around the demands of Chinese customers and the country's fast-moving digital ecosystem. The partnership brings Audi's engineering experience together with the speed and technological ecosystem that have emerged around China's electric vehicle market.

Bosch Mobility China President Wang Weiliang described a similar evolution. China, in his mind, is not simply a market in which global companies sell products. It has become a source of automotive innovation whose engineering work can serve other markets, while Bosch's international network can help Chinese automakers operate abroad. One formulation he used captures the shift as: "invent in China for global."

This movement is increasingly two-way.

Christian Ach, president and CEO of BMW Group Region China, described how technical staff from China supported preparations for the company's new plant in Hungary. BMW has also said that its Plant Lydia in Shenyang served as a model for parts of the production system at Debrecen, with ideas, structures and processes developed in China incorporated into the Hungarian plant.

Chinese companies are making the journey in the other direction, bringing technologies and manufacturing experience developed at home into their European operations.

CATL's Yin Xiaoying told our panel that establishing production in Germany meant far more than shipping machinery from China. It required training local employees, adapting to local costs and working practices, and building knowledge that could remain embedded in the local operation. That process took years.

Hildegard Mueller, president of the German Association of the Automotive Industry, offered perhaps a simple and elegant description of what China-German automotive engagement could look like: "taking the best of both worlds."

China brings extraordinary speed in product development, a vast and demanding market, and an increasingly sophisticated ecosystem around batteries, digital services and data. Germany brings more than a century of accumulated automotive engineering experience, alongside deep expertise in areas such as safety, efficiency, validation and global manufacturing.

But Müller's argument was not that cooperation eliminates competition. Quite the opposite. Chinese and German companies will compete intensely, including in each other's home markets. She has also argued that Chinese automotive companies should invest and produce in Germany and Europe, becoming part of local production networks in much the same way German manufacturers have built extensive operations in China.

That may be a more durable model of economic engagement than one based principally on selling vehicles across borders.

It also makes the rules governing that integration more consequential.

The deeper companies move into each other's innovation and production systems, the more they encounter questions surrounding data protection, cybersecurity, intellectual property, export controls, critical materials and market access.

These are sometimes portrayed simply as obstacles to globalization. But perhaps they are better understood as governance challenges that the next phase of globalization will have to address.

A software-defined electric vehicle linked to electricity networks and digital infrastructure will be more sensitive than the largely mechanical automobile of previous generations. Governments and companies have legitimate interests in protecting data, intellectual property and security. But if rules become too fragmented or unpredictable, companies may find it increasingly difficult to deploy innovations across markets or build genuinely global products.

The challenge, then, is not to choose between competition and cooperation. It is to make them sustainably coexist. Could this be the deeper lesson from Haikou?

The automotive revolution underway in China is not just about how many electric vehicles are sold, which company has gained market share, or whether Chinese or established global manufacturers are in the lead. Those questions matter, but there is a larger transformation at hand.

The next era of the automobile will depend on whether vehicles can interact intelligently with electricity grids, whether batteries can be managed across their entire life cycle, whether AI can be introduced without compromising safety, whether new technologies can work across different regulatory systems, and whether companies can combine capabilities across borders without surrendering the qualities that make them competitive in the first place.

None of those challenges can be solved by building a better car alone.

140 years after Benz's Motorwagen first rattled through the streets of Germany, the automobile is once again being reinvented. The first revolution was about creating the machine. The next will be about everything that machine connects to.

And this time, the road between Germany and China runs in both directions.