China’s EV boom has the EU setting up roadblocks. Can cooperation clear the way?
Decades after their first joint venture, EU carmakers fear losing their markets to China’s upstarts. Is it too late for them to work together?
When Volkswagen engineers arrived at the facilities of Chinese carmaker First Automobile Works’ (FAW) in the early 1990s, they saw a factory stuck in the past.
As its name suggests, FAW was China’s first automobile manufacturer, founded in 1953. With factories built under the guidance of engineers from the Soviet Union and its first model adopted from Moscow-based Zil, the firm spent its early life as a crown jewel of China’s state industries and a symbol of collaboration between the world’s largest socialist countries.
But decades after the planned economy era ended, the German engineers visiting FAW felt little had changed.