On 13 April 2026, an interview appeared under the headline "German OEMs have caught up with China." The speaker was Gabriel Seiberth, Executive Vice President and Global Lead Electrics/Electronics at EDAG Group — an engineering services firm whose business model is helping German automotive manufacturers develop faster and better. His argument: the narrative of "China Speed" is outdated, German OEMs have made structural improvements, the gap has closed.
This may be true. It is also, structurally, a testimonial.
A man whose firm sells process acceleration to German automotive manufacturers is explaining that German automotive manufacturers have accelerated their processes. This is not analysis. It is a customer reference — the kind that appears in sales decks between the logo page and the case studies. It does not mean he is wrong. It means the statement cannot be taken at face value without checking it against data that does not originate from the same commercial relationship.
What the data says
In 2024, the combined electric vehicle market share of Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche in China was approximately five percent. In 2023 it was 6.5 percent. The Chinese EV market grew 27 percent in the same period. In absolute numbers the Germans sold slightly more — but on a market that expanded dramatically around them, their share fell. This is not catching up. This is falling behind more slowly.
At the specific level: Porsche sold 1,845 Taycans in China in all of 2024. Xiaomi sold 46,625 of its SU7 in the first two months of 2025 — a car that did not exist three years ago, built by a company that had never made an automobile. The Taycan starts at the equivalent of 123,000 euros in China. The SU7 starts at under 30,000.
Chinese brands held 69.4 percent of their home market in the first two months of 2025. In 2020 they held 36 percent. The direction of travel is not ambiguous.
VW Group CEO Oliver Blume said at the Auto Shanghai: "I think we will catch up from 2026." He described a target market share of twelve to fifteen percent. This is a forecast, not a result. It comes from someone with an equally strong interest in projecting confidence. The pattern — executives forecasting recovery, numbers showing continued decline — has been visible in this industry for several years.
The confusion between process and outcome
Seiberth's claim — that German OEMs have improved their development speed and software capabilities — is probably accurate. EDAG and firms like it have done real work. Agile development processes have been adopted. Software-defined vehicle architectures are being built. E/E complexity is being managed more systematically than five years ago.
None of this is the same as winning in the Chinese market.
Process speed and market outcome are related but not identical. You can build a car faster and still lose if the car you are building faster is not what the market wants, or costs twice what the competition charges, or lacks the software ecosystem that Chinese consumers consider essential. The German industry's problem in China is not primarily that its development cycles were too slow. It is that it missed the transition — spent a decade optimising the wrong product, built its premium positioning on criteria that the Chinese market was in the process of repricing, and arrived at the electric vehicle era without control of the battery supply chain that determines cost structure.
Improving the speed at which you develop the wrong thing faster is not progress. It is acceleration in the wrong direction.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research titled its January 2026 report simply: "EV sales 2025: China consolidates position as lead market, European manufacturers cannot keep up." This is the institution whose job is to track these trends without a commercial interest in the answer.
What "China Speed" actually means
The term has been used loosely and it is fair to say it has become a cliché. Seiberth is right that the simple version — Chinese fast, Germans slow — is too crude. German automotive engineering remains technically sophisticated. The new platforms being developed specifically for China, like VW's China Scalable Platform built without external software partners, represent genuine adaptation.
But "China Speed" in its more serious meaning is not about development cycle length. It is about the rate at which an entire industrial ecosystem can reprice and reposition. BYD started as a battery manufacturer. It became the world's largest EV seller by controlling its own cells, semiconductors, motors and software — vertical integration that allows it to cut prices faster than any competitor who buys these components externally. Xiaomi entered automotive from consumer electronics and applied a platform business model that treats the car as hardware running software, with revenue streams from services. These are not fast development cycles. These are different business models operating on different logic.
German OEMs are improving their development speed within their existing business model. The question that the Seiberth interview does not address — because it is not within EDAG's scope to address it — is whether the existing business model is the right one for the market that China has become.
The Kodak problem
Kodak was technically excellent at film development in 2005. It had improved its processes, reduced its costs, trained its workforce. None of this mattered because the market had moved to digital photography — a transition Kodak itself had researched and then suppressed because it threatened the film business.
The analogy is imperfect, as all analogies are. German OEMs are not Kodak — they have resources, global reach, engineering depth, and brand equity that Kodak never had. They are adapting, which Kodak did not do fast enough. The Chinese market may not eliminate them; they may find a stable position as premium suppliers of a particular kind of vehicle to a particular segment.
But the framing of "catching up" assumes that the destination is fixed and the question is only about speed. If the destination is moving — if the Chinese market is not simply an EV market with faster development cycles but a fundamentally different conception of what a car is and what it costs — then catching up on process metrics misses the point. You can close the gap in software development speed and still find yourself selling luxury goods to a shrinking luxury segment while the mass market has moved to a competitor you cannot match on price.
Why this matters beyond China
The Chinese manufacturers who are currently not cost-competitive — who are, according to analysts, operating below cost in many segments while building market share — will eventually need revenue. Europe is the obvious next market. The EU tariffs imposed in late 2024 have slowed the entry. Tariffs are a delay, not a solution. They buy time. The question is what is done with that time.
If the answer is "improve development processes" — which is what EDAG sells, and what Seiberth's interview implicitly recommends — then the time is being used to run faster on the same track. If the answer requires rethinking cost structure, battery supply chain ownership, software business models, and the price points at which mass-market vehicles can be sold in Europe — then the time is being used for something that might actually matter.
The German industry press will continue to publish interviews with engineering service providers explaining that their customers have improved. This is what engineering service providers do. It is not evidence. Evidence is market share data, price competitiveness, and the rate at which the Chinese manufacturers are learning the European market while the tariffs keep them partially out.
The headline "German OEMs have caught up with China" tells you something. It tells you that German OEMs need to believe they are catching up, and that there is a market for that belief. What it does not tell you is whether it is true.
The numbers, as of April 2026, suggest it is not.