WCX 2025: Intel’s Weast Says China Leaping Ahead Due to Focus on Innovation

China’s rapid advancements and industry growth are due to organizational streamlining, intense competition for innovation and a culture that encourages round-the-clock communication and more work hours than are common in the West.

April 9, 2025

Chris Clonts

Jack Weast, vice president and general manager of Intel Automotive, told an audience at WCX 2025 that China’s automotive industry is advancing quickly due to fierce competition, an innovation-first focus and more efficient organizational structures.

In Detroit, keynote speaker Jack Weast, VP and GM of Intel Automotive, was asked questions about the state of competition between the Chinese and American auto industries by Alba Colón, member of SAE's board of directors and VP for the automotive sector. (Chris Clonts)

Weast’s keynote discussion today in Detroit peeled back the curtain into the mindset and organizational nature of Chinese auto companies. Weast would know, as he’s been in China for the past year, observing and working with many segments of the country’s booming auto industry.

“In China, there are 150 active vehicle brands,” he said. “It’s the world's largest car market. It's the world's fastest growing car market, and China is now the largest net exporter of vehicles, having overtaken both Japan and Germany, who held those spots for a long time.”

Weast also briefly addressed a common misperception – perhaps not held by executives but the general public – that China is not a modern country. “You can get anything you want delivered in 15 minutes,” he said, citing his wife’s beloved Dairy Queen order that arrives “colder than if we got it in person.” He said the society, at least in the cities he’s seen, is largely cashless and cardless, with all transactions being conducted via smartphones and QR codes. He was particularly impressed that there are many battery-swap stations for EVs in the country, something that was promised by Tesla in America and other start-ups around the world, but never came to fruition.

Heavy pressure to innovate

A slide from Jack Weast at WCX 2025 showing what he called competitive advantages of Chinese industrial culture.

On the innovation front, he said that unlike many automakers that begin to design a new model with an eye on a price point, a typical Chinese automaker begins thinking about innovation first. The cost management comes later in the process. The size of the market also creates a life-or-death imperative to keep innovating, he said.

“Everyone is constantly trying to be the first at something and out-innovating others. Once one automaker does it, then everybody else has to follow, and somebody else is going to jump above that,” he said. “It creates this insane competitive spiral across those 150 brands that forces the whole industry to move at China speed quickly, at getting innovations to market as fast as you can. There is intense competition there that we haven't seen in the rest of the world in a long, long time.”

Communication: Fewer boundaries

He said this design-to-production process is helped along by a culture that encourages constant communication and near-constant work. The term “996” comes up frequently. Though Weast says it is not an official state policy, it is accepted that many employees work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. “It is all in office. There's no hybrid, there's no remote, there's none of these kinds of things that that are more common in the rest of the world. It speaks to the intensity and the commitment of the employees to out-compete with their competition.”

He said much of business discussions take place in WeChat, an instant-messaging analog of WhatsApp here in the United States. “When you go have dinner or you meet the CEO, you exchange WeChat information. You text directly. There are no boundaries from a communication standpoint, negotiations happen on WeChat. The expectation is, when you get a message on WeChat, you respond immediately, even if it's 11 p.m. on a Friday night.” He said there are few meetings. Issues are resolved in real-time with that instant communication.

Organization: One leader, one product

A slide from Jack Weast at WCX 2025 showing what he said are the key aspects of the tech-first nature of China's auto industry.

Weast cited the old joke that you could tear down an American-made vehicle and determine the organizational structure of the company because so many different teams work on individual systems.

Not so in China, he said. “In general, one technical leader is responsible for the entire end-to-end architecture, and all the teams are under that person. So, the powertrain is not a separate powertrain organization from the infotainment, it’s the same team. It’s one team under one leader with one goal, to build the best vehicle they can.” He said it makes it far easier and faster to make trade-offs during the design process.

Those three key areas, he said, are why, in China, a company can bring a car to market in 12 to 18 months rather than the three to four years it can take in the West.

The session was moderated by Alba Colon, director of technical partnerships at Hendrick Motorsports, a member of the SAE International board of directors and VP of automotive. She asked Weast what else American companies could change to compete with China’s culture of rapid innovation.

“We just we've got to get that [competitive] hunger back ourselves. There's nothing like competition that drives us as companies or as individuals to want to be better,” he said.