Geely argues a Europe R&D office won’t replicate its 13-year setup

Kennet Pettersson worked on three vehicle platforms in his first 15 years as an automotive engineer, at Saab and then Volvo. In the 13 years since he joined Geely's Swedish operation in 2013, he has worked on more than twice that many, he told Automotive News Europe's Douglas A. Bolduc at this year's Beijing auto show.

That is one engineer's career, not an industry statistic. But Pettersson, now Geely's global senior chief engineer for mechanical architecture, offered it as evidence of something the company has spent more than a decade assembling: a development system that runs between China and Europe and combines Chinese speed with European depth in vehicle dynamics, regulation, safety and long-horizon engineering.

The timing of the claim matters. Chery Automobile said earlier in August that it would open an R&D center in Britain this year, Automotive News reported, and Geely's engineers used the interview to argue that a building in Europe is the easy part.

An office is not an organization

Jerker Andersson, Geely's global senior chief engineer for electrical architecture and software, told Automotive News that a company cannot run everything remotely from China, and that other Chinese automakers have recognized this. What they don't yet have, in his account, are the working relationships and shared culture that Geely and Volvo built over roughly 13 years, and he expects that to take time.

He was candid that the process was not smooth. There was a lot of friction along the way, he said, and the organization learned from it.

That framing puts a number on something operators usually describe in vague terms. Thirteen years is Geely's own figure for how long it took to get a bi-national engineering organization to the point where knowledge flows in both directions, and it's a reasonable reference point for any manufacturer, in autos or elsewhere, that is planning a second engineering center on another continent and budgeting for it to be productive in two or three.

CMA was the training ground

The relationship formed on a specific program. Geely and Volvo announced their Compact Modular Architecture collaboration in 2015, and the first CMA car, the Volvo XC40, came off the line in Ghent, Belgium, in 2017, according to Automotive News. Chinese engineers spent that period working alongside European colleagues in Gothenburg.

Pettersson said many of the Chinese engineers he works with today were in Gothenburg during those early years. That detail is easy to skip past. It means the personal relationships that now carry Geely's cross-border decisions were formed on one platform program more than a decade ago, and they are still in place.

The platform itself has had a long life. Automotive News lists the Volvo XC40 and EX40, Lynk & Co 01, Polestar 2, Geely Starray and the current-generation Monjaro among CMA-based vehicles, and reports that Volvo's Ghent factory built its 1 millionth CMA car in 2024. For a supplier, that is the practical payoff of the arrangement: one architecture, several brands, one European plant past the million mark.

Pettersson's description of the current state is that both sides contribute. Geely brings its European research team to Chinese colleagues, he told Automotive News, and the Chinese side listens and adopts what is presented. That is a stronger claim than co-location. It's a claim about who gets to change the design.

Ten-year robustness meets build-it-now

Geely isn't pretending the two cultures approach development the same way. Andersson described the traditional European engineering mindset as one that tries to anticipate requirements far in advance, building components and architectures durable enough to cover needs five or 10 years out. Chinese teams, in his account, put their energy into meeting today's requirements and then pivot fast when conditions shift.

Neither approach is ideal on its own, he said. The two sides try to find a middle ground.

This is the tradeoff any engineering leader running a distributed team will recognize, stated by someone who has lived with it for over a decade. Overbuilding for a 10-year horizon costs money and time on features the market may never demand. Building only for today means redesign when regulation or customer expectations shift. Neither approach is ideal on its own, Andersson said, according to Automotive News, and the two sides try to find a middle ground. That suggests the value of the system is in how the two cultures work through the question together, not in a fixed process document.

The same tension shows up in how many versions of a car Geely builds. According to Automotive News, Chinese automakers going global face a core question: how much of a vehicle can remain common across China and overseas markets. The publication describes Geely's approach as a shift away from developing two different cars toward what it calls '1.25' development. The report does not spell out the full mechanics of what that means in practice.

For a European Tier 1 or Tier 2 supplier, that has a concrete consequence. If a Chinese OEM commonizes most of a vehicle across regions, the decision about a bracket, a harness or a control module may be made once, for both markets, and the engineer making it could sit in Gothenburg or in China depending on how integrated the organization is. Knowing which is the case is worth more to an account manager than knowing the address of the new R&D center.

The supplier map is already shifting under Chery's new center

Chery's UK center arrives on a supply base that Chinese companies have been buying into for two decades. The Financial Times, in reporting by Sebastien Ash, Kana Inagaki, Harry Dempsey and Ian Johnston, cites consultancy Rhodium's count of more than 130 European automotive parts makers that Chinese companies have invested in since the mid-2000s, concentrated in the manufacturing hubs of Germany and France.

Sébastien Frendo, chief executive of a Paris-based consultancy, told the FT it would not be surprising if two or three of the top 10 suppliers were Chinese in the near future, something he noted is not yet the case. The FT also reports that EU policymakers and auto executives are watching the acquisitions closely as Chinese vehicle exports grow.

Read alongside the Geely interview, the FT's numbers indicate two parallel routes into Europe: buy the suppliers, or build the engineering relationships. On the second route, Andersson told Automotive News that Geely's system is becoming increasingly difficult for rivals to replicate simply by opening an engineering office in Europe. "It takes time to have this kind of Chinese-European relation," he said.

The pattern is not unique to vehicles. Graeme Purdy, chief executive of UK solid-state battery developer Ilika, told WardsAuto's Paul Myles that the most successful gigafactories in Europe are generally Asian-owned or joint ventures with Asian partners, and that Europe is largely licensing Asian battery technology and taking Asian help to get plants running. He called it the reverse of what happened in China, where Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Volkswagen Group gave access to their technology to help build up the domestic industry. Geely and Volvo, on the Automotive News account, sit somewhere between those two models: neither side simply licensed the other.

What would confirm the claim

Geely's case rests on its own engineers' description of a system that took 13 years to build. It is a credible account from people with the job titles to know, and it is also a competitive argument made by a company that benefits if rivals are seen as years behind. Both things are true at once.

The test is observable. Chery's British R&D center is due this year, per Automotive News. Whether it becomes an organization in Andersson's sense, one where European engineers change designs rather than adapt them, will show up in the products it touches and in how many programs its engineers carry over the next several years. Pettersson's own count, three platforms in 15 years and more than double that in 13, is the number to measure against.