Western and US automakers take 48 to 60 months to develop a new car from concept to launch, while Chinese automakers do it in 18 to 24 months.
Von Tschammer cites a stark gap in vehicle development timelines, noting Western OEMs need 48-60 months versus 18-24 months in China, calling closing that gap the top competitive priority for US and European carmakers. ✦ AI generated
Thomas von Tschammer · The Cognitive Revolution · 2026-07-01 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 43:13
“How much disruption do you expect to see in these like 100-year-old uh industries like auto...”
some numbers to develop a Western Europe or US OEM, it takes time between 48 to 60 months for a new car developed. From the moment they want to launch it to the actual moment it hits the plant and it's being manufactured, right? In China, it's 18 to 24 months.
verbatim transcript · starts at 43:13
43:13it takes time between 48 to 60 months for a new car developed. From the moment they want to launch it to the actual moment it hits the plant and it's being manufactured, right? In In China, it's 18 to 24 months. Everything those companies in US and Europe care about is how do we get from 16 to 24 months, right? Because that's what's going to create the next
43:38competitive advantage for them. >> Yeah, that's a sobering stat. I mean, the number of iterations in a given time is a pretty hard deficit to overcome long-term. Quite sure how to phrase this question, but one thing I wonder about is in a way if we really super optimize the design process it seems like at least in a naive way, we might end up making things really hard on manufacturing. The sort
44:10of going back to like my dad's the start of his career, there was literal like pencil on paper and like annotation of it should be this much, right? And the tolerances that the that existed on the machining side were just a lot more generous than I think they are today and I think maybe even you can imagine again if the design gets so optimized and we're really
44:31satisfying these constraints down to the the absolute maximum in our designs, it sounds like that would create really super tight tolerances and really super difficult manufacturing challenges. And so how do you think about I guess maybe one answer is this is the role for the human engineer, but don't satisfy you know, let's not satisfy ourselves with that answer. How should we be thinking about like just how far
44:57we want to push design optimization and when we need to meet manufacturing a little bit more in the middle. >> It's a good question. So when we're saying that we want to optimize designs, we also want to optimize them for manufacturing, right? What do you mean by that? That means that when I'm saying that building a car is a multi-disciplinary and multi-optimization, I also mean that because you want to