May 28, 2026, on this day, SAIC Group officially became the first enterprise in the history of China's automobile industry to exceed 100 million cumulative production and sales. No speeches from leaders, no product presentations, and no data bombardment on slides. In their place was a "Global Relay Delivery" spanning the Eurasian continent, connecting more than ten brands and nineteen car models. Every delivery moment opened a chapter of someone's life. 100 million vehicles are a number, but more importantly, a mirror. It reflects the ups and downs of an enterprise's seventy-plus years and the microcosm of China's automobile industry knocking out the first "Phoenix" brand from alleyways to standing on the global stage in the Smart Electric Era.
A "Delivery Ceremony" Only SAIC Could Pull Off
If one word were used to define this delivery ceremony, it would be "unreproducible".
It did not take place in a closed convention center but unfolded synchronously in multiple cities worldwide. Beyond the main venue in Shanghai, Nanjing, Liuzhou, Taiyuan, London, Jakarta, Singapore... delivery scenes continued to light up. The countdown went from the 99,999,996th unit to the 100,000,013th unit. Every vehicle delivery opened a real user story.
This "decentralized" ceremony design is not a brand show but an open presentation of system capabilities. Mobilizing a full matrix of 15 brands, from commercial to passenger vehicles, from the 60,000 range to the 500,000 range, from independent to joint venture, from domestic to overseas, and completing delivery under the same time and theme, requires behind-the-scenes whole industry chain collaborative capability.
More critically, it transformed the cold industrial number "100 million vehicles" into personal memories with warmth. For example, a couple returning to their homeland brought MG memories from their stay in the UK back home; a post-85s village party secretary used a Wuling Rongguang Pure Electric to deliver meals to left-behind elderly people; philanthropist blogger Liu Jia cut hair for left-behind children in Guangxi mountains for five consecutive years, and Buick provided immediate aid; he was moved by the "Full-score cabin" of Zhijing E7.
This shift in narrative style is essentially a public test of a "user-centric enterprise". In the past, automotive industry milestone releases were often enterprise-centric—leader speeches, technology presentations, sales data. This time, SAIC handed the stage completely to users, even the 100 millionth user, who was Cao Xudong, CEO of Momenta, a core partner in its smart driving strategy. "Partner becomes owner" is both a coincidence and a metaphor: in the intelligent electric vehicle era, the boundaries between users and enterprises are blurring, and the depth of ecosystem relationships is becoming a new competitive barrier.
The Hidden Card Behind 100 Million Vehicles: System, Globalization, and "Joint Venture 2.0"
If the delivery ceremony is the "face", the "backbone" behind the 100 million vehicles is the whole value chain system built by SAIC over seventy-plus years.
Many people see the data of SAIC ranking first in Chinese automaker sales for the first four months of 2026: cumulative sales of 1.302 million vehicles, independent brands accounting for nearly 70%, new energy vehicle sales of 412,000, and overseas markets surging by 50.2% year-on-year. But more worthy of attention are the structural changes behind these numbers.
Independent brands are no longer the "runner-up" role but the absolute main force. Roewe, MG, IM, Shangjie, Wuling, Maxus... Passenger and commercial lines advance together, covering almost all imaginable scenarios from personal travel to logistics. Joint venture brands have not stayed in the old script of "trading market for technology". Buick Zhijing E7 is based on the "Xiaoyao" Super Fusion Architecture, delivering over 10,000 units within a month of launch; Audi E7X plans to become Audi's first L3 level landing vehicle globally.
As the 99,999,999th delivery vehicle model of SAIC Group, ID. ERA 9X is a sample worthy of separate analysis. This car is not only the flagship for SAIC Volkswagen to counterattack in new energy but also a highly persuasive footnote of the Joint Venture 2.0 era. 11,079 orders locked within 1 hour of launch, 2,326 retail units delivered in 5 days, directly entering the top three of 300,000+ RMB extended-range large high-end SUVs. One month after launch, cumulative deliveries broke 7,000 units. In the high-end extended-range market where joint venture brands have long been suppressed by new forces, this speed breaks the stereotype that "joint ventures can't do new energy well".
Among the first batch of ID. ERA 9X owners, 60% live in first and second-tier cities, over 80% are management elites, over 40% are bosses and company partners, 58% hold a bachelor's degree or above, and average annual family income is 430,000 RMB. Female percentage exceeds 20%, over 85% are married with children, and those aged 25-39 account for more than half. About 40% come from old Volkswagen owners, 20% from traditional luxury brand replacement users. More than half directly chose the high-spec Ultra version. The 6,999th owner is Yang Chen, the first Chinese player in the German Bundesliga. These data point to a clear conclusion: ID. ERA 9X did not trade the market with low prices but truly entered a user group with high education, high income, and complete judgment on products.
From extended-range systems to smart driving algorithms, from chassis tuning to cabin interaction, a large amount of core capabilities come from SAIC and its ecosystem partners' local innovation. This is the most essential change of "Joint Venture 2.0": it is no longer foreign parties giving technology and Chinese parties doing the market, but both sides jointly defining products on the same platform, or even led by Chinese teams on technology routes. Behind these products is SAIC's role transition from "local adaptation" to "technology definition". In the past, joint venture R&D centers were more about executing global headquarters' technology localization, whereas now, SAIC's technical capabilities have started to be output in reverse, participating in the definition of global products. This is what is truly worth paying attention to in "Joint Venture 2.0"—it is not a slogan, but a capability.
Globalization is another hidden card. SAIC is currently the representative with the earliest and largest scale of "going out" among Chinese automobile enterprises. Overseas cumulative sales have exceeded 7 million vehicles. MG has consecutively ranked first in Chinese brand sales in Europe for 11 years, European annual sales in 2025 exceeded 300,000 vehicles, becoming the first Chinese automobile brand to break one million cumulative sales in Europe and the UK. More importantly, SAIC is shifting from "product going overseas" to "value chain going overseas". It possesses over 100 parts production bases, over 3,000 dealer networks overseas, has built three R&D innovation centers including London, and four production manufacturing centers in Thailand, Indonesia, India, and Pakistan. Anji Logistics owns 42 roll-on/roll-off ships, with 8 international routes covering Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
The depth of this global layout means SAIC is no longer a purely Chinese local automobile enterprise but a true industrial player with global operation capabilities. When many Chinese brands are still discussing how to "go out", SAIC is already thinking about how to "go up".
Technology is Not Just an "Exhibit"
Another key support for 100 million vehicles is the technology landing capability.
SAIC's 100 millionth delivery model—IM LS9 Hyper, is a good observation sample. It is equipped with full steer-by-wire four-wheel steering, 520-line ultra-vision LiDAR, NVIDIA Thor chip, whole domain 800V high-voltage platform, Stellar Super Extended Range, and even jointly premiered the "Endogenous Security" technology with Purple Mountain Laboratories globally, expanding automotive security from the physical level to information and system security. These technical indicators would not be inferior on any international brand's high-end models.
But more worthy of attention is that these technologies do not only exist on IM's flagship models. The Roewe i6 in the 60,000 range comes standard with 8155 chip and Doubao Large Model; the Buick Zhijing E7 in the 150,000 range is the first to equip Doubao Deep Thinking Large Model; the Shangjie Z7 in the 200,000 range carries Huawei ADS 4.1+896-line LiDAR, with 12,000 large orders in 27 minutes of launch. This landing capability of "technological democratization" is the real gold content of SAIC technology breakthrough. It shows that SAIC's technology logic is not "stacking specs" but precise matching around user real scenarios. Whether it is the "Smart Brain" end-to-end smart driving large model, or the "Robust Body" Digital Chassis 2.0, or the "Powerful Heart" thermal efficiency 46.3% DMH hybrid system, they all have to answer the same question: What can users perceive?
SAIC's answer is: From understanding cars to understanding you. Understanding cars is the extreme pursuit of core technology, and understanding you is precisely landing every cutting-edge technology into user-perceivable and enjoyable travel experiences. This sentence sounds like a concept, but from the delivery list of 100 million vehicles, it has been broken down into countless specific product decisions.
From "Leading the Horse Pack" to "Thousands of Galloping Horses"
In 2014, SAIC pioneered a comprehensive transition to new energy. At that time, many in the industry were still watching and waiting. Twelve years later, SAIC gave its own answer with 100 million vehicles. These twelve years happen to be a complete zodiac cycle. From the then "Leading the Horse Pack"—pioneering transformation, pioneering investment, pioneering going overseas, to the current situation of independent, joint venture, commercial, passenger, domestic, overseas "Thousands of Galloping Horses", the road SAIC has walked is almost a microcosm of China's new energy vehicle industry.
Behind 100 million vehicles is nearly 150 billion RMB in R&D investment over the past decade, nearly 26,000 effective patents, and two National Science and Technology Progress Awards. But its more important value lies in answering an industry-level question: When scale expansion meets a ceiling, how should Chinese automobile brands proceed next? SAIC's answer is "Second Entrepreneurship". This word sounds a bit old-fashioned, but placed in today's context, it points to the transition from scale leadership to quality leadership. 100 million vehicles is not the end but a new starting line. Next, what needs to be competed for is not who sells more, but who can define standards in the global market, establish irreplaceable brand assets in users' hearts, and continue to invest in technology no-man's land and achieve a commercialization loop.
From workers using hammers to knock out the first Phoenix brand sedan in 1958 to the IM LS9 Hyper with endogenous security technology driving off the production line in 2026, SAIC completed the leap from zero to 100 million in nearly seventy years. And the true revelation of this leap may not lie in the number itself, but in the fact that it proves one thing: China's automobile industry has the ability to walk a road from following to parallel running, and then to leading in local areas.
The Next 100 Million Vehicles, SAIC's Journey Has Just Begun.
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