Hefei, CN - Lighthouse award in Customer Centricity

The plant builds battery-electric vehicles to order in China's hyper-competitive EV market, where buyers expect deep personalisation, fast feature iteration, and battery safety and longevity as table stakes. Annual volume rose about 73% in two years, from roughly 81,000 to 141,000 vehicles, while the configurable product space ballooned to some 3.6 million combinations, exposing R&D cycles too slow to reflect user signals, warehousing that could not scale, and quality coverage that fell behind a widening portfolio. The site responded by wiring customer signals straight into the factory: in-cabin voice feedback and a battery-swap data network feed a unified R&D data lake; a digital-twin warehouse steered by reinforcement learning sequences material across all configurations; and reconfigurable, multimodal inspection stations adapt to each model variant. Speed to market fell from 36 to 20 months — a 44% acceleration — with about 90% of the R&D feedback-to-iteration workflow automated; warehouse reconfiguration dropped from 120 hours to 2, and battery fault detection reached 99%, while the brand ranked first in NPS among new-energy vehicles in J.D. Power's 2025 China study.