The automotive industry faces an existential challenge. Chinese EV makers and Western disruptors like Tesla have fundamentally rewritten the rules of product development. According to McKinsey's August 2025 research on automotive innovation, these new players go from concept to launch in roughly 24 months—twice the speed of legacy automakers.[1]
For Tier 1 suppliers serving both traditional OEMs and these new entrants, the pressure is immense: deliver faster, maintain safety quality, and somehow keep costs competitive. The question isn't whether to accelerate—it's how to do it without compromising the rigorous compliance that safety-critical development demands.
The Speed Gap: Understanding What We're Up Against
McKinsey's research reveals a stark divide in automotive development timelines. China's new EV-focused automakers have slashed development cycles by leveraging several key advantages that traditional OEMs struggle to match.[1]
🇨🇳 Chinese New EV OEMs
🌍 Traditional Mass-Market OEMs
China's new OEMs and Western disruptors are showing they are being strategic about what they produce, how they develop and test, and how they collaborate across the supply chain. Those decisions translate into significant reductions in time to market.
— McKinsey & Company, "Automotive Product Development: Accelerating to New Horizons" (August 2025)[1]
The implications are clear. BYD is constructing vehicle assembly plants in Hungary, Indonesia, and Turkey. Four Chinese companies—BYD, Leap, Li Auto, and Seres—have made their EV portfolios profitable while many non-China EV automakers are still struggling.[1] The competitive threat isn't theoretical anymore.
What's Driving the Speed Advantage?
McKinsey identifies several key differentiators in how Chinese OEMs achieve their velocity:[1][2]
A critical insight from McKinsey's September 2025 research on "Innovation Execution": Chinese companies have developed radically open information access within their organizations. R&D drawings, specifications, market data, and strategy are stored in easily accessible internal databases with wide access across procurement, engineering, and manufacturing. Speed of execution—not IP protection—is their competitive advantage.[2]
Chinese OEMs Are Also Pursuing Compliance Standards
It's important to note that Chinese OEMs aren't simply ignoring safety standards—they're actively pursuing compliance certifications to enable global market expansion. As these manufacturers expand into Europe and other regulated markets, they must meet the same stringent requirements as established players.
🌏 Chinese OEMs Pursuing Global Standards
BYD R155/R156 Certification: BYD commercial vehicles have successfully obtained UN R155 (cybersecurity) and R156 (software update management) certification, enabling them to sell in UNECE member countries including the EU, Japan, and South Korea.[8]
ASQMS Standard: China has developed its own automotive software quality standard (ASQMS), published December 2023 and mandatory since January 2024. This standard applies to both Chinese and international companies working with Chinese OEMs, demonstrating China's commitment to software quality management.[9]
UN R155/R156 Mandate: As of July 2024, all vehicles sold in UNECE countries must comply with UN R155 and R156 cybersecurity regulations—this includes Chinese manufacturers exporting to Europe.[10]
This creates an interesting dynamic: Chinese OEMs are learning to balance their speed advantage with the compliance rigor required for global markets. For Western suppliers, this means the compliance capabilities they've spent decades building remain a genuine competitive advantage—if they can execute them efficiently.
The Software Complexity Challenge
Modern vehicles have become extraordinarily complex software systems. According to IEEE Spectrum, a premium vehicle today contains approximately 100 million lines of code running on 70-100 electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the car.[3] Volvo's software quality expert Vard Antinyan notes that this codebase contains 10 million conditional statements and 3 million functions.[3]
This complexity creates massive documentation requirements. The harmonization of ISO 26262 (functional safety), ASPICE (process quality), and ISO/SAE 21434 (cybersecurity) results in over 280 work products that must be created, maintained, and traced throughout the development lifecycle.[5]
The Documentation Dilemma for Western Suppliers
Here's the uncomfortable reality for Tier 1 suppliers: you can't simply copy the Chinese playbook. Western OEMs—your customers—still require full ASPICE Level 2/3 compliance, ISO 26262 functional safety certification, and increasingly ISO/SAE 21434 cybersecurity conformance. These aren't optional nice-to-haves; they're contractual requirements that determine whether you win business.[6]
Documentation burden consumes significant engineering effort in safety-critical automotive development. The IEEE Requirements Engineering Conference found that automotive manufacturers have adopted rigid requirements engineering processes that negatively impact development speed, with requirements decomposition over many levels of abstraction identified as a key bottleneck.[7]
The math is challenging. Creating compliant work products for ASPICE and ISO 26262 requires maintaining bidirectional traceability between requirements, architecture, design, code, and tests.[5] With 100 million lines of code and thousands of requirements, this traceability must be maintained continuously—not just at audit time.
The Third Path: Speed + Quality Through Intelligent Automation
The good news? You don't have to choose between competing on speed and maintaining compliance quality. AI-powered compliance automation opens a third path that Western suppliers can leverage to match Chinese development velocity while preserving the safety rigor that remains a genuine competitive advantage in global markets.
Why Documentation Automation Changes the Equation
Consider what happens when you automate the documentation burden:
Transform Compliance from Burden to Competitive Advantage
- Real-time gap detection: Verify documentation stays aligned with code—catch drift the moment it happens, not weeks before an audit
- Continuous verification in CI/CD: Documentation quality gates that run with every commit—compliance verification becomes continuous, not a phase
- Legacy code documentation (ISO/PAS 8926): Generate SRS, SAD, SDD for pre-existing software where the standard explicitly requires creating evidence that doesn't exist
- AI-assisted updates: When gaps are detected, get intelligent suggestions to accelerate documentation updates—engineers review and approve all content
- Human-in-the-loop: AI detects gaps and assists with updates, humans decide and approve—maintaining the expert judgment safety requires
Reclaiming Engineering Time
The ROI calculation is straightforward. If documentation verification and maintenance consumes a significant portion of engineering effort, and automation can reduce that burden substantially, you've just recovered capacity for actual engineering work. That's capacity you can redirect toward the rapid iteration that Chinese competitors use to their advantage.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Scenario 1: New Project Development (Verification Focus)
A supplier wins a new ADAS contract with an aggressive 18-month timeline. They integrate GapLensAI into their CI/CD pipeline from day one. Every code commit triggers automatic verification that documentation remains aligned with implementation. Gap alerts fire instantly when requirements drift from code. Engineers update documentation faster with AI-assisted suggestions—but they write and approve all content. By SOP, they've maintained continuous compliance throughout—no last-minute audit scramble.
Scenario 2: Legacy Code Qualification (ISO/PAS 8926)
An OEM acquisition brings a proven ECU codebase with 400K lines of code—and virtually no documentation. This is where document generation is explicitly required: ISO/PAS 8926 Section 4.4 mandates creating SRS, SAD, and SDD with bidirectional traceability as prerequisites for qualification. The standard acknowledges this documentation typically doesn't exist for legacy software.[13]
Traditionally, this means months of senior engineers reverse-engineering software. With GapLensAI, the team generates draft work products in days—then engineers review, refine, and approve every document before it becomes official evidence. ISO/PAS 8926 qualification happens in weeks, not quarters.
Scenario 3: Pre-Audit Gap Assessment (Verification Focus)
A Tier 1 faces an ASPICE Level 3 assessment in 6 weeks. Rather than manual artifact review, they run GapLensAI analysis across their codebase and existing documentation. Within hours, they have a comprehensive gap report showing exactly where documentation is missing, incomplete, or inconsistent with implementation—prioritized by risk. Engineers focus remediation effort on the gaps that matter most.
The Bigger Picture: Compliance as Competitive Moat
Here's what often gets lost in the "speed vs. quality" debate: Western suppliers' compliance capabilities are actually a competitive advantage in global markets. As Chinese OEMs expand into Europe and North America, they face the same UNECE WP.29, ASPICE, and ISO 26262 requirements that Western suppliers have spent decades mastering.
The winning strategy isn't to abandon compliance to match Chinese speed—it's to automate compliance so thoroughly that it stops being a speed constraint. Then you have both: the development velocity to compete with new entrants AND the safety credentials that global customers require.
Taking Action: Where to Start
For suppliers looking to accelerate without sacrificing quality, consider this roadmap:
1. Audit your documentation burden. Measure how much engineering time actually goes to compliance documentation verification and maintenance versus core development. Most teams underestimate this significantly.
2. Identify automation opportunities. For ongoing projects, gap detection and verification of existing documentation against code is typically the highest-impact starting point—auditors trust verification over generation. For legacy code lacking documentation, ISO/PAS 8926 explicitly requires creating evidence, making generation appropriate.
3. Integrate into existing workflows. Solutions that require separate processes won't get adopted. Look for tools that integrate into VS Code, your CI/CD pipeline, and existing ALM systems.
4. Start with a pilot. Pick one project for gap detection or one legacy codebase for documentation generation. Measure time savings and quality improvements.
5. Scale what works. Once you've validated the approach, extend it across projects and teams. The compounding benefits grow with each integration.
The Bottom Line
Chinese OEMs have proven that 24-month development cycles are possible.[1] They've also proven that traditional approaches to compliance documentation can't keep pace with that velocity. For Western suppliers, the path forward isn't choosing between speed and safety—it's leveraging AI to achieve both.
The suppliers who figure this out first won't just survive the competitive pressure from Chinese entrants. They'll thrive by combining Western safety rigor with Chinese-competitive development speed. That's not just keeping up—that's building a sustainable competitive advantage for the next decade of automotive transformation.
Author: Krishna Koravadi