On 27 and 28 December 2019 the CCRT (China Automotive Consumer Research and Testing Center, established by China Automotive Technology and Research Center, abbr. CATARC) held its first annual summit in Haikou, Hainan Province in South China. The topic of the summit was: Car Evaluation Drives into the New Phase of Consumer Orientation.

Apart from the release of the forth evaluation on passenger cars, experts and professionals from the automotive and research industry were invited to talk about the international and domestic automobile market, elaborate on the market characteristics and performance, as well as forecast the development trend of the future.

Among plenty of prestigious speakers were the Deputy General Manager of CATARC, Deputy Secretary-General of China Automobile Dealers Association, Chairman of China Market Research Association, representatives from Dongfeng Honda, FAW Group R&D General Institute, J.D. Power, AC Nielsen, etc.

Spiegel Institut also had the honor to deliver a speech by Ms. Yuwei Jin, Senior Director Asia-Pacific on the topic “Culture and Behavior Differences in Automotive Market Research”. By presenting three concrete examples, Ms. Jin illustrated the different use context, cultural understanding and real life habits in China, German and USA related to car driving with the conclusion that the user-centered development process is the ultimate solution to know and understand your local users, create good user experience, thus bring good business. The presentation were warmly acknowledged by the audience and received very positive feedback.

In the past months, Spiegel Institut and CATARC have been in intensive contact, aiming to build a long-term cooperation. The delegation of CATARC visited Spiegel Institut in Shanghai, Mannheim and Munich in September and a common understanding of a win-win collaboration was then reached. The first joint project to support Chinese OEMs to design a better HMI interface according to the real user requirements looks very promising to take place soon.

We are looking forward to more cooperation with CATARC and expect to work for more local OEMs in China as an UX expert.