By Gary S. Vasilash

The first thing to acknowledge is that the auto industry today is characterized by various forms of partnerships and alliances, whether they are codified like the Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance or looser-but-still actionable work being done on things from entire vehicles to propulsion systems by General Motors and Honda.

Last week Volkswagen brand and XPENG and Audi and SAIC announced that there will be “strategic co-operations” for, initially, products for China that will carry the badges of the German companies, with XPENG supporting VW and SAIC Audi.

The cooperation isn’t particularly surprising. That’s just happening.

What is:

VW will build electric vehicles on an XPENG platform. Yes, there is still the VW MEB platform. But somehow it seems that’s not getting it done in China.

Audi will work with SAIC on developing electric vehicles for the China market in categories that it currently doesn’t have offerings. You’d imagine that the people in Ingolstadt would be up to the challenge, but evidently there is something that needs to be supplemented.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Chinese OEMs had partnerships with Western OEMs with the latter having the engineering and development chops and the former the production resources.

In the current case, it seems that the Chinese companies have the tech and know-how being sought by the German brands. And undoubtedly the production facilities to build the vehicles to be developed, too.

Things are moving far more rapidly than might have been expected even 10 years ago.