Saying Goodbye to Fake Cars with Education

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No matter how many articles we run on talented Chinese designers or world class Chinese design firms that we highlight it seems that it only takes one company to clone a famous Western truck and we’re back to square one in terms of development.

Although the majority of famous automotive design and engineering schools are based in Europe, specifically Italy, Germany, France and the UK, Chinese colleges and universities are ramping up their automotive based courses.

Jilin University

As Jilin is close to the industry based Changchun city where VAG vehicles are churned out in their hundreds of thousands each year, there is a huge demand for fresh automotive talent in the city. Jilin University has stepped up and developed several automotive based courses. Jilin University is heavily focused towards automotive engineering but it also has a strong design facility, the uni did produce the first generation of Chinese designers such as Hong Qi’s Zhai Yan Liang and also SAIC-VW’s Shao Jing Feng.

Shanghai Tong Ji University

Shanghai Tong Ji University is an amazing place, but it is not exactly close to the city of Shanghai, in fact the automotive campus is probably closer to Kunshan than it is to Shanghai – yes we did say automotive campus. Tong Ji has a massive campus entirely devoted to the study and development of automotive based interests, 10,000 students graduate from the school each year, Tong Ji is also the proud owner of the sole wind tunnel in China used for automotive testing which they share with Audi and other manufacturers.  Tong Ji works closely with non automotive Shanghai-VW to raise Chinese design talent, and as a result Tong Ji students have gone on to develop a range of vehicles ranging from buses to several Shanghai VW concept cars.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

As with Tong Ji University, Jiao Tong has a major focus on automotive design and has also set up a cooperation with Shanghai-GM which sees talent from the school snapped up by GM on graduation.

Jiang Nan University

Jiang Nan Uni was the first Chinese university to introduce an industrial design course way back in 1960, the university has a talented alumni and regularly invites world class designers, design companies and design directors to take part in developing the curriculum to make sure the next generation of designers are being produced.

Tsinghua University

It goes without saying that Tsinghua University wouldn’t have a strong automotive program, Tsinghua has become a central pillar in the Chinese arts and is well renowned for its artistic output. The university is also one of China’s older schools with one of the best arts academies in the country with many of the nations top designers in both automotive and other fields graduating from Tsinghua, it comes as no surprise to learn that its also pouring out some very talented designers.

The Chinese auto industry has suffered from a talent crisis for the past 30 years, the years of turmoil from 1900 to 1949 coupled with the Cultural Revolution left China with a serious lack of local talent, but this situation is being rapidly corrected with the latest round of graduates coming out of Chinese universities. In the late 90′s and early 00′s Chinese auto companies relied on foreign know how to get their factories up and running and products coming down the production line, Japanese automotive engineers that had long been in retirement were called up by their Chinese cousins and pushed into work in developing suspension systems for several Chinese companies, European and American engineers and designers were also called upon but thanks to greater local talent and returning overseas Chinese more products are being done by ‘Chinese hands’ than ever before.