Diagnosis: chinaAutomobile industryIn particular, the new energy sector is facing a typical “inner-consumption” disease. At the core of its pathology is that the vicious “water battle” is forcing enterprises to apply the funds and energy that they are applying to r & d, shifting on a large scale to defensive marketing and emotional confrontations, thus systematically eroding the long-term innovation underpinnings of industry at the three levels of resource allocation, competitive logic, and market confidence。
The most visible indicator on the checklist is the imbalance between r & d and marketing
It depends on the disease, first the data. The two most striking sets of figures on the test list reveal a mismatch of resources in the industry。
Even worse, this squeeze is fatal for small and medium-sized enterprises that lack the technology to keep the river. They need to spend 30-50 per cent of their marketing budget on a responsive response, leading to less than half of the industry average for their r & d investment, in a vicious circle of “indefensible or beaten to defend themselves against lack of money for r & d”。
The logic of competition is distorted by the internal and external causes of the disease and by the fact that the underlying causes are “bad currency to expel the good currency”
External factors are environmental changes. In 2025, the profits of the chinese automobile industry fell to 4. 1 per cent, a decade low. In the brutal game of the stock market, some cars found that wiping their rivals through the “water forces” was a very low-cost, very quick “high-roi” market behaviour compared to the billions of dollars invested in positive research and development that took years。
But the real underlying causes are fundamental distortions in the logic of competition, creating two vicious cycles:
Since august 2025, when the ideal car was attacked by the ai water force, the order was sharply reduced by more than 5,000 vehicles, evaporated at a market value of about $20 billion; the ideal mega was listed for 72 hours for malicious p drawings, with a withdrawal of up to 10,297 vehicles。
Enterprise-specific specimens: visions and experiences, mapping industry-wide pathology
With the ideal car as a specimen, we see more than the loss of a company, but the pathology of the entire industry. The “new car has not been released, black reviews have arrived” and the comment area has been attacked by organizations, behind which ai technology is holding back, the cost of producing a black copy is close to zero (the cost of a black copy is only a few cents), while the cost of safeguarding the rights of the enterprise is extremely high (more than a year, more than a million dollars)。
On the other hand, there is a chronic average of 15,000 attacks per month, with an estimated annual loss of over $2. 8 billion. The founder, li bin tan, said that the cost of responding to the water force was between $30 million and $50 million a month. These huge sums of money and the energy of legal and public relations teams could have been invested in the next generation of battery technology or smart driving algorithms。
Post-pregnancy: is it a phase disorder or a structural recession
This depends on the results of the game of internal and external causes, which will need to be seen later in a hierarchy:
Even more dangerous is the spread of this “infiltration” abroad, which exacerbates global consumer doubts about chinese automobile technology and becomes a hidden obstacle to the rise of brand premiums and the globalization process。
A positive signal is that the market itself is producing antibodies. A 2026 study of the news shows that 87. 08 per cent of consumers listed safety as a primary factor in car purchases, and that brand names (53. 33 per cent) are more important than intelligent configurations (51. 77 per cent). This means that consumers are sobering themselves from marketing brows and anchoring trust on real security and long-term reputations。
The short-term information fog created by the navy could eventually penetrate the market's long-term rational choice。
Final diagnosis: the battle of the auto-water force is not an unheavy “over-marketing” but a “chronic disease” that is consuming the core innovative blood of the industry. It will not immediately take china’s leading technological advantage away, but it will significantly slow the process of transforming the technology dividend into brand value, market confidence, and global leadership. To heal it, a dose of “supervisory iron boxing + platform responsibility + corporate consensus” is needed。
