SAIC Volkswagen's 'Blue Army' pilots the direct-sales model the rest of the JV won't touch

By 2020, sales had slid to 1.5 million units (−24.7% YoY) and China's EV shift was accelerating (by 2023, per CPCA, hybrid sales were up 492% from 2021 while pure EVs gained 107%), but this JV had no experience selling electric cars inside a fuel-car machine — and German executives were openly hostile to range-extenders.

A small in-house 'Blue Army' pilots the EV sales model the rest of the JV fears — before the market forces the change

Fu Qiang, the sales & marketing deputy GM, built a ~30–40-person 'Blue Army' team dedicated to NEV sales. It piloted the agency (proxy) model closest to new-force direct sales, opened dedicated ID.Stores in city centers, cut order-to-delivery time from 3–4 weeks to under one by pre-stocking dealer inventory, and later ran formal red-blue 'battles' between marketing and R&D on product definition.

The ID. pure-EV series passed 180,000 cumulative units in 2.5 years — the joint-venture 'EV sales champion' — while the agency model it proved spread company-wide, reaching 757 agency dealers and 50+ ID.Store(X) showrooms by early 2022.

SAIC Volkswagen was China's sales champion, first past 2 million units in 2016, but sales slid to 1.5 million in 2020, down 24.7%. The market split: by 2023 hybrid and range-extender sales were up 492% from 2021 while pure EVs grew 107%, and Volkswagen China's CEO had dismissed range-extenders as 'the worst solution'. Inside the JV, nobody knew how to sell electric cars.

Fu Qiang, deputy GM for sales, framed it in wargame terms: 'we were the whole organization's Blue Army, because the main battlefield was fuel cars.' In 2020 his team built a ~30–40 person unit for NEV sales, piloted the agency model, opened ID.Store city showrooms, and studied new forces with an 'empty-cup mindset'. The first ID.4 X rolled off the MEB line in October 2020.

The pilot learned in public. Agency 1.0 took three to four weeks from order to delivery; 2.0 pre-positioned inventory, cut delivery to under a week, and moved to three-party contracts. In 2.5 years the ID. family passed 180,000 cumulative units, the 'JV EV sales champion'. Fu Qiang admits it undershot the plan: 200,000–300,000 annual sales was the target, about 100,000-plus was reality. For the ID.ERA range-extender, marketing and R&D fought red-blue 'battles' over trade-offs.

Fencing the new business off protects it from being managed to death by the old business's metrics — the unit survived precisely because it was explicitly experimental.

Making failure safe lets the model iterate: agency 1.0's delivery mess was fixed in 2.0 rather than punished, because a pilot's job is to find the problems.

The wargame frame turns internal conflict into a ritual: marketing and R&D argued in defined rounds about range, weight and cost instead of fighting politically.

Wins get exported: by early 2022 the pilot's agency model ran across 757 dealers and 50+ city showrooms — a prototype that became company practice.

When the core business can't move, incubate the future in an adversarial pocket: a small team, its own sales model, a mandate to differ, then export the proven process back.

The Blue Army's patterns became the template for the wider comeback. By 2025 the JV had proposed 'one-price' pricing, its Pro family share rose from 7.2% (2023) to nearly 8.7% (Q1 2025), and with the venture extended to 2040 under 'JV 2.0', the ID.ERA range-extender is set to launch in April 2026 against the Li L8/L9. Fu Qiang now spends most time on product and strategy, delegating sales to younger cadres.