On October 10, the fourth stop of Changan Mazda's "Seedling Plan Season 2" National University Tour came to Beijing Jiaotong University. With the theme "Above the Surface — The Aesthetics and Art of Automotive Industrial Design," through a variety of formats including special lectures, roundtable dialogues, in-depth interaction, and campus ambassador appointments, it presented the faculty and students of Beijing Jiaotong University with an automotive industry feast of face-to-face exchange between industrial practice and academic research.
Wu Xuxi, Executive Deputy General Manager of Changan Mazda Automobile Sales Branch, and relevant leaders from the School of Mechanical, Electronic and Control Engineering of Beijing Jiaotong University attended the event. Wu Xuxi said: "Beijing Jiaotong University has a profound heritage and distinctive characteristics in the fields of transportation and vehicle engineering — its Transportation Engineering discipline has ranked first in the world 6 times, Vehicle Operation Engineering is a national key discipline, and the Vehicle Engineering major is a national-level characteristic major and one of the first batch of national first-class major construction points, with abundant achievements in fields such as vehicle dynamics, new energy vehicle powertrains, and intelligent connected transportation. Generation after generation of top talent who have advanced China's transportation and automotive industry have emerged from here, providing solid talent support for the high-quality transformation of the national automotive industry."
[Wu Xuxi, Executive Deputy General Manager of Changan Mazda Automobile Sales Branch]
Beijing Jiaotong University can be traced back to the Railway Management Training Institute founded in 1896. It is China's first institution of higher learning specifically dedicated to cultivating management talent and the birthplace of modern Chinese railway management and telecommunications education. Changan Mazda was established as a joint venture by central state-owned enterprise Changan Automobile and Mazda, two century-old companies, and is a joint venture controlled by a central state-owned enterprise. Today, Changan Mazda has become Mazda's global center for new energy R&D, production, manufacturing, and complete vehicle export, with EZ series new energy models exported to more than 60 countries and regions worldwide.
At the event, Liu Yifan, Chief Designer of Changan Mazda, delivered a special lecture titled "In the New Energy Era, Mazda's Path of Design," in which, combined with the design practice of the EZ-60, he explained in detail the evolution of "Kodo Design" in the electric era and systematically explained how Changan Mazda breaks through homogeneous styling design and leads the trend of new energy design. In the roundtable dialogue session, focusing on themes such as "The Aesthetics and Art of Automotive Industrial Design" and "Automotive Industrial Manufacturing and Quality," engineering experts from the front line of Changan Mazda's Product R&D Center engaged in in-depth exchanges with professors and experts from the School of Mechanical, Electronic and Control Engineering of Beijing Jiaotong University, sparking many innovative ideas.
[Liu Yifan, Chief Designer of Changan Mazda]
[Engineers from Changan Mazda's Product R&D Center and professors and experts from the School of Mechanical, Electronic and Control Engineering of Beijing Jiaotong University engage in a roundtable dialogue]
Faced with this valuable opportunity for exchange, students of Beijing Jiaotong University showed enthusiastic interest in the interactive Q&A session, with questions covering multiple frontier fields such as AI car manufacturing, electric vehicle motion sickness prevention design, automotive paint craftsmanship inheritance, assisted driving technology layout, battery safety standards, and intelligent cockpit development approaches. Engineers from Changan Mazda's Product R&D Center answered them one by one. Changan Mazda presented appointment letters to the first batch of Beijing Jiaotong University "KOC Campus Promotion Ambassadors." They will serve as a bridge between Changan Mazda and Beijing Jiaotong University students, continuously spreading and implementing the industry-academia integration concept of the "Seedling Plan" on campus, enabling more students to participate and grow continuously through real industrial practice.
Since its first stop at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in May this year, the Seedling Plan has successively visited Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Beijing Institute of Technology, and Chongqing University, with Beijing Jiaotong University as the fourth stop. It will continue to visit top universities across the country in the future, building a long-term mechanism for collaborative education between schools and enterprises. As part of the industry-academia integration system of the "Seedling Plan," at the end of last month, student representatives of the Seedling Plan were invited to attend Changan Mazda's 2026 Fan Festival and the launch event of the EZ-60 Laser Edition and shared on stage. The ongoing EZ-60 National University Modification Design Competition has also officially opened for Beijing Jiaotong University students, and outstanding works will have the opportunity to be realized as actual modifications.
[Seedling Plan students take the stage at Changan Mazda's global vehicle launch event]
Entering 2026, Changan Mazda continues to deepen its new energy transformation: sales from January to August increased by 20% year-on-year, outperforming the market by 38 percentage points, with full-year sales expected to grow by 25% year-on-year; the share of new energy product sales reached 57%, making it a leader in the new energy transformation of joint ventures. In the future, Changan Mazda will continue to use the "Seedling Plan" as a link to deepen school-enterprise cooperation, enabling more young students to participate in the R&D and creation of global automotive products, and jointly write a new chapter for China's automotive industry in the new energy era.
