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Tan Benhong
Former Chairman & CEO
In 2020, Tan Benhong inherited a dormant Changan-NIO joint venture — no brand, no product, no team. Three years later he stood beside Huawei's Richard Yu, declaring Avatr 12 would lead China's EV industry for a decade. One month later, he was removed from all positions. The ¥32B IPO he made possible went forward without him.
Transformation Arc
In December 2022, Avatr delivered exactly nine vehicles in its first month on sale. One year later, Tan Benhong stood on stage beside Huawei’s Richard Yu, declaring that Avatr 12’s design would lead the industry for ten years. One month after that, he was gone.
The auto industry is destined to be a marathon — it has been running for over a hundred years. Avatr will maintain a 'long-termist' philosophy, pursuing sustainable development.
The Secret Column #
Tan joined Changan Auto in the mid-1990s after completing an automobile engineering degree at Chongqing Institute of Technology. Over the next 25 years, he worked through Changan’s technical and management hierarchy — from factory-floor positions to Executive Vice President — accumulating the institutional knowledge that China’s oldest automaker ran on.
When the Changan-NIO joint venture collapsed in 2020, the structure left behind was nearly worthless: a legal entity without a brand, a product pipeline, or a development team. NIO had exited. Changan had other priorities. The JV was scheduled for quiet dissolution.
Tan chose differently. He took over as Chairman and began rebuilding — not as an officially sanctioned initiative but as what insiders described as a “secret column”: a brand-building project run semi-covertly inside Changan’s bureaucracy before the parent company had formally committed. He built while the organization deliberated.
The Soul Question #
The reckoning came in November 2021. Before greenlighting the Avatr brand launch in Shanghai, Changan chairman Zhu Huarong posed what became known internally as the “soul question”: “Do users even need a completely new brand?”
The question forced clarity. Changan already sold electric vehicles. The premium EV segment was crowding rapidly — NIO, Li Auto, XPeng, and BYD’s Yangwang sub-brand were all competing for the same affluent Chinese buyer. A new brand needed to offer something none of them could.
Tan’s answer was structural: the CHN Alliance. He engineered a partnership that brought Huawei’s Intelligent Driving System software and CATL’s battery platform into Avatr as technology co-architects — not subcontractors. Changan provided manufacturing scale and state-enterprise credibility; Huawei provided software intelligence and its vast retail network; CATL provided battery architecture. The three together could do what none could do separately.
The answer to Zhu’s soul question was yes. A new brand was necessary precisely because existing brands couldn’t credibly carry CHN’s promise. Avatr would be design-forward, software-defined, and genuinely premium. In November 2021, it launched in Shanghai with ¥2.42 billion in Series A funding.
Insiders noted that Tan had a hardware encyclopedist’s command of the product — he could recite component specifications “like counting family treasures” (如数家珍). His technical mastery was evident in every product briefing. What he built, he knew in precise detail.
Nine Units #
December 2022 tested everything. Avatr delivered nine vehicles in its first month of commercial sales.
The number was technically explicable — production ramping, supply chain constraints, typical early-delivery dynamics — but commercially devastating. Competitors were delivering thousands monthly. NIO was in the tens of thousands. Avatr, which had raised billions on premium positioning, was in the single digits.
The 2023 trajectory improved but remained far from targets. Against an internal goal of 100,000 deliveries, Avatr shipped 21,483 — a 79% miss. The product that Tan had built with encyclopedic attention to hardware specifications was real. The retail and distribution infrastructure needed to move it at scale was not.
Ten Years, No Competitors #
The Avatr 12 launch in November 2023 was the reset attempt. The vehicle carried more aggressive styling, deeper Huawei integration, and a design brief Tan had championed since the brand’s inception. At the launch event, standing beside Richard Yu of Huawei, Tan made his most public declaration: “I guarantee that Avatr 12’s design will be far ahead of the industry for ten years — all heads turning, no competitors.”
Twenty thousand customers placed orders in the first weeks.
One month later, in December 2023, Tan Benhong was removed from all Avatr positions. The official reassignment was to Party Committee Deputy Secretary at Changan — an organizational and HR role. Chinese business analysts were blunt: “From Tan Benhong’s career profile, he is clearly an operations-type executive. Assigning him to human resources work is a waste of his considerable operational ability.”
He made no public statement. No comment to the press, no message through intermediaries. He accepted the reassignment without visible resistance.
The Brand Moved On #
After Tan’s departure, Avatr doubled its annual delivery volume. The company filed for a ¥32 billion IPO — a financial validation that would have been inconceivable without the CHN alliance Tan structured, the brand identity he fought to establish inside Changan’s bureaucracy, and the product pipeline he shepherded from a dormant shell to commercial reality.
He built the brand. The brand moved on without him.
This is the specific risk of intrapreneurship inside a state enterprise: the builder’s success becomes institutional capital, attributed upward and distributed broadly. Tan operated within a structure where authority flowed to Changan, brand equity accrued to Avatr’s shareholders, and his long-termist philosophy proved accurate in ways he may not have anticipated. The marathon continued. His leg of it ended before the finish line.
The departure circumstances remain partially opaque, as SOE leadership changes rarely surface full explanations. What is documented is the achievement: a dormant JV transformed into a brand capable of a ¥32 billion IPO. What is documented is the timeline: a public declaration of decade-long design leadership, then one month later, removal. And what is documented, finally, is the silence that followed — characteristic of someone who understood that the brand he built was never entirely his to claim.