Seres put nine-month R&D at 5.69bn yuan and said its new platform will support L3
A filed record of an October 31 analyst meeting attributed a RMB 630 million rise in nine-month research spending to iterating the Magic Cube platform, and set the work against China's first mandatory L3 standard.
Seres filed the record of an October 31 analyst meeting on November 2, reporting research and development expenses for the first nine months of 2026 of RMB 5.69 billion, an increase of RMB 630 million or 12.4 percent on the same period of 2025. It attributed the rise to completing an iteration of its Magic Cube technology platform and to an intelligence upgrade.
The company said the new generation of the platform will fully support an L3 architecture as it is progressively completed, and set that against China’s first mandatory national standard for L3 and L4 automated driving, which takes effect on July 1, 2027. Whoever first closed the L3 technology loop and reached production readiness would take the lead in the next cycle, it said, and described itself as pursuing deep vertical integration around chips, algorithms, redundant architecture and safety-validation systems.
Seres said the platform had been upgraded across six core systems — multiple powertrains, cockpit-driving coordination, intelligent chassis, an intelligent hub, intelligent safety and smart services — and that the new generation delivers domain-wide over-the-air updates and all-scenario safety redundancy. It argued that platform iteration lowers the development cost of later models against developing each one independently.
Asked why third-quarter profit excluding non-recurring items was negative, the company said rising raw-material prices and other factors had increased third-quarter operating cost by about RMB 2.5 billion. It named disruption to the global geopolitical landscape, commodity price rises and tight supply of automotive-grade memory chips among the causes of the earlier sharp rise in raw-material prices, and said the pass-through to the finished vehicle lags. It added that the main raw-material prices are now trending down.