Liu Tao

Liu Tao (刘涛) keeps a folder on his phone labeled “Survival.” He chose the English word deliberately. For nearly three decades he had built his career inside SAIC Motor, China’s largest state-owned automaker, and when the company asked him to lead its most ambitious bet, he created a file documenting every way the project might be killed before it ever reached production.

We chose a road that is correct but a bit hard.

The lifer’s credentials #

Tao joined SAIC in 1997, fresh from Jilin University of Technology with an automotive degree — reportedly having filled every line on his college entrance exam with automotive-related majors — and spent the next two decades becoming the kind of executive that state enterprises produce at their best: technically fluent, institutionally loyal, capable of navigating the internal politics that determine which projects survive and which are quietly shelved.

The career that followed was a masterclass in accumulation. He participated in SAIC’s overseas acquisitions — the purchase of Korea’s SsangYong Motor and the assets of Britain’s MG Rover — accumulating cross-border experience that most Chinese automotive executives of his generation lacked. He built the marketing operations for Roewe, SAIC’s domestic passenger car brand, translating engineering capability into consumer language — a skill that would define his approach at IM. Roewe’s sedan would go on to become one of China’s longest-continuously-sold models, with over 1.4 million cumulative deliveries. In 2010, he led the development of inkaNet, China’s first 3G vehicle telematics system — a bet on vehicle connectivity a full decade before the EV revolution made it obvious. The project marked him as someone who understood where the industry was heading, not merely where it had been.

By the time SAIC’s leadership began planning what would become IM Motors in 2019, Tao had earned something rare inside a state-owned enterprise: the combination of technical credibility, political capital, and strategic ambition that made him the obvious choice for the assignment. He was approaching fifty, held an IMBA from the HKU-Fudan program, and had never worked anywhere else. His entire professional identity was SAIC. The assignment to Project No. 1 was not a promotion. It was a wager — SAIC’s, and his own.

The scale of what followed was institutional. Tao and his team produced nearly 10,000 pages of presentations across seven rounds of SAIC group-level review — each round an opportunity for senior leadership to kill the project before it reached production. Every document was filed in the Survival folder. The approval, when it finally came from chairman Chen Hong in March 2020, was not the end of the institutional gauntlet. It was merely the beginning of the market one.

The cage #

The structural disadvantage was obvious from the start. China’s premium EV market was being built by founder-CEOs who owned the companies they ran: Li Bin (李斌) at NIO, He Xiaopeng (何小鹏) at XPeng, Li Xiang (李想) at Li Auto, and eventually Lei Jun (雷军) at Xiaomi. These men controlled their boards, held significant equity, and answered primarily to their own conviction. Tao held no equity in IM Motors. He answered to SAIC’s party committee and senior management. His authority was real but conditional — contingent on quarterly results and institutional patience, not founder prerogative.

The competitive asymmetry extended beyond governance. China’s EV market had developed a “celebrity CEO” culture in which founder personalities drove brand awareness as effectively as advertising budgets. Lei Jun’s product launches drew millions of livestream viewers. Li Xiang’s provocative Weibo posts generated controversy that translated into search traffic. Tao adopted the same playbook — posting on Weibo, hosting livestreams, delivering emotional launch speeches — but the fit was imperfect. Industry observers characterized IM Motors’ marketing as 小家子气 (petty, small-minded), a criticism that reflected less on Tao’s personal ability than on the institutional constraints visible behind every gesture. A founder-CEO’s swagger reads as authenticity. A professional manager’s swagger reads as performance. Tao was performing a role that his competitors inhabited naturally, and the audience could tell.

Multiple industry voices characterized Tao’s marketing approach as 小家子气 (petty, small-minded) compared to the confident swagger of Lei Jun or Li Xiang — not because he lacked conviction, but because the institutional constraints were visible in every public appearance. A founder-CEO’s boldness reads as authenticity. A professional manager’s boldness reads as performance. One observer summarized the dynamic precisely: Tao was “a passionate lifer doing his best to play startup founder within the cage of a state-owned enterprise.” His genuine conviction about driving dynamics and technology was consistent across five-plus years of interviews. But consistency of conviction, without the equity stake to back it, changes nothing about the power dynamics. He operated without equity upside, without job security, and without the communications freedom that founder-CEOs take for granted.

“We chose a road that is correct but a bit hard,” Tao said in January 2023, as sales collapsed toward their nadir. The understatement was characteristic. The road was not “a bit hard.” At 455 monthly units in December 2022, the road appeared to end.

The pattern that wouldn’t break #

The communication failures did not begin in April 2024. They were a pattern — eighteen months of a state-enterprise executive attempting to play the celebrity CEO game in a market built for founders.

In November 2022, Tao attacked Tesla on Weibo over a fatal crash in Chaozhou, calling the company “arrogant and cold-blooded.” A court later found Tesla not at fault; Tao would not apologize publicly until 2025. In December 2022, a video surfaced showing him violating five traffic laws in two minutes while test-driving an IM L7. Another public apology. In November 2023, a livestream in which Tao made dumplings inside a car was mocked by netizens as tone-deaf product marketing; the Weibo post was quietly deleted. Each incident was minor in isolation. Together, they formed a portrait of an executive whose institutional communication instincts — cautious, compliance-oriented, eager to demonstrate personal investment — collided repeatedly with the irreverent expectations of China’s social media landscape.

April 2024 compressed eighteen months of friction into a single devastating sequence. The L6 launch event, IM Motors’ most important product introduction, was designed to answer every criticism the market had leveled: too expensive, too niche, too slow to iterate. Instead, the month became Tao’s worst. He delivered an emotional speech praising his team’s sacrifices — colleagues who missed their children’s births, who tested positive for COVID four times. The Chinese internet responded with accusations of “suffering marketing” (苦难营销), the implication being that a state-enterprise executive invoking exhaustion was performative rather than genuine. Before that controversy subsided, a Xiaomi SU7 specification error in IM’s comparison materials required a public correction. Then a second error. Then a third. Three separate apologies in a single month.

“This is an experience I’ve never had in my entire career,” Tao said. “Regardless, standing at such a critical moment, we cannot miss it.” The statement captured the particular agony of a professional manager in crisis: unlike a founder, who can retreat into private conviction, Tao had to justify continued confidence to the institution that employed him while publicly absorbing damage that a founder would have weathered with equity as insulation.

By August, the damage had reached its structural endpoint. Chinese automotive media reported that Zhang Liang, SAIC’s Chief Digital Officer, was being groomed to replace Tao as IM Motors’ operational leader. IM Motors denied the report as “fake news.” But four factors made the timing genuinely lethal: Tao had just endured his worst public month; sales had not yet responded to the L6 launch; SAIC’s own financial position was deteriorating rapidly; and Rising Auto’s leadership had already been reshuffled before its dissolution — a precedent Tao would have understood with precision. The arithmetic was public: 28,469 units delivered through July against a full-year target of 120,000.

The folder pays off #

What saved Tao was not a speech, an apology, or a marketing campaign. It was the product he had bet on.

On September 26, the refreshed LS6 debuted with Lingxi Digital Chassis 2.0 and the IM AD 3.0 autonomous driving system — creating what IM internally called the “Double 6 Series” strategy, pairing the refreshed LS6 with the L6 to cover the ¥20–30万 segment with technology density that competitors could not match at the price. October’s delivery count was 10,001 — arriving just two months after the replacement rumors. November followed with 10,007. For the first time, IM Motors had crossed the threshold that separates curiosity from credibility in China’s EV market.

The L6, the same product whose launch had generated Tao’s worst month, turned out to be exactly the vehicle the brand needed — priced aggressively enough to reach volume, differentiated enough by the Lingxi chassis and full technology stack to sustain margins. The product that had required three apologies was now generating the only growth numbers anywhere in SAIC’s portfolio.

The fourth quarter accelerated. The year ended with 65,503 deliveries, a 71 percent increase over the prior year. SAIC’s overall performance continued to decline for the fourth consecutive year — joint ventures with Volkswagen and General Motors hemorrhaging market share to domestic competitors. IM Motors was the exception, and Tao was its architect. The professional manager who held no equity, answered to a party committee, and competed against founder-CEOs with personal fortunes on the line had produced the only brand in SAIC’s stable that was growing.

The irony is structural. The institutional constraints that made Tao seem weak — no founder equity, SOE bureaucracy, conditional authority, communication instincts that repeatedly misfired — were precisely the advantages that kept IM alive while founder-led competitors burned through capital and conviction in equal measure. HiPhi’s founder-CEO could not absorb losses indefinitely. Tao’s parent company could. Tao’s lack of personal brand meant IM’s identity rested on product, not personality — and when the product finally arrived, the brand’s survival was not contingent on one man’s charisma.

By March 2025, Tao was managing IM’s expansion into Thailand, the first of fifteen international markets leveraging SAIC’s existing MG dealer infrastructure. Export models were renamed — L6 became IM5, LS6 became IM6 — reflecting a professional manager’s pragmatic concession to global brand architecture rather than a founder’s insistence on name continuity.

Through November 2025, Tao remains Co-CEO. He has outlasted the replacement cycle that ended other executives’ tenures at underperforming SAIC subsidiaries. He has survived longer than several of the founder-led brands he was most often compared to unfavorably. The story is not yet a triumph — IM Motors still trails NIO, XPeng, and Xiaomi in monthly volume, and the 120,000-unit target that prompted the replacement rumors has not been reached. But the Survival folder, it turns out, was correctly named — not because the project nearly died, though it did, but because the folder’s creator understood from the beginning that survival inside a state-owned enterprise is never guaranteed, only earned, one quarter at a time.

Last updated: March 16, 2026