Purpose This paper aims to quest the strategies and paths of Chinese automobile firms for being world class. It analyzes their strengths and potentials in comparison with the development experience of the global examples and provides policy recommendations for cultivating world-class automobile firms. Design/methodology/approach The authors apply the analytic hierarchy process method to evaluate the competitiveness of automobile firms with multiple indicators. Findings The evaluation results suggest that Chinese automobile firms still lagged behind their world-class peers. Especially, Chinese domestic firms developed unevenly so that they could not make progress in the core parametric dimensions. Nevertheless, Chinese firms could achieve world class, at least in some niche segments, supported by its accumulated technological capacity and tremendous market size. Originality/value This research is the first scholarly work to evaluate the competitiveness of Chinese automobile firms and provides insightful comments on its industrial policies in the automobile industry. This may be valuable for policymaking in the automobile sector of China and other developing economies.

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