Abstract: As a complex product system, new energy vehicles have brought disruptive changes to existing transportation modes and energy consumption structures, especially in the context of addressing climate change and promoting green development trends, playing a crucial role in continuously leading the transformation and upgrading of China's automotive industry. However, despite the significant achievements in the development of the new energy vehicle industry, a retrospective analysis reveals that its technological level has been constrained by multiple factors, such as the absence of core technologies, low-end production capacity, and fraudulent subsidy claims by enterprises. These factors have long maintained a fixed gap with cutting-edge technologies, positioning the industry as a follower struggling to achieve a leap forward and deeply mired in a "middle-technology trap." This not only results in the idle waste of government fiscal funds but also further dampens the enthusiasm of market entities and end-consumer participation, ultimately hindering the healthy development of the new energy vehicle industry. Based on this, analyzing the theoretical mechanism for the new energy vehicle industry to bridge the technological gap and achieve technological catch-up in the short term becomes an important issue that drives China to transition from a major automotive country to a powerful one and inspires other industries stuck in late-developer traps to pursue technological catch-up. Addressing this issue, this paper first systematically argues the characteristic facts of the new energy vehicle industry falling into the "middle-technology trap" in its early stages by combining aspects of government regulation, market development, and industrial chain support. It identifies that non-unified technical standards, pervasive local protectionism in the institutional environment, insufficient competitive mechanisms, and outdated market environments, along with an industry chain system that only masters low-end technological processes, are the main reasons why new energy vehicles face low levels of core technology R&D, an extensive but not strong industrial chain, and a lack of autonomy. Considering that mainstream technology catch-up theories like reverse A-U cannot effectively explain the phenomenon of rapid industrial catch-up, this paper, based on the existing literature on industrial technology transcendence paths and focusing on the phenomenon of rapid development in the new energy vehicle industry in the short term, attempts to reveal the mechanism of technological catch-up for new energy vehicles as a complex product system from the perspective of dynamic stage evolution based on the logical chain of "goal-action-outcome." Specifically, facing the predicament of being stuck in the "middle-technology trap," this paper, in conjunction with industry-relevant background information, finds that the technological catch-up process of the industry undergoes three stages and forms a new catch-up model: core component industrialization achieved through alliance-led entity coordination by integrating elements and constructing standards; application scenario diversification achieved through policy-empowered process coordination by establishing and optimizing processes; and ecosystem maturation achieved through market-led strategic coordination by leading competition and extending value. Throughout the catch-up process, the government, market, and industry chain as the boundary conditions of industrial development, jointly drive the industry to bridge the technological gap by leveraging institutional advantages, scale benefits, and support advantages. The new innovation catch-up model proposed in this paper differs from existing technology catch-up theories formed in strongly administratively controlled and monopolistic market areas, providing a robust theoretical supplement to the literature on bridging technology gaps in open market environments. It further expands the innovative evolutionary path for late-developer industries to achieve technological catch-up, providing a theoretical basis for revealing the basic mechanisms and principles of complex product systems to achieve rapid catch-up.