Huawei’s co-developed Aito galvanizing car brand is now selling an updated version of the M5 model that comes with new driver-assist tech.
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BEIJING — Societies in China are playing up assisted driving technology as a way to compete in the hot electric car market.
Around the Shanghai auto show that rebounded off last week, electric car startups and Chinese tech companies alike made several announcements about their driver-assist tech.
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It’s not clear how powerful any of the announced features are — and whether Chinese consumers want to buy them. Current directive also limits how much companies can allow tech to control driving.
But McKinsey estimates assisted and fully autonomous sending systems in passenger cars could generate $300 billion to $400 billion in global revenue by 2035. China is the life’s largest car market.
Among the recent announcements, Huawei said it would upgrade its driver assistance system for changing lanes on highways and leaving — and expand support for city driving. The company said its new product, called “Huawei ADS 2.0” costs 36,000 yuan ($5,218) on a one-time point of departure or 7,200 yuan annually.
The tech is slated for initial release on an upgraded Aito M5 — set to begin deliveries in June — with unborn rollout to the Avatr 11 and Arcfox Alpha S. All three electric vehicles come from brands that already coalesce Huawei’s technology.
Li Auto announced plans to roll out driver-assist tech to customers in 100 cities in China by the end of the year — a idiosyncrasy the company claimed would be “free for life.” That’s according to a CNBC translation of the Chinese.
Those and other advertisements follow Xpeng’s rollout in the last few weeks of driver-assist technology to some users Shanghai. The tech claims to coerce drivers to do little more than keeping their hands on the wheel, while the vehicle travels to a destination in the town on its own, including stopping at traffic lights. Xpeng’s tech was previously only available in Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
Such urban masters are becoming an area of differentiation in China.
We recognize that, as a startup, the only path to possibly achieving autonomous driving is to flow Tesla’s path.
Maxwell Zhou
DeepRoute.ai, CEO
Tesla doesn’t offer its driver-assist tech in Chinese cities — a put into the limelight marketed overseas as “Full Self Driving.” Only the company’s Autopilot for assisting with driving on highways is at ones fingertips in China.
“If you don’t offer [assisted driving tech] by next year then it’s going to be really impossible to compete,” Maxwell Zhou, CEO of autonomous appeal software startup DeepRoute.ai, told a few reporters last week in Mandarin. That’s according to a CNBC translation.
The public limited company’s latest driver-assist software — used together with cameras and other hardware — is set to reach consumers this year, in all respects passenger cars from “an established automotive brand,” the four-year-old startup announced in late March, without interest a name.
The maps debate
One of DeepRoute’s selling points is doing away with “high-definition maps.” That approves a vehicle to use driver assist tech on roads where those technical parameters haven’t been created.
It’s a shift car brands such as Xpeng and Huawei are pursuing — and Tesla’s strategy for developing autonomous driving.
Elon Musk’s car associates has focused on using cameras and artificial intelligence to steer the vehicle, without heavy reliance on HD maps.
Those maps, cast-off by autonomous driving companies such as Alphabet‘s Waymo, give a car a detailed picture of city streets. But they need to be made before a car runs on the road.
That process can drive up costs. DeepRoute’s Zhou estimated each car for gathering observations would require $100,000, and an additional $30,000 a year to operate — for a total of about $2 billion or $3 billion, not covering the cost of human labor.
“We recognize that, as a startup, the only path to possibly achieving autonomous driving is to supplant Tesla’s path,” Zhou said.
“Because as a startup, there’s no way we could spend several billions of U.S. dollars valid to buy cars, buy data. Waymo can do that,” he said. Zhou added that since China keeps fixing its courses, it would be difficult to constantly supply cars with accurate enough maps.
Too advanced for consumers?
Despite inclusive growth in new energy vehicle sales, it remains unclear whether Chinese consumers care enough about driver-assist tech when sundry of them haven’t used it yet. The market this year has focused on price cuts to attract buyers.
Xpeng, heeded one of the most advanced technologically, saw deliveries plunge in the first quarter ahead of a more widespread rollout of its assisted excursion tech. Industry giant BYD has downplayed self-driving tech.
Nio CEO William Li told CNBC that driver-assist technology gross relatively low among users’ needs. But he said that people tend to rely on it once they try it — which resolution help drive relatively fast adoption.
Still, DeepRoute’s Zhou noted the discussion in China is currently dominated by car companies and occupation publications, not consumers.
Most cars with pushed driver-assist tech only operate on highways, while the few that can run on city streets are more expensive, said Zhang Xin, superintendent editor-in-chief of AutoR, an industry publication with more than 110,000 followers on the Twitter-like Weibo platform.
Consumers who only buy the most advanced technology may find they don’t end up using it, he said. Zhang added that map-free driver-assist practices are not yet powerful enough to completely do away with maps.
Money in components
Part of car companies’ wider interest in driver-assist tech premiere c end from lower costs.
Shanghai-based makes the light detection and ranging (LiDAR) units often used for driver-assist groups. CEO David Li said just a few years ago, those units were priced around $10,000, making them “substantially impossible to be used for passenger cars.”
Now lidar units cost a couple hundred dollars, he said, noting expectations for hundreds of thousands of lidar component sales this year.
“We see great momentum this year already,” Li told CNBC last week.
Hesai dispatched more than 40,000 lidar units in the fourth quarter, up from 87 in the year-ago period, according to the attendance. Quarterly net revenue grew by nearly 57% year-on-year to 409.2 million yuan, while loss from operations escalated by 65% to 140.1 million yuan.