Intelligent driving a new engine for China's NEV industry

With several automakers unveiling plans to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence and advanced technologies, intelligent driving injected new vitality into the NEV industry, the China Securities Journal reported on Tuesday.

China's automaker BYD released its premium advanced driver assistance system "God's Eye" on Feb 10, while Changan Automobile officially launched on Feb 9 its intelligent strategy "Dubhe 2.0" plan, outlining a detailed roadmap for intelligent upgrades. Li Auto is set to release a self-driving car featuring an L4 smart driving solution within the next three years, and Xpeng plans to launch a L3 autonomous driving system by late 2025.

Besides, carmakers have ramped up efforts on research and development investment in the field of intelligent driving. BYD, with a team of over 5,000 engineers in the intelligent driving sector, hit a record-high R&D investment of 33.3 billion yuan ($4.56 billion) in the first three quarters of 2024, a 34-percent increase year-on-year. Nearly half of the annual R&D investment of Li Auto, which exceeded 10 billion yuan, focused on artificial intelligence, with the company establishing four dedicated AI teams.

"Intelligent driving is no longer out of reach," said BYD chairman Wang Chuanfu. "Currently, the biggest obstacle to the widespread adoption of intelligent driving is the high price, which prevents most consumers from accessing the technology."

Experts believe that the introduction of DeepSeek, an open-source large language model, will not only accelerate the training speed of intelligent driving systems, but also reduce the training cost. This is expected to increase the penetration rate of high-level intelligent driving systems among carmakers, making the technology more available and affordable for consumers, according to the China Securities Journal.

BYD announced that it would fully integrate DeepSeek to enhance both car-end AI and cloud AI capabilities. In addition, other carmakers including Geely, Dongfeng Motor, SGMW's Baojun, Leapmotor and Chery Group also announced deep integration with DeepSeek.

By 2025, the intelligent driving hardware threshold is expected to fall with the advancement of the technology, making the system widely available for under 200,000 yuan, according to a report by Minsheng Securities.