What does China’s ‘perfect EV’ look like? It must be smart, handy, and have stamina to go the distance
- Increasingly, an EV’s appeal depends on how smart it is, not just how far it can go or how cheap it is
- Improving battery technology and investments in charging infrastructure have helped EVs to travel further than ever before on a single charge
Three weeks later, the man in charge of spearheading smart-driving technology at China’s largest telecommunications supplier hit back.
Increasingly, an EV’s appeal is defined by how smart it is, not how far it can go or how cheap it is, as technological advances helped overcome drivers’ so-called range anxiety and lower production costs.
“Making the cars autonomous and intelligent can draw more Chinese buyers.”
Intelligence is measured by the vehicle’s digital bells and whistles, manifested in such built-in features as voice-activated controls, facial recognition, over-the-air software upgrades, phone-linked features and self parking.
The watershed moment came in 2022 when Chinese carmakers made headway to turn self driving into a reality, said UBS’ analyst Paul Gong.
“Chinese companies are developing [self-driving] technology fast, while striving to produce and sell cars [fitted with these systems] on a large scale,” he said.
“They have shown their capability in controlling costs, and it is an encouraging sign that they have taken the leap forward in commercialising the technology.”
The most complex component in self-driving is the light detection and range sensor (LiDAR), which uses pulsed lasers to map out a 3D view of the vehicle’s surroundings.
China’s highway laws bar Level 5 full automation – requiring zero human intervention all the time – except on designated routes in controlled environments.
Most of the self-driving capabilities found in China’s EVs are either classified as L2 or L3, where sensors are used to give a vehicle “environment detection” capability, enabling it to decide whether to pass a slow-moving car.
But the technology still requires human override and the driver must be alert and ready to take control.
“Eventually, driverless cars are supposed to be safer than cars with humans behind the wheels.”
It has already supplied autonomous driving systems to about 30 carmaking clients including Tesla challenger Nio and Geely’s premium EV brand Zeekr in China.
Wang, also head of the company’s smart car business division, said SenseTime had signed agreements with the assemblers to install a total of 31 million autonomous driving products in their cars.
The painstaking efforts by Xpeng’s engineers would make the X-NGP “better suited” to the “complicated scenarios on China’s roads [than FSD]”, said the Guangzhou carmaker’s president, Brian Gu.
Up to 15 per cent of all new EVs will have at least partial automation (L2) within the next three years, according to Baidu, China’s dominant internet search engine operator, which created an open-source autonomous driving platform in 2017.
That translates to about 400 million smart cars that can drive on highways as well as city roads, and park themselves with partial or conditional human intervention.
Beijing-based Baidu is now running fully autonomous robot taxis on designated routes in the Hubei provincial capital of Wuhan, as well as Chongqing and Beijing.
“In 2026, when intelligent cars become more prevalent, customers will be less likely to consider cars without intelligent driving capabilities,” said Li Zhenyu, Baidu’s vice-president and head of its Apollo intelligent driving business division.
“Carmakers are supposed to plan ahead to face a new round of competition.”
Apollo’s technology has been used in 134 models from 31 car brands – a total 7 million vehicles. The company is fully prepared for competition with FSD, said Apollo’s general manager Rob Chu.
“It would take one year to 18 months for FSD to adapt to the traffic conditions in China,” Chu said during an April 16 press conference in Shanghai.
“We still have time to fine-tune our technology and system to improve our capabilities in autonomous driving, and prepare them fully for competition.”
Advancements in battery technology and China’s investments in charging infrastructure have enabled EVs to travel farther than ever before on a single charge, removing the range anxiety that previously hampered adoption of the technology.
Contemporary Amperex Technology Corporation (CATL), the largest of them all, last week unveiled a battery that packs a whopping 500 watt-hours per kilogram, double its current energy density, and enough to power a light aircraft someday.
China quietly takes 10 per cent of global market for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles
Most of the premium models launched since then, including Nio’s EC6 and ES6, as well as Xpeng’s P7 and G9, all can go beyond 500km on a single charge.
The exhibition booths of marques from the US, Europe, Japan and South Korea, previously the dominant forces in China’s automobile market, no longer held sway.
The combined first-quarter sales of Volkswagen’s ventures in Changchun and Shanghai fell 15.4 per cent to 607,412 cars, putting the German carmaker within striking distance by BYD, whose deliveries jumped 77 per cent in the same period to 508,706 cars.
The writing is on the wall for Europe’s carmakers, as they are falling behind Chinese rivals in digital technology, said Joerg Wuttke, the chief representative of the German chemicals company BASF and president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China.
“This auto show was an eye-opener for everyone, and we have to get up and keep going,” Wuttke said in Shanghai this week.