According to the Financial Times, global car brands have been stunned by the success of Chinese automakers in the rapid adoption of electric vehicles. Today, the battleground is shifting to autonomous vehicles. Many experts believe that China has once again gained the upper hand.The competition means that U.S. companies such as Tesla and Waymo will face off against BYD, China's largest electric car maker, as well as self-driving taxis from Pony.ai, Baidu and WeRide.
China’s self-driving taxi market could be worth US$47 billion
Although autonomous driving has been seen as BYD's shortcoming for years, the company shocked the entire auto industry in January this year when it announced that it would deploy its "Sky Eye" advanced assisted driving system on 21 new models at no extra charge to customers.
BYD takes the lead
Tu Le, founder of consulting firm Sino Auto Insights, said BYD appears to be taking a leading position in the race to develop advanced driver assistance systems. Such technologies include automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, monitoring driver attention and potential collisions, etc., and are regarded as a prelude to achieving fully autonomous driving.
"If you ask me who will win, I have to go back to the question of 'who sells more cars'. If we talk about heroes based on data, we need to consider who collects more data? How much of this data is used for algorithm training? Then BYD will obviously win, because they have made the smart driving system standard for all series." Tu Le said.
BYD's "Sky Eye" intelligent driving system becomes standard equipment for cars
As the nascent industry of autonomous driving continues to grow, companies are vying for hundreds of billions of dollars in potential new revenue as logistics and transportation fleets adopt self-driving vehicles that are expected to become safer, cheaper and more efficient.
Goldman Sachs analysts predicted this month that China’s self-driving taxi market will soar from $54 million in 2025 to $47 billion in 2035. Goldman Sachs analysts said the growth was driven by falling hardware and algorithm costs. The cost of a vehicle equipped with smart driving features is expected to drop from US$44,000 today to US$32,000 in 2035.
Coupled with the decline of the internal combustion engine vehicle industry, the emergence of autonomous vehicles has also brought new opportunities for hardware and software companies.
One of the strongest contenders is Baidu, a Chinese company that rivals Google and is the country's largest autonomous taxi operator. Baidu said in January this year that its Luobo Kuaipao self-driving vehicles provided 1.1 million rides to the public in the fourth quarter of last year, a year-on-year increase of 36%, and the cumulative number of rides exceeded 9 million.
Huawei asks the world
Another high-profile challenger is Huawei. Although the company has no plans to build cars, it is expected to dominate many aspects of the autonomous driving supply chain.
"Huawei has a clear advantage. They are trying to achieve full vertical integration, that is: manufacturing chips, developing software, building in-car entertainment systems, and processing data in the cloud." Tu Le said.
In the United States, Tesla plans to launch a self-driving online ride-hailing service in Austin, Texas, in June this year and start producing a batch of self-driving vehicles next year. However, Elon Musk has encountered regulatory issues over whether his Cybercabs self-driving taxis can be allowed on the road without pedals and steering wheels.
In the face of changes in the world's geopolitical environment, Christoph Weber, head of the Chinese business of Swiss engineering software company AutoForm, said that Germany's Volkswagen seems to be in a good position in the autonomous driving competition and is expected to continue to remain competitive.
In recent years, Volkswagen has been caught off guard by the rapid progress of China's auto industry, and its share in the country has been hit hard. But since then, Volkswagen has made sweeping adjustments to its global strategy. Weber said that Volkswagen now seems to be essentially becoming "two companies": one in China and one in the United States, each with independent technology platforms, supply chains and R&D teams.