AUSTIN: Chinese electric-vehicle makers led by BYD beat Tesla in the competition to produce affordable electric vehicles. Now, many of those same fierce competitors are pulling into the passing lane in the global race to produce self-driving cars.
BYD shook up China’s smart-EV industry earlier this year by offering its “God’s Eye” driver-assistance package for free, undercutting the technology Tesla sells for nearly US$9,000 (RM38,000) in China. “With God’s Eye, Tesla’s strategy starts to fall apart,” said Shenzhen-based BYD investor Taylor Ogan, an American who has owned several Teslas and driven BYD cars with God’s Eye, which he called more capable than Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” (FSD).
It’s not just BYD. Other Chinese auto and tech companies are offering affordable EVs with FSD-like technology for a relative pittance. China’s Leapmotor and Xpeng, for instance, offer systems capable of highway and urban driving in US$20,000 vehicles. A slew of Chinese firms are chasing the same technology, an industry push backed by China’s government. BYD’s assisted-driving hardware costs are far lower than Tesla’s, according to analyses performed for Reuters by companies that dismantle and analye vehicles for automakers. The comparisons, which have not been previously reported, show that BYD’s costs to procure components and build a system with radar and lidar are about the same as Tesla’s FSD, which doesn’t have such sensors. That undercuts Tesla’s unusual technological approach, which aims to save costs by nixing such sensors and relying solely on cameras and artificial intelligence. The rising competition from Chinese smart-EV players is among the chief problems confronting Tesla CEO Elon Musk after his rocky tenure as a Trump administration advisor as he refocuses on his business empire – as Tesla vehicle sales are tanking globally.
Tesla did not respond when reached for comment about its Chinese competitors. Previously, Musk has described Chinese car companies as the most competitive in the world. Chinese competition was one factor driving Tesla’s strategic pivot away from mass-market EVs last year, when Reuters reported it had killed plans to build an all-new EV expected to cost US$25,000. Musk has since staked Tesla’s future instead on self-driving robotaxis, the hopes for which now underpin the vast majority of the automaker’s stock-market value of roughly US$1 trillion. Now Tesla faces the same stiff competition on vehicle autonomy from many of the same Chinese automakers who undercut its affordable-EV plans. Adding to the challenge are tech firms including Chinese smartphone giant Huawei, which supplies autonomous-driving technology to major Chinese automakers. Short of full autonomy, today’s driver-assistance systems offer a critical competitive edge in China, the world’s largest car market, where Tesla sales are falling amid a protracted price war among scores of homegrown EV brands. Tesla is further handicapped by China’s regulations preventing it from using data collected by Tesla cars in China to train the artificial intelligence underpinning FSD.
BYD investor Ogan, of Shenzhen-based Snow Bull Capital, has a front-row seat to China’s autonomous-tech battleground. He recently drove several BYD models equipped with God’s Eye, he said, and didn’t have to take over driving in any of them while traveling the congested streets of Shenzhen, a bustling southern China megalopolis of 18 million people.
Another notable smart-EV player in China is Huawei, experts say.
Huawei lends its technology and branding to a half dozen automakers including heavyweights Chery, SAIC and Changan, and has lower-profile partnerships with more than a dozen other carmakers, Huawei representatives said.
Reuters journalists rode in an Aito M9 – a luxury electric SUV from Seres with Huawei driver-assistance technology – as it navigated Shenzhen roadways in April. With a driver’s hands off the wheel, the vehicle exited a highway seamlessly into a congested urban zone, where the M9 proceeded cautiously and slowed to a crawl as a construction worker appeared like he might walk into the roadway. At one point the vehicle turned right and slowly drifted left to avoid two men unloading boxes from a parked truck. The vehicle then parallel parked itself at Huawei’s Shenzhen headquarters. – Reuters
