BYD Executive Believes L2 Intelligent Driving Gaining Traction in China

At the Jiemian News REAL tech conference held on November 7, Zhong Yilin, vice president of BYD’s automotive engineering research institute, said that the sales volume and penetration rate of intelligent vehicles on L2 and above in China increased rapidly, which was 24.5 times higher than that in 2017. Vehicles in the price range of 200,000 yuan to 300,000 yuan ($27,669 to $41,503) witnessed the largest increase, gaining ground on those vehicles which cost upwards to a million yuan.

At present, the highest level of vehicles equipped with automatic driving technology in the Chinese market is still L2. This system is able to control the vehicle horizontally and vertically under its operational design condition. According to several automobile enterprises, most auxiliary driving systems can cover daily uses. According to the High-tech Intelligent Automobile Research Institute, from January to July 2022, about 2,838,900 L2-level intelligent assisted driving vehicles were equipped with insurance, an increase of nearly 70% year-on-year.

Many automobile company executives attach great importance to automatic driving. For example, He Xiaopeng, founder of XPeng Motors, has said before that the company will attain real automatic driving by 2025. Even the founder of Xiaomi, which has not yet successfully built a car, regards autonomous driving as the core of his company’s automobile business, saying that Xiaomi will enter the first echelon of the industry in 2024.

BYD has mastered the core technologies of the whole industrial chain of new energy vehicles such as batteries, motors and electronic controls, and has product matrices such as passenger cars, buses, trucks, and industrial vehicles. In terms of intelligence, at present, some models have been equipped with L2 intelligent driving assistance functionality and intelligent pilot, creating a better experience for users.

In April this year, BYD launched four new models for its Han Series. The DiPilot intelligent driving assistance system is equipped with up to 24 sensing elements, adding functions such as highway advanced driving assistance and emergency lane keeping assistance, reaching L2 automatic driving.

SEE ALSO: BYD to Independently Develop Intelligent Driving Chip

Zhong Yilin said that, in regard to intelligent networked vehicles, China has made breakthroughs in a variety of key components, and gradually is able to compete with many global players. Many major cities in China have issued supporting policies.

In mid-October, Shenzhen issued a document to promote the development of the intelligent networked automobile industry from four aspects and sixteen measures. On September 5, Shanghai issued a plan, aiming to expand the special market to 500 billion yuan and making L2 and L3 cars account for more than 70% of new vehicle production by 2025. The scheme focuses on key areas such as vehicle-grade chips, artificial intelligence algorithms, lidar, vehicle-mounted operating systems, intelligent computing platforms, and wire-based execution systems.