It’s crazy!
On the evening of February 10th, BYD held an intelligent strategy conference to launch the "Eye of God" advanced intelligent driving system, and lowered the entry price to 69,800 yuan, hoping that everyone can enjoy advanced intelligent driving.
If last year’s intellectual drive was "the whole country can open it", then this year’s roll is "everyone can buy it". The intelligent second-half war has made high-level intelligent driving the number one position for competition. As the leader of new energy vehicles in the world, BYD’s next competition is inevitable. However, BYD’s courage to make intellectual driving equal is far beyond the industry’s expectations, and it is directly mounted on the entry-level model of 70,000 yuan.
So, in this new competition for the global automobile market, has the intellectual drive really come?
"broken price"
"Smart driving is not a show, and practice makes true knowledge. The real intelligent driving technology is related to the travel experience and safety of every user and family, and must be able to meet the high-frequency travel scenes of users. " On February 11th, Wei Jianjun, Chairman of Great Wall Motor, spoke on the social platform. On the same day, Yu Chengdong, managing director of Huawei, chairman of BG, and chairman of BU, a smart car solution, also shouted from a distance: "Intelligent driving is a completely different realm. Just like calling the internet, it takes 5G to surf the Internet! "
BYD’s intelligent strategy has stirred up a thousand waves, and the voices of many car executives have caused heated discussion.
In the second half of intellectualization, intelligent driving has become synonymous with the technical strength of automobile enterprises, and the new technical track and industrial chain system involved in it are the key for automobile enterprises to create differentiated advantages and carry out value wars. Therefore, car companies have reached a consensus that smart driving must enter the game.
This time, BYD’s amazing thing is to decentralize the smart driving to the entry-level model, covering the mainstream range of 100,000-200,000 yuan. In BYD’s new product layout, high-end smart driving has become standard at more than 100,000 yuan, and it also covers some models below 100,000 yuan.
At the China committee of 100 Forum on Electric Vehicles held last year, He Xiaopeng, Chairman and CEO of Xpeng Motors, pointed out that the reason why intelligent assisted driving did not become an important reason for customers’ car purchase decision was that it was too expensive. "We have seen that high-level intelligent assisted driving is about 50,000 yuan more expensive than intelligent assisted driving that only provides ACC. And if it is only 10,000 or less than 20,000, we believe that high-level intelligent assisted driving and even driverless driving will quickly occupy this market. "
At present, the 69,800-yuan Seagull Smart Driving Edition has high-speed N0A and some high-end parking functions. Although the actual level needs to be tested, it has subverted the market pricing, which has attracted the attention of the industry.
"As the industrial chain matures and the competition in the electric vehicle industry intensifies, providing intelligent functions will become the key for car companies to cope with competition." Zhong Shi, a member of china automobile dealers association Expert Committee, believes that the popularization of intelligence on low-priced vehicles will not only enhance competitiveness, but also further boost market sales.
The year of "equal rights"
The fierce battle between car companies is beginning to take shape, and the key word "equal rights" for smart driving this year has emerged.
As early as the 2024 World New Energy Vehicle Conference held in September 2024, some car company executives predicted that the penetration rate of smart driving would reach 80% in 2025. Therefore, it is no longer enough to measure the popularity of intelligent driving only by using the assisted driving function. What can reflect the intelligent driving level of car companies now is the L2+ level function mass production, which is what many consumers have heard about NOA.
In fact, 2024 is a year in which automobiles compete to popularize high-speed NOA and open cities NOA. Zhiji, Weipai, Ai ‘an … BYD also announced at the end of the year that "Eye of the God" will open the navigation function of cities without maps.
However, when it comes to L2+ smart driving, it usually focuses on vehicles with a price of more than 200,000 yuan. Wang Chuanfu, chairman and president of BYD, pointed out that at present, the number of vehicles equipped with smart driving in the automobile market is 200,000 yuan, and the high price led to less than 10% of vehicles sold in China last year equipped with high-end smart driving. On the contrary, 70% of car consumers buy models below 200,000 yuan, which makes most people have no chance to get in touch with smart driving.
Car companies are eager to decentralize high-level intelligent driving and seize the parity market.
Since the second half of 2024, many automobile brands, including Chang ‘an, BYD, Geely, HarmonyOS Zhixing, GAC Ai ‘an, Lantu, Ideality, Tucki and Zero Run, have put forward plans for equal rights in smart driving, and suppliers such as Huawei Gankun and Horizon are also proposing to promote smart driving for all.
On the eve of BYD’s conference, Changan Automobile released "Beidou Tian Shu 2.0" to promote the transformation of smart driving from "high-end configuration" to "national standard", and plans to install lidar on 100,000-yuan models. Previously, GAC Ai ‘an has decentralized some intelligent functions and plans to carry them on the Ai ‘an UT model with a starting price of less than 100,000 yuan.
Nowadays, BYD has a hand in winning numbers, and a number of smart driving versions have been listed, which has accelerated the pace of product competition and set off a wave of product iteration and high-level smart driving. Following BYD’s big move, Lantu Automobile quickly announced the new Huawei Gankunzhi driving model, and the zero-running car also announced that it would pre-sell the new car of "the first laser radar urban intelligent driving within 150,000 days" in March.
Once the racing starts, it is difficult to stop. In the future, there will be more affordable versions of smart cars, and it is inevitable that high-priced smart cars will sink to the range of 100,000-200,000 yuan.
Industrial chain forward
According to the research report released by CITIC Jiantou, 2025 is the key node to realize the leap-forward development from 1 to 10. In the early stage, pioneers such as Tesla FSD, Huawei ADS, Tucki and Ideality have opened up high-level smart driving technology paths. With the gradual increase of penetration rate, giants such as BYD officially entered the market, and the scale effect of intelligence began to appear.
Under the background of L2+ popularization, L3′ s high-level technology competition is still a bright spot in the industry.
Also on February 10th, He Xiaopeng announced that a brand new version of V6 will be launched in mid-2025, that is, quasi-L3 high-level self-driving; At the end of the year, it will launch true L3-level software (which needs several times the hardware of the vehicle to improve the computing power and storage of the chip) and automatic driving with hardware redundancy. He said that with the official or upcoming release of intelligent strategies by a number of car companies, the wave of national and even global popularization of intelligent driving has arrived.
There is another key factor in He Xiaopeng’s prediction of intelligent driving speed. Just a few days ago, he praised DeepSeek for "shocking the global technology circle" and bluntly said: "In the next decade, AI will drive great changes in automobiles, and it will also drive great changes in hardware and software around the world."
The development of smart cars is catalyzed by technological breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence.
On February 6th, Geely Automobile was the first to announce that its self-developed Star Ruida model had been deeply integrated with DeepSeek-R1. Followed by Geely, Dongfeng, SAIC, Zero Run and many other car companies have successfully joined hands with DeepSeek.
The changes that DeepSeek has brought to cars are not limited to the personification and fluency of voice dialogue in the intelligent cockpit. Some insiders pointed out that DeepSeek, as an open source basic model, is expected to accelerate the training speed of intelligent driving and reduce the training cost of intelligent driving, and become an important tool for intelligent driving training. In other words, with less data, time and cost, the same level of functional development can be achieved.
At the Guangdong High-quality Development Conference held not long ago, Liang Hua, the chairman of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., pointed out that artificial intelligence technology is accelerating its development stage, and its application in thousands of industries has also ushered in a critical period. The key to seize new opportunities is innovation, which should lay a solid foundation through technological innovation, create value through scene innovation and form development synergy through ecological innovation.
The accelerated promotion of intellectual driving and equal rights will bring considerable growth effects to the entire industrial chain. Wang Chuanfu said at the press conference that BYD’s models in the price range of 100,000 yuan and above will be equipped with smart cars as standard, and models below 100,000 yuan will be "mostly equipped". "If there is more supply in the smart car industry chain, models below 100,000 yuan will be equipped with more." He also confidently said that relying on the world’s largest new energy vehicle manufacturing system, BYD can promote the coordinated development of the entire upstream and downstream industrial chain and accelerate the popularization of smart driving.
As the only supplier of intelligent driving chips in BYD, Horizon announced on February 10th that the "Eye of God" system will be equipped with Journey 6 series, of which Journey 6M is the first to be mass-produced. The two major suppliers of lidar, sagitar Juchuang and Hesai Technology, have said that the penetration rate of lidar will continue to increase.
The integration of artificial intelligence and automobile industry has entered a new stage. With the development of technology, scale, cost control and industrial chain coordination, the development of intelligent automobile industry in China is about to usher in a new growth and pattern reshaping.
