China AV Newsletter - Feb. 2024

AI compute chips still lead the trade war between US and China, while recent regulations from Washington find another strategic segment to look at – LiDAR tech! Nvidia showed great reports recently but for the first time mentioned the threat by Huawei AI compute chips. While regulations are piling up in western markets, China is moving ahead breaking new records in autonomous driving deployment and testing; in Shanghai as example AV driven hours have doubled in the past year! Happy New Year of the Dragon!

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China AV Newsletter - Feb. 2024

Feb.1st: The U.S. Department of Defense has once again updated its "list of Chinese military enterprises" . This time the inclusion of Chinese advanced compute AI chips and LiDAR companies were in the spotlight, excluding Yangtze memory, Megvii Technology and HESAI Technology from operating on US soil. These brands join other popular brands as Huawei and DJI into the blacklist. This announcement limits the companies in military/ government related business, in HESAI case for example, the firm does not meet the definition of "military-related enterprises" as all of its products are for civilian use only, so the impact of these regulations if any is still unclear.

Feb.2nd: ZF China has been awarded L4 autonomous driving test license, becoming the first foreign-funded Tier 1 to be awarded an L4 test license in Shanghai. ZF plans to carry out autonomous driving open road tests in designated areas under the supervision and guidance of the Shanghai municipal government. According to ZF, its China autonomous driving team has set a number of records at the test site during the test, including the shortest self-assessment test record and the shortest test record.

Feb.4th: Avatr announced the launch of Avatr12 autonomous driving. This new version does not rely on high-precision maps , and is now fully open for urban NCA, covering national highways, provincial highways, town roads, main roads and side roads. The official announcement claims that the software is available nationwide.

Feb.5th: Autonomous driving vehicles equipped with Pony.ai 's sixth-generation L4 autonomous driving software and hardware systems were approved to start the "unmanned vehicle, remote vehicle" autonomous driving passenger demonstration application in Beijing. In Beijing Yizhuang, passengers can now summon the vehicle through PonyPilot+ APP to experience the new product technology and travelling mode without a safety driver in the vehicle. This model has already carried out fully autonomous driving passenger testing in Guangzhou for several months.

Feb.5th: Shanghai Municipal Transportation Commission, Municipal Economic and Information Commission, and Municipal Public Security Bureau jointly released the 2023 Shanghai Intelligent Networked Vehicle Development Report . Data shows that by the end of 2023, Shanghai covered a total area of 912 square kilometers for open testing of autonomous driving, of which 464 square km in Jiading and 386 square kilometers in Lingang have been opened. A total of 774 vehicles from 32 companies have been issued with road testing and demonstration application licenses. Total accumulated autonomous test mileage in Shanghai reached 9.6 million kilometers, an increase of 25% from 2022 and total test duration of 1.15 million hours, an increase of 190% compared with 2022.

Feb.19th: Yuntu micro officially announced the completion of B2 financing round of hundreds of millions RMB . Yuntu micro is focused on R&D of high-end automotive AI compute chips. To date, Yuntu micro has completed 6 rounds of financing.

Feb.22nd: Haomo.ai announced that it has secured over 100 million RMB in Series B1 financing . Haomo.ai is developing autonomous driving VDS for mass production vehicles. As of February 2024, over 20 vehicle models are equipped with HPilot, the intelligent driving product of Haomo.ai , while user-assisted driving mileage has exceeded 120 million kilometers.

Feb.23rd: In US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, NVIDIA listed Huawei for the first time as a major competitor in a number of areas , including artificial intelligence chips. NVIDIA said Huawei is competitive in providing chips designed for AI applications such as graphics processors (GPUs), central processing units (CPUs) and networking chips. All of those are crucial for autonomous driving applications.

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Sources: HESAI; ZF China; Pony.ai ; Gasgoo; Haomo.ai ; Nvidia; EqualOcean; Avatr;