BYD plans to use smart driving features as a weapon to drive sales growth next year, as the marginal effect from price advantage begins to wane, according to local media.

BYD (HKG: 1211, OTCMKTS: BYDDY) plans to use smart driving features as a weapon to drive sales growth next year, as the marginal effect from price advantage starts to wane, according to a local media report.

The Chinese new energy vehicle (NEV) maker plans to launch variants with smart driving features for all of its models next year, 36kr said in a report today.

From the BYD Seagull, which is priced in the RMB 60,000 ($8,360) range, to the Yangwang U8, which is priced in the RMB 1 million range, there will be variants offered with smart driving systems, the report said.

The BYD Seagull is an A0-class electric vehicle, based on the e-Platform 3.0, and is the BYD Group's least expensive.

The 2025 Seagull, currently on sale, was launched on August 1 and is offered in three variants with starting prices of RMB 69,800, RMB 75,800 and RMB 85,800 respectively.

Yangwang is BYD's ultra-luxury brand launched on January 5, 2023, with the first model being the U8 off-road SUV (sport utility vehicle) with a starting price of RMB 1.098 million.

BYD's team is expediting its research and development in order to cover the entire model range with intelligent driving capabilities.

The regular weekend for BYD's smart driving program team is one day off this weekend and two days off the following weekend. However, in order to speed up the progress, the R&D staff has been taking only one day off on weekends for weeks, according to 36kr.

Zhang Zhuo, BYD's head of Ocean series sales, said earlier this year that the NEV maker hoped to have BYD's in-house developed smart driving system as standard in models around or even below RMB 150,000 within 2-3 years.

Zhang went on to mention on November 1 that the Seagull will also offer smart driving features, the report noted.

Currently, BYD has placed its intelligent capabilities at the top of its strategy, prioritizing them over overseas business and supply chain management, the report said.

The head of BYD's new technology research institute often receives calls from chairman Wang Chuanfu in the middle of the night, communicating on the topic of intelligence, while previously, they communicated more about power technology, according to the report.

Since the end of last month, several media reports have hinted that BYD is accelerating its research and development on intelligent driving technology.

On October 21, local media outlet HiEV reported that after undergoing a series of organizational restructuring this year, BYD was aiming to have its in-house developed smart driving algorithms in mass production as soon as November.

On October 31, Jiemian reported that BYD had set up a forward-looking team to focus on the use of end-to-end AI models.

BYD's plan is to implement NOA (Navigate on Autopilot) functionality available on highways on the DiPilot 100 platform, and additional NOA functionality available in urban areas that does not rely on HD maps on the DiPilot 600 platform, according to Jiemian.

BYD calls its smart driving computing platform DiPilot, with different branches depending on the computing power.

Those with computing power of 100 TOPS or less are called DiPilot 100, and they use the Drive Orin N chip from US chip giant Nvidia and the Journey 5 chip from local manufacturer Horizon Robotics.

Systems with 300 TOPS or less based on a single Nvidia Orin X chip are called DiPilot 300.

A system based on two Nvidia Orin X chips with 508 TOPS is called DiPilot 600.

In the January-October period of this year, BYD's NEV sales amounted to 3,250,532 units, an increase of 36.49 percent year-on-year.

If BYD's sales for the remaining two months of 2024 stay near October's 500,000-unit level, full-year sales are expected to reach roughly 4.3 million vehicles, representing a 42 percent increase from 3.02 million units in 2023.

($1 = RMB 7.1748)

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