With the rapid development and wide application of AI foundation models, the Chinese automobile industry has become highly intelligent.

Cars with combined driver assistance, or Level 2 autonomous driving, accounted for 42.4 percent of all passenger car sales in China in the first half of 2023, as stated by Xin Guobin, Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology, at the 2023 World Intelligent Connected Vehicles Conference (WICVC), held from September 20 to 24 in Beijing.

Han Zhao, a director at the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, mentioned that early automatic driving was more based on the integration of sensors and deep learning algorithms, leading to issues such as over-reliance on high-precision maps and high costs.

Since the beginning of 2023, with the explosive development of generative artificial intelligence, autonomous driving has begun to evolve into an end-to-end foundation model, according to Han.

Chinese auto companies are applying foundation models to solve the challenges posed by automatic driving. The use of a large amount of data allows the model to grow, the algorithm to be optimized, and the intelligence level of automobiles to improve.

Industry insiders believe that in the future, general artificial intelligence will be applied on a large scale in the automotive industry, especially in the fields of autonomous driving and intelligent cockpit to provide better performance and more accurate perception.

In April 2022, Beijing became the first city in China to start the pilot operation of unmanned passenger vehicles. Li Zhenyu, vice president of Baidu, mentioned that its "Apollo Go" unmanned vehicle had provided more than 3.3 million services to the public by June 30.

It is generally believed in the industry that the initial establishment of an AI foundation model and the acceleration in promoting intelligent connected technology will speed up the development of intelligent connected vehicles.

China's intelligent connected automobile industry has achieved remarkable results. The vitality of technological innovation has been enhanced, while intelligent driving and large computing power chips have been mass-produced and installed.

Additionally, several car companies are developing conditional autonomous driving and highly autonomous driving models, and the construction of an intelligent road transformation and cloud control infrastructure platform has accelerated.

Data from the WICVC showed that China has opened more than 20,000 kilometers of intelligent connected vehicle test roads, with a total test mileage of more than 70 million kilometers. Autonomous taxis, trunk logistics, unmanned delivery, and other demonstration applications in multiple scenarios have also been carried out in an orderly manner.

(With input from Xinhua)