Volkswagen unveils ADAS system for upcoming electric cars in China
Volkswagen is positioning its automated driving system (ADAS) in China as a solution for ‘particularly natural and safe driving behaviour’ and states that it intends to present the technology in a first Volkswagen brand model as early as this year and integrate it into a new generation of smart cars in the compact class in China from 2026. The German company is thus trying to catch up with its Chinese competitors. This is because the market for electric cars in China is now so competitive that ADAS is increasingly becoming a decisive sales argument. The trend has even arrived in the low-price segment: China’s largest electric car manufacturer BYD announced in February, for example, that it would also be integrating its assistance system called ‘God’s Eye’ into small cars in future.
Cariad joint venture Carizon in the lead
At the Shanghai Motor Show, Volkswagen is revealing how the Group intends to restore its competitiveness in this area. The system, which is the responsibility of Volkswagen’s troubled software company Cariad via its joint venture Carizon, is intended to offer ‘high-precision driving functions up to Level 2++ that are fully focused on safety and pave the way for further development to Level 3 and higher’, as the car manufacturer writes. Level 2 offers so-called semi-automated driving aids in the automated driving spectrum (from L1 to L5). In the case of 2++, this applies to both motorway and urban traffic scenarios. The leap to level 3 (‘highly automated driving’) is that only then can drivers temporarily turn away from driving tasks and traffic.
In technical terms, Volkswagen’s new ADAS solution is based on a system-on-a-chip (SoC) approach in which a number of components (including processor and memory) are integrated into a single chip. According to Volkswagen, this compact design paired with high computing power should ‘enable smooth and fast reactions to a wide range of driving situations’.
In-house development expertise ‘in China, for China’
The Wolfsburg-based company itself describes its own ADAS for China as an ‘important milestone in building up its own development expertise for core technologies that are in high demand from Chinese customers’. In the Far East, users are known to attach greater importance to infotainment and connectivity functions in their cars than in Europe, for example. Volkswagen writes: “In the Chinese market, a quarter of all newly registered vehicles are already equipped with a Level 2 driving system for motorway scenarios. By 2030, Level 2+ is expected to be in use in more than 80 per cent of existing vehicles. Level 2++ […] is then expected to be installed in 75 per cent of new vehicles.”
Against this backdrop, the Group founded Carizon in November 2023, a joint venture between the Group’s own software developer Cariad and the Chinese tech company Horizon Robotics. The joint venture focuses on automated driving systems for the Chinese market. ‘Over the past 18 months, more than 500 software experts have driven the development of the new ADAS technology at the Beijing and Shanghai sites,’ Volkswagen announced.
Volkswagen announced that it would invest €2.4 billion (partly in Horizon Robotics and partly in the JV) and hold a 60 per cent stake in the joint venture when Carizon was founded at the end of 2023. Partner Horizon Robotics is a technology company based in Beijing with a focus on ADAS software and hardware solutions. In terms of hardware, the company competes with top dog Nvidia. Horizon Robotics’ well-known customers include BYD and Changan.
Ralf Brandstätter, Member of the Board of Management of Volkswagen AG responsible for the China region and CEO of Volkswagen Group China, commented: “With our new ADAS system, we are demonstrating what is possible when strengths of Volkswagen are combined with local innovation. The system has been developed at ‘China speed’, fully tailored to the needs of our Chinese customers and will set a new benchmark in the market for driving performance, safety and quality. The rapid progress we have made reflects the outstanding capabilities of our joint venture CARIZON and the successful implementation of our ‘In China, for China’ strategy,” Brandstätter continued.
Training with AI-supported data platform GAIA
The performance of the new system is guaranteed by Carizon’s proprietary AI-supported data platform called GAIA, a platform for the intelligent collection and analysis of data. ‘With two terabytes of data collected daily per vehicle and over 100,000 test kilometres completed daily, GAIA enables highly automated AI training of the vehicle software,’ it says. Compared to conventional data platforms without AI-supported big data technology, the platform analyses data around six times faster and shortens the test cycles for AI solutions to just one twentieth of the previous duration. As a result, Carizon is able to ‘generate and validate hundreds of thousands of real-world driving scenarios with exceptional speed and accuracy’, which in turn accelerates the development cycle.
Marcus Hafkemeyer, CEO of CARIZON, explains: “With a team of 500 local ADAS experts and the consistent integration of AI in the development process, we have built an advanced ADAS system in a very short time—one that will deliver outstanding performance in driving performance and safety. This year, we will bring Level 2+ ADAS to the road. Level 2++ ADAS with Urban Navigate on Autopilot (NoA) is in advanced testing and will be launched in 2026. This will also enable us to lay the technological foundations for a fast-track evolution towards Level 3.”
In this context, those responsible describe the Shanghai Auto Show as a very important trade fair. The company will be presenting a new generation of smart electric vehicles from the Audi and Volkswagen brands for the first time, which have been developed exclusively in China for Chinese customers. The Group plans to launch more than 20 fully electric and electrified models in China by 2027. By 2030, the Group brands should already have around 30 all-electric models.
China’s government harbours smart car market
It is also worth mentioning that the trade fair debut of Volkswagen’s own ADAS system coincides with the moment when China begins to regulate the use and marketing of software-based driver assistance systems more strictly in the country: Manufacturers are being instructed to refrain from advertising with terms such as ‘self-driving’ or ‘autonomous driving’, to no longer complete public beta tests and to only carry out over-the-air updates once validation has been completed.
According to industry experts, the government is concerned that users are not sufficiently aware of the limits of such systems and that the companies’ marketing could further fuel the misleading of consumers. As a result, there is already an increasing number of road accidents in China. A particularly serious crash involving a Xiaomi SU7, in which three women died, recently attracted a great deal of attention regarding autonomous driving systems in the country. According to the findings, the driver assistance software was activated during the accident.
Chinese portals such as Car News China see the announcement of the stricter regulations at this point – namely, just before the start of the Shanghai Auto Show, where autonomous driving functions are likely to be heavily promoted – as a “signal of the government’s determination to regulate this sector more strictly.” The government has also just introduced stricter safety standards for batteries, which are due to come into force from 2026. According to experts, the two together could accelerate consolidation in China’s overcrowded car industry.
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