From technology to the city In 2026, Waymo’s order volume in San Francisco at one point surpassed Lyft’s, while Apollo Go’s first-quarter rides crossed 3.2m. Capital followed the proven demand: global private autonomous-driving deals reached 23.3bn dollars in the first four months of 2026, more than double the full-year 2025 total, headlined by Waymo’s 16bn … Read more
China has approved its first mandatory national safety standard for L3 and L4 autonomous driving, setting a unified bar for vehicles that can drive themselves. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s standard, Safety Requirements for Autonomous Driving Systems of Intelligent and Connected Vehicles, was formally approved on 30 July and takes full effect on … Read more
Tesla’s product play Tesla targets a 20,000 to 30,000 dollar Optimus, roughly the price of a Model Y, by reusing its motor, battery-management and sensor supply chain and driving cost down through scale. The deeper move is the data flywheel: with more than a thousand Optimus units inside its own factories by 2026, each robot … Read more
The numbers Both companies turned free cash flow negative for the first time. Google’s was minus 5.9 billion dollars, its first negative since the 2004 IPO. Tesla’s was minus 1.1 billion, its first in about two years. The driver is capital expenditure: Google’s second-quarter capex doubled to 44.9 billion dollars, nearly 5 billion a day, … Read more
The blue light marks assisted-driving status. NIO vice-president Ma Lin commented that some versions are brighter than the tail lamps and glare at following drivers, a clear hazard. The China Automotive Technology and Research Center said multiple ADAS-light models abuse the feature: blue glare at night disrupts other drivers’ judgement, and such cars tend to … Read more
The round, from Xingzheng Capital and Yidao Capital, funds next-generation vehicle-grade autonomous solutions. Alongside it, Sinnol announced it is moving beyond ports into open-road heavy logistics. Why ports first Founder He Bei chose ports in 2020 for their high digitalisation and labour cost, easier to prove autonomy’s value. Reality was harder: unmanned trucks must mix … Read more
The reported logic: SpaceX, a major US defence contractor, creates conflicts that a firewall between Tesla’s China unit and its US operations could resolve. Tesla has already been asked to rigorously separate US and China operations, including a standalone sales entity for Shanghai exports. Selling Shanghai is hard to imagine. The plant runs as a … Read more
Seeing more clearly Huawei stays on multi-sensor fusion, recently shipping distributed millimetre-wave radar, high-resolution solid-state lidar, a lidar-vision unit called Limera, and an 896-line dual-path lidar. The point is cross-verification: when one sensor degrades in fog, glare or occlusion, the others keep reading the road. Understanding the world Beyond perception, Qiankun moves to the WEWA … Read more
Huang Xuejie, a leading Chinese lithium-battery scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has a timing argument the industry should hear: 2026 is the mass-production year for hybrid solid-liquid batteries, and full solid-state will not “flip the table” until after 2035. Between now and then, the hybrid is where the money and the deployment are. … Read more
The narrative that battery makers only earn thin margins is over. At the 2026 Greater Bay Area auto show, only two power-battery makers, CALB and Gotion High-tech, took independent stages, and in the first four months of the year their installed volumes differed by just 0.14 GWh, a 0.08 per cent gap in share, slotting … Read more