Nvidia is testing a licence fee for the software its chips use to run AI agents, and the reference price it gave at GTC Berlin is about USD 2,000 per GPU per year, roughly RMB 13,500. The figure came from chief executive Jensen Huang. It is not a published product yet, and Nvidia has signalled … Read more
Five executives from Renault, Mann+Hummel, FORVIA Hella, Gentherm and Haiwei were asked the same question at a forum in Shanghai on 23 October: how does a car technology still earn a return when the advantage it creates lasts less than a model cycle? Suppliers and carmakers met at the fourteenth Automotive and Environment Innovation Forum … Read more
China’s automotive industry sold more vehicles than ever and kept less of the money. Data published by Cui Dongshu of the China Passenger Car Association shows industry profit of RMB 267.5 billion in the first nine months of 2026, down 23 per cent year on year, on revenue of RMB 8.0435 trillion, which rose 2.6 … Read more
At the 2026 World Intelligent Connected Vehicle Conference, the most consequential announcements were not about cars. A new edition of the national framework for vehicle networking standards opened for public consultation, and seven national standardisation technical committees signed a cooperation framework covering automotive, intelligent transport, communications, traffic management, geographic information, smart cities and road transport. … Read more
Automotive software developers spend an average of 35 per cent of their time on base software integration: connecting operating systems to middleware, adapting systems and handling configuration. That is the central finding of the 2026 Driving the Future SDV developer report published by QNX, the BlackBerry-owned real-time operating system supplier, on 22 October. The QNX … Read more
Axera Semiconductor used an industry forum in Shanghai to lay out a strategy that runs in the opposite direction to most Chinese semiconductor narratives. It is not chasing the most powerful chip. It is chasing the chip that European law requires every new car to carry. Axera’s automotive chip shipments passed 1.6 million units by … Read more
A solid-state battery project with RMB 8 billion of committed capital began production in Kunshan, Jiangsu, on 21 October. The first phase is 10GWh of solid-state power battery capacity, built by Qingtao Power Technology, a joint venture between SAIC’s Huayu Automotive Systems and Qingtao Energy Development Group. The Kunshan plant’s first phase covers 10GWh of … Read more
Volkswagen is considering extending the software it uses in Chinese models to mainstream Volkswagen brand cars sold in Europe, according to Manager Magazin, which cited people familiar with the matter. The move would gradually sideline Rivian, the American partner Volkswagen has spent USD 5.8 billion bringing into its software stack. The China Electronic Architecture was … Read more
Chinese carmakers sold more cars in Europe than their Japanese rivals did in a single quarter for the first time, according to Dataforce figures reported by Bloomberg. The shift is small in absolute share and large in meaning: it is the first time the Japanese industry, present in Europe for six decades, has been displaced … Read more
On the evening of 12 October, the Ministry of Finance and the tax administration published a notice that repriced Chinese car exports: from 1 April 2027 the VAT export rebate on new energy vehicles falls from 13 to 9 per cent. The change covers 67 product lines, taking in battery-electric passenger cars, plug-in hybrids including … Read more