Huawei, the Chinese company at the centre of the US-China tech storm, is working with European and Chinese car companies to launch self-driving vehicles as early as 2021 as it seeks to move beyond its traditional telecoms equipment industry to embrace a broader range of artificial intelligence products.
Dang Wenshuan, Huawei’s chief strategy architect, said that Huawei is providing the AI backbone in several co-operative ventures including one with Audi, which is owned by Germany’s Volkswagen, and the Chinese manufacturers GAC Group, Beijing New Energy Automobile and Changan Automobile.
“From my understanding, we are working together to have a car that will be shipped in the year 2021 or 2022 using these [autonomous driving] components,” Mr Dang said. “This will be in China, but not only in China . . . it will also be in Europe.” Mr Dang said China will be at the forefront of the global autonomous vehicle industry when it gets under way in 2021 and 2022 because of the size and dynamism of its market.
Asked which of Huawei’s partners would be first to market with a road-ready car, he said: “In terms of moving to a connected car, or an autonomous driving car, the Chinese car manufacturers are moving even faster.” The business operations of Huawei, the world’s largest telecoms equipment company, are under severe pressure following Washington’s move to add it to its “entity list”, which in effect bars US companies from selling components to it and 68 of its affiliates.
The impact of the ban, which is set to come into force in mid-August, is likely to be felt in the critical areas of cyber security and semiconductors, but Huawei executives said the work on developing self-driving vehicle technology is set to proceed regardless.
In a video shown to the FT at Huawei’s headquarters, an Audi car drove around the streets of Shanghai obeying traffic signals and avoiding pedestrians and scooters in what appeared to be an uncontrolled environment.
A person sat in the driving seat but did not touch the steering wheel or controls. However, Tu Le, managing director at advisory firm Sino Auto Insights, said the US blacklisting, if fully implemented, would hamper Huawei’s prospects since much of the technology is from the US.
The capabilities of autonomous vehicles, which navigate by using sensors to feed images of road conditions back to a central computing system in the car, are divided into levels one to five. Level 5 — in which a vehicle can do without a driver altogether — “will never be happen”, according to Mr Dang.
Manufacturers such as Huawei are focused on achieving Level 4, such as the Audi prototype in the video. Several Chinese internet companies including Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu are developing self-driving vehicles with different partners, but the Chinese companies have so far been seen as lagging behind Google subsidiary Waymo, which launched a self-driving robotaxi service in Phoenix, Arizona late last year.
But Huawei is expecting China’s mass market to carry domestic manufacturers forward following launch in 2021. Globally, the autonomous vehicle market is set to grow from $54.23bn in 2019 to $556.67bn in 2026, according to Allied Market Research estimates.
China’s government has provided strong support for autonomous vehicles as part of a broader push to gain global leadership in artificial intelligence. Mr Dang said that 70 per cent of the value of an autonomous vehicle will reside in its information and communication technology, meaning that ICT companies such as Huawei rather than traditional car companies will dominate the value chain.
