Volkswagen and General Motors are both accelerating electrification in China, the world s largest EV market. SAIC Volkswagen Automotive recently started upgrading one of its Shanghai plants for EV production. GM introduced a concept EV in China, demonstrating its local design capability.
China-based Black Sesame Technologies announced on May 19 that it will provide local carmaker Hongqi Auto with its Huashan-2 A1000L series chips to enable an autonomous driving platform. In addition, the pair plan to start mass-producing vehicles based on the chip next year.
To catch up in the world s largest EV market, Volkswagen has focused on software R&D. The European carmaker is reportedly in talks with tech company Huawei to use the latter s software in Volkswagen cars in China, hoping the potential collaboration would facilitate its market share.
Tron Future Tech, a Taiwan-based startup specialized in active electronically scanned array (AESA) for drone and space applications, recently announced success in delivering the prototype of T.SpaceRouter, its automotive user terminal for low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication. In a press release, the company claimed that the T.SpaceRouter sourced 85% of components locally, marking a milestone for domestically developed automotive LEO satellite communication user terminals.
The HMI (human-machine interface) battle between automakers and mobile phone platforms has been getting fiercer and fiercer. Most automakers are afraid of their business opportunities being swallowed up by Apple s CarPlay, but they ve made limited progress in the self-development of operating systems (OS) and related software. However, a recently discovered "data trump card," namely navigation and mileage calculation, has given automakers the confidence to make their move.