I recently gave a presentation at the AmCham Shanghai Look Back & Look Ahead: Auto Industry 2024, an annual event organized by the AmCham Shanghai Automotive Committee, recapping the key takeaways and China factor in the vehicle and broader transport/mobility space at CES 2024. I’d like to thank Bill Russo, Chair of AmCham Shanghai Automotive Committee and Founder & CEO of Automobility Ltd. for inviting me to the event, as well as both Bill and Yale Zhang, Managing Director of AutoForesight, for sharing their insights and perspectives.
Below is the full text (slightly edited from actual delivery) of my presentation along with the presentation slides. The event took place on January 30, 2024 local time.
Happy Lunar New Year of the Dragon!
Good morning, everyone! Thank you, Bill, for inviting me to attend this event again, it was nice seeing you at CES after Auto Shanghai last year! Time flies and Beijing Auto Show is right around the corner, so very much looking forward to that and maybe seeing you and some of you in the audience.
Quick intro about myself. I was previously the chief editor of China Automotive Review, spent two decades on the ground in China based in Beijing, covering the Chinese auto industry up until the pandemic. I’m now based in the U.S. doing my own gigs still focused on the China EV, AV and mobility space. I freelance in both Chinese and English, I do project-based consulting work for firms both in China and the U.S., and I am the co-host of the weekly podcast China EVs & More. All in all, I’ve been closely following China’s auto market over the last 25 years or so through these various capacities.
What Bill and Yale just shared, that was a lot to unpack, what a year it was for China auto and NEV sales and export, and really phenomenal how China EVs is waking up, shaking up and shaping up the rest of the global auto industry, there are some hidden dangers lurking beneath the surface and we’ll probably talk about that in the Q&A. But Elon going from laughing at BYD, what, 10 years ago to now saying Chinese car companies are going to demolish most other car companies in the world is the epitome of what has transpired in just a very short period, it seems.
Switching gears to CES.
Wow, what can I say.
This was my 7th and second consecutive year attending CES, the new CES, in person. With the exception of 2021 and 2022, I’ve attended every year since 2016, so I’ve been really lucky to have witnessed the kind of the evolution of both companies and technologies that have been presented at this event over the last 8 years, and how reality has set in for example for autonomous vehicles, lots of talking the talk and promises back in 2016 and 2017 that never materialized. I’d say that this was the most memorable CES I’ve attended to date and I’ll talk about some of the reasons why, through my personal lens.
I’m not going to bore you with the show numbers, Bill has already shared those, but let me just say it was BIG, it’s always been BIG. For those of you that have attended CES in the past you know what I mean. Since I attended last year, I’d say from an attendance perspective and participation from Chinese companies and people coming over from China, it felt at least 2X last year. Part of the reason was obviously when China opened up at the end of 2022, people getting COVID and the U.S. requiring COVID testing for people coming over from China affected participation. But this year purely from a crowd, traffic point of view it was definitely back to pre-pandemic vibes.
If we zoom into the vehicle tech or the broader transport and mobility space, it’s become such a big theme at CES now that there is one huge West Hall erected since CES 2022 pretty much dedicated to this space, whereas in the years past vehicle tech is usually scattered in the North, Central and South Halls dedicated more to consumer electronics. I spent almost the entire week at CES and walked at least 10km per day easy and I think I still missed some booths that I would have liked to spend a little more time on so there is no way I’m going to be able to give you an exhaustive roundup in the roughly 25 minutes that I have but I’d like to touch on some of the takeaways and China factors that I thought defined this year’s CES in the vehicle tech and mobility space. Some of which Bill already shared.
My first big takeaway and keyword is RESPECT, really, the people and the talent factor, and I’ll explain why.
You know one of the perks, treasures, values and great experiences at CES is meeting the “big shots”: people along the EV, AV and mobility value chain that are driving industry change and transformation, people that you may only meet at this “global tech party” at the beginning of every year that is becoming ever more automotive focused and drawing ever more forces from outside the auto industry. CES2024 was all the more memorable thanks to on and off the record conversations with these people, even if it’s just a simple “hello” and handshake. Some of these people I met for the first time ever, some were reconnecting from the China days and some I had met during the pandemic.
But I want to share one anecdote which is meeting Dr. Wu Xinzhou, who is the head of automotive at NVIDIA and former vice president and head of Autonomous Driving at Xpeng, amongst the audience at the Mercedes-Benz press conference. For those that don’t know, Xinzhou was the key person behind Xpeng’s XNGP, the Tesla FSD-like Level 2+ navigation based ADAS system which is now available in 200+ cities in China. The last time I had met him was at Xpeng’s first 1024 Tech Day back in 2019 in Tsinghua University and I remember asking him then what his goal was for Xpeng, and his answer was: to be №1 in autonomous driving. And more than four years later, Xpeng indeed is one of the leaders if not the leader in that space in terms of offering the so-called point to point NOA or Navigation on Autopilot feature where the car basically does the driving but the driver has to pay attention at all times. This is one of the most competitive and cutthroat battles right now in China. So it was really great to meet him.
And speaking of RESPECT, it was great to hear from Mercedes CTO Markus Schafer praise Xinzhou because now NVIDIA is a crucial ecosystem partner as ADAS features become more advanced and its Orin chips are pretty much standardized on many of the Chinese smart EVs that offer advanced L2+ NOA features. In fact it was Xinzhou who announced during CES that Li Auto’s next generation of BEVs would be equipped with NVIDIA Drive Thor platform and Mercedes’s MMA platform CLA that’s coming out next year supposedly will offer eyes-off Level 3 at speeds of up to 130 km/h (this feature is currently only available in California, Nevada and Germany at speeds up to 60 km/h), to which NVIDIA is a very important supplier to make it happen. So if Xinzhou was crucial to Xpeng before, he is now one of the most crucial executives between the entire China smart EV space and NVIDIA.
It was great to see Chinese talent explaining tech for visitors at Mercedes-Benz and other multinational brands, whether it’s people that work in design or tech development. At the same time it was really great to see how some of the Chinese companies, quite a few of them CES regulars, have matured and become more globalized just from a branding or marketing point of view, for example the customer facing people at LiDAR companies like RoboSense and Hesai there were a lot of Americans, and the booth design at a lot of Chinese companies, not just in the vehicle tech and mobility space, were very professional and if you didn’t know about these brands you wouldn’t know they were Chinese.
Also worth mentioning is the booth set up of Japanese and Korean brands like Sony, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Hyundai Mobis, Doosan were very unique and I think it’s something that Chinese companies can learn a lot from in terms of how you present tech, products and concepts and making it very experiential and eye opening. So RESPECT all around and in many aspects.
Like what I put up last year, CES remains a venue that pits battles among the OEMs, tier-1 suppliers, LiDAR companies, chip companies, autonomous vehicle/trucking/robotaxi companies and the who idea of software defined vehicles and AI was big, big this year.
For the OEMs CES is not so much about new model debuts, but rather proving their tech credentials, and this was especially the case for the German OEMs. So let’s break down the OEMs into different buckets.
Hello IDA. Hey Mercedes. Hey BMW. Hey Cerence. The German brand trio of Mercedes, BMW and VW, somehow as if they had reached a consensus before the show, all showed off their generative AI/Large Language Model solutions in the form of virtual assistants integrating ChatGPT voice interaction in the vehicle with help from partners including Cerence and Amazon Alexa. Mercedes gave a preview of their MB.OS 1.0 which will arrive with the CLA Class next year on the MMA platform which really tried to integrate a lot of 3D rendering and immersive features like surround navigation, and some of those will be unique to the Chinese market developed locally in China, VW with the ChatPro that will be available on vehicles in Q2 and BMW offering voice assistant that helps you learn features about your car, almost like a digital assistant for your car manual. I tried all three of them and let me just say there are still a lot of bugs and kinks that need improvement before they are pushed out, they are still under development afterall. And those of you that are familiar with the type of voice assistant interaction that is pretty prevalent on Chinese smart EVs in China nowadays know that the legacies are rather behind on this front. But this perhaps proves one point that what’s happening in China is influencing what is happening the rest of the world. It’s really a part of this whole immersive cockpit experience that China is so much ahead on.
Hyundai and Kia really took it to a different level showing what the future would look like in a hydrogen powered world and with Platform Beyond Vehicle (PBV) catering to the broader mobility and logistics space, providing flexibility and modularity for both businesses and individuals; Honda presented its next generation EVs the Saloon and Space Hub under the Honda 0 Series and also used the occasion to reveal a new “H” badge for future EVs. Sony presented an updated version of its AFEELA smart EV in collaboration with Honda that is really about utilizing Sony’s expertise in its CMOS sensors including in-house developed LiDAR, which we’ll touch upon a bit more in a minute, and really bringing Sony’s traditional prowess in gaming and entertainment into the car, so I’d say this AFEELA that will be taking orders next year in the U.S. with deliveries expected in 2026 is the closest smart EV from a foreign brand at CES to what is commonly available in China nowadays.
Hyundai Motor Group’s Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) company Supernal LLC debuted the eVTOL concept and Xpeng’s XPENG AeroHT flying car company showed off its own eVTOL Flying Car concept and is taking orders in Q4 this year of the Modular Flying Car and expects to deliver that in another year’s time. With some of these eVTOL companies recently getting regulatory approvals, I think we are on the cusp of seeing these things getting into production and into the air over the next 12–24 months.
U.S. EV startup Mullen and Vietnamese EV startup VinFast both tried to stay relevant with the debut of their respective new EVs, the Mullen 5 RS and VinFast Wild Pickup Concept and VF 3. I think the future is still a bit murky for these types of companies who have been either very aggressive like the case of VinFast in terms of investing in local manufacturing, sales & marketing, dealerships in the U.S. or Mullen trying to stay relevant. Other startups like Rivian, Fisker and Lucid all face their own growing pains and for the foreseeable future Tesla’s going to dominate the U.S. market in EV sales as GM and Ford dial back their investment and plans for EVs. So the competitive environment, it’s just night and day between China and the U.S.
No Chinese OEMs exhibited directly at CES, but boy, somehow CES turned into a China EV Show, or to be specific, GES: the Geely EV Show. Geely had several models of its subsidiary brands including the ZEEKR 007, ZEEKR 009, Geely Galaxy E8 and several Polestars including the 3 and 4 “piggy backing” at partner booths such as Valeo, BOE, Luminar, Mobileye and Google. I think this is the first time that people in North America have really gotten to see up close the type of smart EVs that are available in the Chinese market with both the ZEEKR 007 and Geely Galaxy E8 having launched in China just days before CES 2024. The story with the customizable light band developed by Valeo is quite interesting in itself and I heard this was an idea that came up when Valeo CEO Christophe Perillat visited Geely last September so the turnaround was really quick. It’s basically equipped with Valeo Thinbilite bifunction 15mm height and two digital panels, bundled with more than 1,700 LEDs, providing users with a seamless, personalized and interactive experience for front lighting. Valeo is also delivering the interior ambient lighting for an exciting driving experience. Finally, the vehicle boasts an elevated brand identity thanks to a central illuminated logo seamlessly integrating an ADAS sensor.
While the Galaxy E8 is equipped with the world’s first 45-inch 8K display supplied from Chinese display company BOE in collaboration with Corning the glass maker, which also worked together on the world’s first 45-inch 9K oxide MINI LED pillar to pillar curved screen.
One big theme with a lot of the tier-1s is the incoming EU regulation requiring Driver Monitoring Systems to be standard by the end of this year so quite a few of them such as Magna, Gentex, Valeo, smarteye showed off their latest innovations in DMS integrating into the rearview mirror. Also quite a few of them showed their thermal sensing capabilities augmenting AEB that will likely be added to NCAP testing.
Another big part if we talk about Conti, FORVIA and Gentex is innovative displays not only in terms of digital rearview mirrors but really the ability to display information on all kinds of surfaces, not only screens. One concept that I saw was reverse HUD which is not reflecting information onto the windshield but rather down to the dashboards and panels.
For company like Bosch, they showed off the hydrogen fuel stack system for the Nikola Class-8 fuel cell truck which I actually took a ride in and learned about the prospects of fuel cell trucks in North America. They delivered 35 of these mostly to port customers in California at $450,000 but get this: they get $200,000 in federal subsidies. Bosch also showed off its automated valet charging combined with its automated valet parking in collaboration with Volkswagen Group’s software arm CARIAD.
U POWER Tech, a smart EV techn company out of Shanghai, debuted at CES 2024 with its UP Super Board, a skateboard chassis technology that serves as a foundation platform for automakers to slash the development time by at least 6 months. Along with UP Super Board, UP VAN, the company’s first all-electric van built on the platform was also displayed. U POWER delivered the first batch of UP Super Boards to Olympian Motors, a new-gen EV company headquartered in New York. U POWER also signed a development contract for its UP VAN with the Detroit-based LUMOS EV Inc. Powered by U POWER, the LUMOS LC2 VAN will be available in Mexico by mid-2024, followed by further expansion in North America. Leveraging its R&D capabilities and a business model that integrates the global EV industry supply chain, U POWER has announced partnership with business partners in Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe markets, with a goal of accelerating the EV industry transformation. Founder Paul Li is a veteran of the industry, having worked at Continental, Horizon Robotics and Great Wall Motor before founding the company in 2021.
LiDAR has always been a big topic at CES. For those of you that remember, last year when I presented at this event, I showed a slide with more than a dozen LiDAR companies exhibiting at the West Hall. This year the leaders of the pack, namely China’s big 3 of Hesai, RoboSense and Seyond (formerly Innovusion) are separating themselves from the rest of the pack, while others either didn’t show up or moved to the other halls and turned focus on other applications. Volume wise we are seeing LiDAR deliveries in China number in the tens of thousands per month, and the Big 3 could be looking at delivering a combined one million LiDARs this year alone. Valeo which supplies LiDAR for Mercedes for their Level 3 Drive Pilot feature is expecting vehicles equipped with Level 3 and Level 4 to be around 3 million globally by 2030. An interesting race is heating up in the L3 space in China with Mercedes, BMW, BYD, Chang’an, IM and a couple of other brands getting permits to test L3 on expressways and it’ll be interesting to see the use of LiDAR for this special purpose. The other trend we should also be watching for is one or all three of the Big 3 getting onto vehicles from major international OEMs or brands. You probably will hear some announcements this year.
Computing, computing, computing, it’s all about computing, as they say in the smart EV age data is the new oil. Mobileye, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, AMD, Lenovo Vehicle Computing, Black Sesame, TI, all the relevant players exhibited their latest products.
Cross-domain meaning combining ADAS computing and infotainment/smart cockpit chips into one was a big trend. Case in point the Wudang C1200 chip from Black Sesame and the new Bosch Qualcomm solution based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC. Worth mentioning that since 2021, Snapdragon digital chassis has supported more than 100 models from 40 Chinese brands. It’s also helping quite a lot of Chinese companies with their domain controllers. The Qualcomm 8295 which is the 4th generation Snapdragon cockpit platform with 5nm tech is now on vehicles including the Mercedes-Benz E-Class, JIYUE 01, ZEEKR 001 FR, 007, Geely Galaxy E8, Xpeng X9, LeapMotor C10, NIO ET9, Xiaomi SU7.
ZEEKR is going to be the first automaker that adopts Intel’s SDV SoC announced at CES 2024, so this AI augmented SoC is going to help achieve generative AI and camera based driver/occupant monitoring system.
The major AV companies that were present at CES 2024 or Vegas were Aurora, ZOOX, Motional and Chinese AV startup WeRide. Given that Cruise is in a funk and has suspended all operations and TuSimple is delisting, there is really one major player left in America’s robotaxi and autonomous trucking industry with any significant progress as far as commercialization is concerned: Waymo and Aurora. Even Aptiv has ended investment in Motional as commercialization and wider rollout continue to be delayed, while Aurora is not going to launch commercially available autonomous trucks until 2027. ZOOX on the other hand has been stuck in the concept stage with its Cruise Origin like robovan in neutral. So the only bright spot at CES 2024 for commercial demos was again WeRide, which brought a couple of its robobuses for CES attendees to test ride in and actually offered rides onto public roads in Vegas. WeRide is one of the most leaders in China’s AV space in a variety of form factors including robotaxis, robobuses and robosweepers already in commercial operation in several Chinese cities. It is also preparing for an IPO in the U.S. but needs to be careful of the current geopolitical landscape and scrutiny over Chinese companies especially what I call “Chinafornia” companies such as Baidu, Pony.ai, AutoX and avoid what TuSimple has gone through. So not all is smooth for the AVs as reality has set in following the fervor that reached a high in 2016 and 2017, the first two years that I attended CES.
We talk about the Chinese are coming to the U.S., but in fact they are already here. Companies and brands like StarCharge, Gendome and Autel are all Chinese and already have operations in the U.S., in fact Autel already has a plant in the U.S. making DC fast chargers, while Chinese charging operator StarCharge is offering charging solutions to commercial customers and Gendome, which part of Chinese battery supplier Gotion, displayed mobile energy storage products for the North American market. If you didn’t know they were Chinese brands, you wouldn’t know they are Chinese brands purely from a booth/display and branding design perspective.
My conclusion is again China and the tech innovation coming out of China and the type of advanced connectivity or autonomous driving features are increasingly having an influence on the western companies, whether it’s the OEMs trying to catch up or the tech companies, the NVIDIAs, Mobileyes, Qualcomms, Intels, AMDs, TIs, the tier-1s of Bosch, Valeo, FORVIA, Magna, supporting the China EV companies, you are going to see that it’s either their latest tech or products will debut first on Chinese brands and in China rather than elsewhere, or that they have innovations coming out of China completely developed by their Chinese local talent.
There is so many anniversaries this year. Volkswagen Group is celebrating its 40 years in China, China and France celebrating 60 years of diplomatic relationship, and I like to end with a quote from Francois Marion, former president of Valeo China and currently EVP of Communications and Investor Relations at the French Supplier, which is celebrating 30 years of entering China: we are going from “Made in China” to “Invent with China”.
“Invent with China.” Let me repeat that. I think that is a great phrase in describing what the foreign companies are doing not only in order to thrive but to survive. If you can’t beat the Chinese, be the Chinese, as they say.
With that I thank you for listening and hope you have a little bit more understanding and perspective into what happened at CES 2024 and the China factor. I’m happy to participate in the Q&A and answer any questions that you may have.
