GUANGZHOU, China, June 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — GAC has long been a partner of leading Chinese ride-hailing app Didi and Chinese tech giant Huawei. By pooling resources, data, and scientific research, GAC and the two tech firms are excited to work together on the future of the automobile industry.
GAC has a long history of cooperation with Didi, having held a stake in the company for years, and signing an extensive bilateral cooperation deal in 2019 agreeing to work together on vehicle promotion and customization, driverless travel, intelligent charging and refueling technologies. Many of China’s taxis are made by GAC, meaning that the two companies’ work is closely intertwined: knowledge of and improvements to automobile technology is highly useful to Didi, and GAC benefits from access to Didi’s mountains of data.
Chinese tech giant Huawei is another powerful addition to this pool of technological resources. One of GAC MOTOR’s core brand values is technology innovation, that is, finding ways to make cars more intelligent, more efficient, and more enjoyable to drive. A world-class smartphone provider, Huawei regularly produces cutting-edge technology in fields such as voice and facial recognition, IoT connectivity, "smart" appliances, cameras and charging technology, to name just a few. Having cooperative access to Huawei’s research and technology gives GAC a strong edge in the production of world-class in-car systems.
One exciting project that GAC is working towards in cooperation with Huawei and Didi is "Level 4" autonomous vehicles, which can operate almost entirely without input from humans (current driver-assist mechanisms are classed as Level 2 autonomy).
Combining resources from the three parties, intelligent L4 vehicles are planned to be mass produced by 2024, utilizing GAC design and manufacturing capabilities and automatic driving software from Didi and Huawei. Didi’s intelligent hardware platform, Didi Gemini, is already being road-tested by several multinational car companies, making Didi now one of the important players in the field of automatic driving, with experts calling the company’s technological achievements in this area "impossible to ignore".
Didi founder Cheng Wei has predicted that Didi will host more than 1 million autonomous vehicles by 2025. GAC is eager to be part of the team driving towards this vision of the future, which embodies the GAC MOTOR spirit of GO AND CHANGE.
With so many exciting avenues of research, the future is looking very bright for cleaner, greener and smarter automobiles.
