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China Transportation

Huawei To Invest $1 Billion on Car Tech It Says Surpasses Tesla (bloomberg.com) 53

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
Huawei will invest $1 billion on researching self-driving and electric-car technologies, accelerating plans to compete with Tesla and Xiaomi in the world's biggest vehicle arena. From a report: Huawei's autonomous-driving technology has already surpassed Tesla's in some spheres, for instance by allowing cars to cruise for more than 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) without human intervention, Rotating Chairman Eric Xu told analysts in Shenzhen Monday. The Chinese telecom giant will partner with three automakers initially to make self-driving cars that carry the Huawei name as a sub-brand, said Xu, one of three executives who take turns to fill the post. It will keep its circle of partners small and get its logo onto cars -- not unlike how Intel calls attention to its microprocessors on PCs -- that adopt its autonomous driving technology, he added. The mobile giant has so far agreed to team up with BAIC Group, Chongqing Changan Automobile and Guangzhou Automobile Group.
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Huawei To Invest $1 Billion on Car Tech It Says Surpasses Tesla More

Huawei To Invest $1 Billion on Car Tech It Says Surpasses Tesla

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  • A self-driving car ain't one of them.

    • As long as it's properly tested by the regulator... The main issue with Tesla is they release alpha software onto public roads.

      • Would be interesting to see a car park of teslas drive interacting with each other.
      • The standard practice of the CCP is to invite foreign companies into China, aquire their science and technology, give it to local companies, then provide assistance to those local competitors so they replace the foreign company. Meaning the China self driving cars are derivitive tech from Tesla, not something new. And no, the CCP won't properly test this before release onto their roads.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          If it's better than Tesla's tech then it's clearly not a copy. If they were going to copy anyone it would be someone who actually has self driving tech like Waymo, who of course don't have operations in China.

    • A self-driving car ain't one of them.

      The future holds a lot when it comes to sourcing commodity tech.

      Choice, may not be one of them.

    • Re:There are a lot of Chinese-made things I'll buy (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @03:53PM (#61265364)

      Huawei will be building cars mostly for the Asian market.

      China is the world's biggest car market by far. The SE-Asia market is also huge and growing.

      Even so, a billion dollars is chump-change. They need to invest way more than that to make a serious effort.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        Huawei will be building cars mostly for the Asian market.

        You are implying most Asian countries have poor safety standards and/or expectations. This isn't true. For example, Japan is a free-speech country with an ample middle class who are not keen on risk. Singapore, Taiwan, and S. Korea also have a strong middle class.

        I do suppose it's fairly likely the Chinese gov't will try to tilt safety stats within their own country to make home-grown brands look better. It's what despots do.

        • You are implying most Asian countries have poor safety standards and/or expectations.

          I rather think they're implying that China is a bigger market (by a factor of seven) than Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore combined. China and India are about 1/3 of humanity between them....

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Tablizer ( 95088 )

            If that's the intent, it perhaps should have said, "Huawei will be building cars mostly for the Chinese market."

            • If that's the intent, it perhaps should have said, "Huawei will be building cars mostly for the Chinese market."

              Southeast Asia has 655 million people. Japan and Korea are unlikely to import Chinese cars, but Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia will.

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by Tablizer ( 95088 )

                There are "ascendant" countries all over the world, not just Asia. Again, the original wording made it sound like Asia in general accepts poor quality products. Perhaps you could have said, "Their target market is ascendant countries" or the like. No need to mention Asia.

      • It's plenty if you skip the R&D and just aquire the tech.
    • yeh because we all know musk has never had a long nose, like the 150 mile tunnel thing in vegas, or hyperloop, or autopilot or...

  • It's not a real concern just yet but as this tech matures over the next decade will there need to be some international standards or regulation? I can think of a dozen autonomous vehichle programs running right now. Tesla, Cruise, comma.ai, Waymo, Huawei, Zoox, Embark, Voyage and even more

    Will having a few dozen different softwares running on the open road cause issues? I know competition in the space will improve things to a certain degree, different solutions to different problems but I would much pref

    • You got that right. We have already had several accidents, some fatal, while trying to test self-driving software in real-world situations. It will be impossible to predict an autonomous car's response when interacting with 5 or 6 other brands of self driving software. There are too many chances for a feedback loop of swerve left, no swerve right, head on collisions. There are simply too many variables. We (humans) have created systems so complex that no one person knows how they work. The first of the
      • The key requirement to developing self driving cars is practice. You need to have your cars drive on public roads with other cars. Given their past actions I believe the CCP will allow plenty of that, with the company paying to clean up any problems. The biggest problem is that the rules of the road change from country to country. Driving on the sidewalk is OK in many third world contries but not in Western countries etc.

  • After stealing Tesla IP from Chinese Factories (Score:5, Insightful)

    by theshowmecanuck ( 703852 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @03:39PM (#61265312) Journal
    Standard Chinese operating procedure. Build factories and assembly plants for American companies who want the low labour cost virtual (and sometimes not even virtual) slave labour in China, who will then tell people that they isolate the technology so that the Chinese can't steal tech secrets. And then at least some of the American companies will lie to themselves about that too, too (the truly unscrupulous, like Apple and Tesla will just outright lie to fan base and neither will care). And then somehow we see Chinese stealth planes and other state of the art devices that people raised in a 'do not think' authoritarian state just can't innovate. And American and other western nations keep shipping that technology back to the home country. And watch all the American ships and planes turn off completely for some reason if they ever did have to confront Chinese forces in the region (like when China finally decides to invade Taiwan). That is, after they have figured out what the military is doing because all the communications equipment in the west has been compromised, too.

  • Hahaha (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @03:52PM (#61265358)

    1000 kilometers without intervention? In a straight line, downhill, falling?

    • or even just going around a circle track - the "autonomous" piloting software just sets the steering angle to a constant that is proper for the track, and let it drive in a circle inside the lanes for hours. See! No intervention!

    • If they were able to get an autonomous vehicle to work in chinese traffic, it will be able to drive anywhere, on highways, roads, small streets, offroad, demolition derby, anywhere!

  • Of course they claim they are "better than Tesla". There's almost no penalty for one company mis-claiming their products are better than competitors'. For one, "better" is generally subjective. Second, if they prove wrong, few customers will remember or care about past marketing predictions. Talk is cheap. I suppose this is all Captain Obvious stuff to most.

  • Do they not know all the smart
    Money is not in improving batteries or self driving, but to buy Bitcoin.

  • I guess their moles have stolen enough IP and data to build something now.

  • The Tesla-Killer-Cemetery is rather full already.

  • Instead of listing the dollar abount lets talk about the actuall things they develop. Seen way too many companies that are nowhere near #1 saying "Wel'll invest a thousand times more than that and dominate the market." only to silently fall back into obscurity when they fail to deliver on that statement.

  • So many companies claim to have superior everything to Tesla and yet, none every do.

  • Mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery.

    How can such a conforming society ever find the creativity to lead instead of follow?

  • Join the club, Huawei (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @08:03PM (#61266524)
    We have been hearing about Tesla killers from all sorts of companies for a decade now - and so far they have have delivered little more than vaporware. Join the club, Huawei.
  • well, they also said they were making a mobile OS from the ground up.

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