BYD's Free Self-Driving Tech Might Not Be Such a Boon After All

WIRED

23-02-2025

Aside from unfavorable comparisons to rival advanced driver systems, calling it God's Eye could be as misleading a moniker as Tesla's Full Self-Driving. Photo-illustration: Jacqui VanLiew; Getty Images
Not only has China's largest EV maker BYD unveiled good, better, and best tiers for its advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS), it announced last week that the tech—marketed somewhat immodestly as 'God's Eye'—will now be fitted as standard to 21 of BYD's 30 cars split across four brands.
Even the $9,500 Seagull hatchback, the cheapest of BYD's EVs, will ship with the base level of God's Eye at no extra cost, while the $233,500 Yangwang U9 electric supercar will get the top-tier iteration. However, BYD's ADAS system could be as misleadingly named as Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD).
Including ADAS for free will no doubt rile BYD's smaller rivals in China's innovative but cutthroat auto market. Comparatively low-tech Toyota, VW, and Nissan may weaken further, and Tesla—which has yet to gain permission for FSD in China—could also struggle.
Elon Musk's auto firm temporarily lost the title of the world's largest EV maker to BYD last year, and since then competition has been fierce. BYD topped the Chinese market for EVs in January with a 27 percent market share, pushing the previously dominant Tesla down to sixth place on just 4.5 percent.
God's Eye (an alternative translation is 'Eye of Heaven') relies on various cameras and sensors to assist drivers with valet parking, adaptive cruising, and automated braking. Among other tasks, it can also learn users' driving habits and supposedly predict the type and skill level of a new driver taking control.
Careful not to describe God's Eye as fully autonomous, BYD's billionaire founder and CEO Wang Chuanfu boasted during a lavish launch event at the company's headquarters in Shenzhen last week that intelligent driving capabilities would soon become as ubiquitous as seat belts and airbags.
Chuanfu then cut to a promotional video showing a U9 spinning a driverless donut at the Hunan Zhuzhou International Circuit before racing around corners at high speed with tires squealing, and at night.
God's Eye is L2+ ADAS—similar to Tesla's FSD—and would, therefore, still require supervision from a human driver on a public road. As defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), the stages of automated driving are measured on a scale of 0 to 5, with Level 0 involving no driving automation through to Level 5, which is full automation.
L2+, not an SAE-accepted term, is used by automakers to imply progression through the levels. The 'plus' part refers to hands-off-the-steering-wheel driving with eyes on the road ahead.
Powerful computers in a car equipped with L2+ control can follow a mapped route, make lane changes, and moderate speed in traffic. L2+ keeps the burden of liability with the driver but gives at least the sensation of hands-free driving. Unlike in the US, China's ADAS rules state that a driver's hand must always be on the steering wheel.
BYD's moniker may suggest its in-house L2+ ADAS is omniscient, but Shanghai-based automotive commentator Mark Rainford of Inside China Auto has test-driven several Chinese L2+ cars, and he is more impressed with Huawei's Qiankun system than God's Eye. Incidentally, continuing the deification nomenclature, Huawei's own General Obstacle Detection network for autos is also referred to as 'GOD.'
Rival automakers XPeng, Nio, and Li Auto, aided by their early adoption of Nvidia's Orin X tech, a system-on-a-chip (SoC) that's used to power autonomous driving and AI applications, are also more impressive than God's Eye, states Rainford. The three are vying with BYD, Huawei, and others to offer the first true Level 3 autonomous driving system.
BYD says it has obtained China's first Level 3 assisted-driving testing license, but, in an internal communication, Xpeng's chairman and CEO He Xiaopeng claimed in early February that his company could launch a commercial L3 product as early as the second half of this year.
Similarly, Li Auto's L3 could also be ready for public release later this year. The firm's MEGA OTA 7.0 intelligent driving system uses a Vision-Language Model, which supposedly allows the system to understand and interpret both visual and textual information simultaneously: It can spot bus lanes, for instance, a simple task for (most) human drivers, but seemingly tricky for some L2+ systems.
BYD—the pinyin initials of the company's Chinese name, Biyadi, now back-formed into the Western-friendly slogan 'Build Your Dream'—entered the auto business in 2003, starting with batteries for internal-combustion-engine (ICE) vehicles before selling a plug-in hybrid car as early as 2008. The company ceased production and sales of ICE vehicles entirely in 2022.
BYD cars made for sale outside of China—in Europe, for instance—likely won't be fitted with fully functioning God's Eye. In the US, President Biden banned nearly all Chinese connected-car software and hardware from model year 2027, and it's unlikely that President Trump's administration will reverse that decision. BYD and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment on this article.
China, the world's biggest car market, has adopted semi-automated driving more readily than anywhere else, with most domestic automakers providing technology between SAE's Level 2 and Level 3. BYD, which sold over 4 million cars in 2024, is betting on its scale, access to mapping and other data—and 5,000 ADAS-dedicated software engineers—to further its path to dominance. Its shares climbed 21 percent in Hong Kong on expectations that God's Eye would be market-moving, while Xpeng's shares closed 9 percent lower, and Geely dropped 10.3 percent.
At an unspecified later date, BYD said that God's Eye would integrate the R1 large language model (LLM) from DeepSeek, the Chinese startup that recently stunned markets with its open-source generative AI. The integration is expected to control voice-activated features and infotainment systems mainly, but could also be used for some ADAS tasks. Zeekr, Geely, Vyah, and M-Hero have also recently announced integration with DeepSeek.
In addition to cloud and vehicle AI, every BYD car with the new God's Eye system will sport Xuanji architecture, introduced in January last year, acting as the car's brain and neural network. With a central processor and access to 5G and satellite networks, the system apparently perceives changes in the internal and external environment of the car in real time. It feeds it back to Xuanji's 'brain' for supposedly almost instant decisionmaking.
Strictly speaking, God's Eye is the camera, ultrasonic radar, and lidar array alone, split into A, B, and C variants, with A being best. The system's operating software is known as DiPilot, introduced in 2020 on the BYD Han, and now with the good, better, and best tiers of DiPilot 100, 300, and 600.
God's Eye A ships with DiPilot 600 and bristles with high-end cameras and radar, and front- and side-facing lidar sensors. This best system will be fitted to BYD's luxury Yangwang EVs, including the U9 supercar. 'The video of the U9 [on the track] was theater,' believes Rainford, who hasn't heard of any autonomous driving system that can 'make a car's tires squeal around corners.'
Rainford adds that BYD is playing catch-up: '2024 was a breakout year for urban-level autonomous driving systems in China, with the front-runners of Li Auto, XPeng, Nio, and Huawei joined by rivals such as Zeekr, Wey, and even more affordable brands like Leapmotor.'
God's Eye B has cameras, radar, and one lidar unit married to DiPilot 300, and will be fitted to Denza, Song, and BYD's other high-end cars. Both A and B God's Eye systems offer FSD-style L2+ ADAS driving.
God's Eye C with DiPilot 100 has cameras and radar, but no lidar, which could be akin to worshipping a 'God with nearsightedness,' Peter Norton, associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia, tells WIRED.
'Like Tesla's FSD, drivers with God's Eye C aren't supposed to use it away from divided highways. But presumably some BYD drivers, like some Tesla drivers, will use it on ordinary roads anyway—with sometimes potentially lethal consequences,' says Norton, author of a book on autonomous driving. He worries that BYD's use of divine terminology could lead to a false sense of security. 'There's no attempt to caution drivers about the system's limitations,' he stresses.
Rainford, too, cautions that God's Eye isn't yet perfect. 'It's way overhyped,' he says, pointing to the glowing press coverage of last week's launch. 'I drove DiPilot 100 last year on the BYD Song L, and it was far from great, requiring lever-activated overtakes. Even on the freeway it was not even close to the [LDAS] market leaders in China.'
Even though it's not yet allowed in China, Tesla's FSD is believed by some to be technically inferior because it relies solely on cameras and AI, rather than lidar and other sensors.
'Tesla has been overselling the effectiveness of its technology for years,' Michael Brooks, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Auto Safety, told NPR last month. 'And a lot of people buy into that. They're kind of wrapped up in this belief that this is an autonomous vehicle, because it's tweeted about that way.'
Musk has been promising the imminent arrival of fully autonomous cars since at least 2016. At a Tesla shareholder meeting last year, Musk claimed the number of miles that FSD can drive without human intervention has increased. 'It's headed towards unsupervised full self-driving very quickly, at an exponential pace,' Musk claimed.
In 2022, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published the results of a three-year investigation into Tesla's Autopilot system, FSD's forerunner, finding a 'critical safety gap' between motorists' expectations of the driver-assistance system and its true capabilities.
Investigators at the time identified at least 13 fatal crashes in which 'foreseeable driver misuse of the Tesla system played an apparent role.' Tesla said in December 2023 that Autopilot's software system controls 'may not be sufficient to prevent driver misuse' and could increase the risk of a crash.
While FSD is indeed a step up from Autopilot, there are seemingly still problems with the system, as evidenced by messages aimed at Musk on X from Tesla drivers. On February 9, drone software developer Jonathan Challinger reached out to Tesla and Musk after driving his Cybertruck into a pole on a four-lane highway in Reno, Nevada, at up to 45 mph while using FSD at night. Challinger's Cybertruck was totaled, yet he thanked Tesla for 'engineering the best passive safety in the world,' stating that he 'walked away without a scratch.'
The Cybertruck 'failed to merge out of a lane that was ending and made no attempt to slow down or turn until it had already hit the curb,' wrote Challinger on a since-deleted post, blaming not the tech, but himself: 'Big fail on my part, obviously. Don't make the same mistake I did. Pay attention.'
'The commenters blame a crossing that any teenager with a learner's permit and 1990 Ford Escort would navigate with ease,' says Norton. 'And [Challinger] extols the over-engineered vehicle systems that coaxed him into discarding his most basic responsibilities as a driver. The combination of wasted wealth, human indifference, misapplied tech, and cognitive incompetence is depressing.'
Sadly, Norton doesn't believe BYD's God's Eye will fare any better. 'Even in the best equipped [L2+] car, the driver is likely to pay less attention and go faster. By the time a pedestrian saw the speeding high-tech car, there'd be no time left to read the plate before Eternity's summons.'