BYD’s ‘God’s Eye’ under the lid

The rise of the Chinese automotive industry on the Electric Vehicle (EV) market is an oft-told story. China has staged a tour de force on the global EV market through substantial commitments and investments in production of EVs and batteries.

The key to BYD’s launch of “Intelligent Driving for All” initiative — designed to make ADAS standard in all its vehicles from low-end to high-end models — was the creation of an expansive domestic ecosystem in China, encompassing semiconductors, sensors, software and subsystems.

Describing BYD’s “God’s Eye” driving system as full self-driving technology is probably misleading, despite the hyperbolic marketing name.

But the point of BYD’s announcement is that it “has set a target to integrate its low-cost solution into its entire fleet as standard without charging customers extra,” Yole analysts observed. “This means it will offer at least L2+ autonomous driving functionality in all its cars.”

The announcement also illustrates the ascent of BYD.

Traditionally an OEM focused on volume production to take market share and enter foreign markets, BYD is now claiming brand leadership with its scalable ADAS technology stack.

“Compared to Xpeng, Li Auto, Nio and Huawei, all with their own intelligent driving systems, BYD was somewhat behind on the technology side,” observed Tu Le, founder at Sino Auto Insights. “It became very apparent that BYD had to work [on its own intelligent driving system], by partnering with someone, or some ones.” BYD did not disclose whose technology the company used in God’s Eye systems. But Le pointed out that BYD has been busy announcing partnership deals with Chinese companies such as DJI and Momenta.

Under the hood

At its announcement, BYD explained that it designed three God’s Eye levels for premium to budget vehicle models.

I asked Yole to help dig deeper and break down the underlying technologies used by BYD.

Three levels of the God’s Eye system designated as A, B and C use varying computing platforms (of 600, 300 and 100 TOPS). Each level also features varying sensor types. For example, the budget system, C, uses only cameras.

Yole summed up:

God’s Eye A – powered by a 600 trillion operations per second (TOPS) computing platform, will provide triple-LiDAR-based driving for BYD’s premium Yangwang models.

God’s Eye B–at 300 TOPS—will support LiDAR-based driving in the Denza, FangChengBao and some BYD models.

God’s Eye C, with a 100 TOPS computing platform, will deliver triple-camera-based features without LiDAR for BYD-branded budget vehicles.

Sensors

The teardown of BYD God’s Eye system starts with sensors.

A table below, created by Yole, shows different sensors developed by different companies. Note that “most BYD suppliers are Chinese” according to Yole.

From cameras to radars and lidars in particular, it shows how BYD has taken advantage of a deep bench of domestic technology suppliers — from RoboSense and Hesai to Huawei and Horizon Robotics.

In-house SoC development

Over the last several years, every major OEM in the world, including China’s Xpeng and Nio, talked about their desire to build their own SoCs, presumably to control their destiny.

Even though it is now using SoCs from chip vendors, mainly Nvidia and Horizon Robotics, BYD is expected to turn the corner sooner than others. This is largely because BYD, a designer of its own MCUs, already has experience with semiconductors. When, not if, BYD designs and deploys its own ADAS SoCs for God’s Eye level C, the Chinese auto company should already be its own high-volume customer.

Lei Xing, co-host of China EVs & More podcast, agreed. In discussions on BYD with Sino Auto Insights’ Le, he said, “The joke on the street is that, besides tires and window glass, BYD does everything on its own. That is not yet true, because they do source chips and lidars. But guess what? Those are the exact same products they’re developing in-house right now —the domain controllers, the lidars, the chips—like what Nio and Xpeng are doing.”

Vertical integration

BYD is developing a winning recipe for lower cost, feature-rich vehicles via vertical integration.