Artificial Intelligence to Control the Vehicle China's Race for AI Agents in Cars

Related Vendor

SIMTOS (Seoul International Machine Tool Show)

AI agents were the most important trend at this year's "Auto China". It is the most visible signal to date that the third disruption of the automotive industry has begun. After electrification and intelligent driving, "AI-defined driving" is now following with force.

Chinese manufacturers in particular are currently outdoing each other with the announcement of AI agents. After the first wave of AI adoption in vehicles primarily led to better voice assistants in the cockpit, artificial intelligence is now set to take on more complex tasks. The AI agents will no longer just chat or answer questions, but will interpret intentions, break down tasks and carry out multi-stage chains of action such as ordering food, making restaurant reservations, payment, navigation and specific vehicle control via ADAS in a closed loop.

AI is More than Just A Tool

The voice in the cockpit is to become an intelligent conductor that can control the entire vehicle. "In other words, the competition has moved away from AI as a chat tool. AI must now be able to act," the Chinese internet portal NetEase quoted Zhong Xuedan, VP at Tencent Smart Mobility, as saying. A video about the Zeekr 8X electric car from the Geely Group shows what will be possible. "Drive me to pick up my child from school and find a McDonald's on the way. I need to get there before 5pm," is the command given to the car by a user in the PR video. The car then plans the best route itself, switches on assisted driving, stops at a McDonald's, drives on and finally parks automatically in front of the school. The driver no longer has to do much himself, apart from handing his child a hamburger and perhaps cleaning the seats afterwards.

"It's not a voice assistant that researches something for you. It's an AI agent that performs tasks for you," is how the Chinese tech magazine Jike Gongyuan describes the technological leap that has just begun. There is no mention of when the Zeekr 8X will be delivered with exactly these capabilities. However, it apparently won't be long now. According to the manufacturer, more than 10,000 orders were received for the Zeekr 8X within the first 29 minutes of its market launch on April 17. Trade media are writing about the first Chinese response to Tesla's "Grok + FSD model".

This agentic vehicle AI was developed by an industrial alliance founded specifically for this purpose. The car manufacturer Geely, its AI subsidiary Afari (Qianli Technology) and the AI start-up StepFun have jointly developed "Super Eva". It is a combined suite of AI agents that can perform multi-step actions in the car across domains.

These functions are made possible by a multimodal AI model developed by StepFun that covers speech and image recognition simultaneously. It works partly as an edge model in the vehicle, for more complex thinking tasks in the cloud. According to the business newspaper Shangguan Xinwen, only around 40 days passed between the first release of the AI model 3.5-Flash and its installation in the car. This cannot be verified exactly, but it gives an approximate idea of the speed at which these or similar AI functions are likely to be rolled out in the Chinese automotive industry from now on.

New Scenarios Possible

Other Chinese manufacturers are also upgrading with AI agents and presented their first results in Beijing. XPeng updated its AI model so that commands such as "Park near the entrance to the shopping center" also work without a map or coordinates. With the help of AI, the car navigates solely by perceiving the real world on site, simply using a camera.

Xiaomi, on the other hand, has just released an update for its HyperOS car operating system, which processes complex to-do lists while driving, makes restaurant reservations, orders coffee and recognizes from the driver's voice whether he is stressed when he gets home so that he can switch on soothing lights and soft music as a precaution.

What is currently being heralded here in more or less impressive functions is the next investment race in the automotive industry. Anyone who doesn't play along here will soon no longer appeal to the spoiled Chinese car customers. Huawei has already announced that it will invest more than 9 billion US dollars in computing power for intelligent driving over the next five years.

German Manufacturers in A Tight Spot

The German manufacturers, who have been struggling to catch up in terms of electrification and autonomous driving functions, are once again under pressure. BMW China has just presented its "BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant", which is based on Alibaba's Qwen model and will be available in new iX3 models and the BMW 7 Series.

Volkswagen currently seems to be the furthest along, having announced a suite of AI agents for all cars in China for the second half of the year. This is no longer just about the interaction between man and machine in the cockpit, but about precisely those chains of action that are already being used to advertise the Zeekr 8X. "The car should be like a companion," explains Thomas Ulbrich, CTO of VW in China.

Korean carmaker Hyundai brought its all-electric Ioniq brand to China, which uses software from Chinese developer Momenta and an AI assistant on a Qualcomm chipset. "China is the place where the future of mobility is being defined, and Hyundai intends to help," emphasizes José Muñoz, President and CEO of Hyundai Motor Company.

Race for the Best Platform And Partners

This new race for the best AI in cars will almost certainly not be decided by the individual car models, nor by the vehicle manufacturers alone. The decisive factor will be who integrates into the best platforms and finds the best partners. AI control for the chassis, in the cockpit, connection to payment platforms, credit and bank card and service apps must all come together.

This is a major new opportunity for China's major internet and AI companies, especially Tencent, known for its super app WeChat. "As an intelligent carrier that integrates hardware and software and is strongly connected to the physical world, the automobile is predestined for the use of AI agent scenarios," says Tang Daosheng, Senior EVP at Tencent. On April 23, the Group launched an "open platform for AI agents in mobility for all scenarios". Seven agents for ordering, navigation, internet searches, connectivity, infotainment, roadside assistance and valet parking can be integrated relatively easily into various vehicle models.

Such platform providers are likely to be of interest to many OEMs, at least until they have developed their own AI agents. More than 100 car manufacturers currently use the Tencent Cloud. Tencent's cockpit solutions are used in more than 80 percent of China's car brands and have been installed in around 18 million vehicles to date, reports the NetEase portal.

There's no getting around WeChat, because it's the "killer app" on almost every Chinese cell phone, which is used to communicate, research and pay for everything from luxury cars to dinner and melons on the side of the road.

Even Tesla upgraded the cockpit of its cars in China in March 2026 with WeChat integration, among other things so that users can send "live locations" directly from chat and map apps to the vehicle navigation system. Alibaba, ByteDance and Baidu are also working on integrating their large-scale AI models into as many vehicles as possible. (se)

Software-Defined Vehicles

Race for the Car Made of Bits and Bytes