Automated Driving ZF Joins the Ranks of the Horizon Partners

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Now ZF also follows in the footsteps of Bosch and Continental, who had earlier entered into partnerships with the Chinese chip manufacturer Horizon Robotics. The collaborations are doubly meaningful.

ZF and the Chinese chip manufacturer Horizon Robotics will jointly develop a new ADAS. The new driver assistance system is set to launch in China in 2026, the supplier has just announced. Horizon and Chinese media referred to the product as a new "coPILOT," while ZF has not yet committed to a specific name.

More interesting than the product and its final name are the strategic implications for the Friedrichshafen-based company, which is currently making headlines in Germany due to plans for massive job cuts. In the fiercely competitive ADAS market in China, ZF was recently overtaken by other Tier-1 suppliers such as Bosch and Continental, not to mention the Chinese competition.

"This deepened collaboration with Horizon Robotics not only cements ZF's global technological leadership in the ADAS sector but also underscores the strategic focus on close cooperation with Chinese technology companies to jointly build an industrial ecosystem," it states.

Chinese Market

ZF and Horizon Robotics to Jointly Launch Driver Assistance System up to SAE Level 3 

China's Chip Pioneers Set the Pace

ZF is now following in the footsteps of Bosch and Continental with some delay, as they had already entered partnerships with Horizon Robotics earlier. Continental founded the joint venture "Horizon Continental Technology" with the Chinese auto chip manufacturer back in 2021. Just as ZF is now planning, the fast chips from Horizon's so-called Journey series are already being integrated into autopilots for the Chinese market there.

Bosch also uses chips from the Journey series for its ADAS products in the People's Republic and announced a planned collaboration with the Chinese technology company in April this year for the development of its latest multipurpose camera.

Horizon Robotics is also the partner of Volkswagen in the joint venture "Carizon," founded with Cariad in 2023, which aims to finally eliminate the automotive software deficit of Wolfsburg in China thanks to Chinese high-tech and German quality focus.

Focus on Integration Instead of In-House Development

The newly announced partnership between ZF and Horizon Robotics thus follows an increasingly established pattern in the strategies of international OEMs and suppliers to utilize rapidly scalable and technologically highly iterative hardware and software solutions from Chinese chip manufacturers.

Instead of wanting to develop everything "in-house," ZF, Continental, and Bosch focus on system integration and their core competence in manufacturing car parts, rather than directly participating in the multi-billion-euro technological race in semiconductor and autonomous software development.

That makes a lot of sense, as the development of autonomous driving solutions in China is progressing so rapidly that even larger research and development departments of individual companies can hardly keep up.

China Gives the Green Light for Level 3 Autonomous Driving

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) officially gave the green light for Level 3 ADAS systems according to the SAE classification in September, subject to certain conditions. At Level 3, the driver can temporarily hand over complete control to the system until their attention is required again in specific situations.

Through its collaboration with Horizon Robotics, ZF is now securing a reliable supply of Journey-6P chips and their computing power of more than 1,000 TOPS, which it can integrate with its own "ProAI computer platform." This will hopefully enable ZF's upcoming ADAS generation to introduce functions like L2+ or L3 on highways and in China's traffic-packed cities, or end-to-end solutions for parking, quickly enough to avoid falling further behind the Chinese competition.

BYD Increases Pressure with Free Autopilot

BYD has particularly increased the pressure on suppliers and other car manufacturers in the ADAS sector since it began installing its self-developed NOA autopilot not only in expensive vehicles but across its entire product portfolio, including very affordable electric cars and hybrids – and at no cost to drivers.

The market penetration of increasingly sophisticated ADAS driving solutions has grown significantly in China in the first half of this year. Already 197 car models are equipped with NOA, or "Navigation on Autopilot," upon delivery from the factory. That is twice as many as in the same period last year, according to a report by the "GaoGong Intelligent Automotive Research Institute."

Suppliers Catch Up – Thanks to Collaborations

It is not easy to get an accurate overview of the market shares of different manufacturers of NOA systems in China because automakers, suppliers, and joint ventures compete fiercely, and many statistics omit one category or another.

Among the NOA third-party providers, Chinese companies Momenta (with more than 60 percent market share), Huawei (around 30 percent), and Baidu Apollo now lead by a wide margin—measured by new registrations with insurance companies—while Bosch, ZF, and Continental, which also belong to this category, are statistically classified more as "also-rans," with market shares in the single-digit percentage range or lower.

Overall, the trend in driver assistance in China is currently increasingly favoring suppliers, who have already captured a quarter of this rapidly growing market. What began with in-house developments by individual automakers is increasingly turning into a complex technology race, where partnerships between specialists like Horizon Robotics and system integrators like ZF, which are considered trustworthy by many OEMs, offer some advantages.

Geopolitics Forces "Dual-Stack" Strategies

From a geopolitical perspective, partnerships with Chinese companies make sense, as the global automotive industry is increasingly being forced into a "dual-stack" strategy due to the technology war Washington is waging against Beijing. Here, "in China, for China," primarily regarding the use of chips and data-based solutions, and separate technology stacks for the rest of the world. OEMs in China consequently reduce their risk when they purchase ZF products with Chinese hardware components and algorithms.

From Horizon Robotics' perspective, the new handshake with ZF is also a smart move, as it expands its sales model beyond direct sales to OEMs and joint ventures with Continental or Carizon to include the route of chip and software integration through an internationally renowned supplier.

Partnerships as a Survival Strategy in Global Competition

In the words of Yu Kai himself, the brilliant founder of Horizon Robotics, who earned his PhD in Machine Learning at LMU in Munich: "ZF has profound expertise and resources in the areas of chassis, electronics, and ADAS. By deepening our strategic collaboration with ZF, we are bringing our local innovations into the global industrial value chain," Yu Kai is quoted in ZF's press release.

Since August 2025, more than ten million units of Horizon Robotics' Journey chip series have already been sold. This success in scaling is important because what ZF, Continental, and other partners are looking for are not only high-performance and quickly adaptable, but also affordable auto chips and ADAS solutions.

Foreign suppliers – and ZF is further proof of this – can only compete with the pace and prices of players like BYD through partnerships with Chinese technology companies. In the long term, this is not only about market share in China but also about their own competitiveness in the global market.