Smart driving gets closer to consumers

Chinese consumers will experience greater access to newer and more breakthrough smart driving technology as a leading local manufacturer of intelligent driving solutions accelerates innovation and the availability of novel features in mass-market vehicles.

"As both domestic and international automakers place growing emphasis on intelligent driving systems, advanced features are increasingly making their way into mass-market models," said Zhang Lin, chairman and CEO of domestic smart driving tech company Freetech.

"This trend is enabling more consumers to access a richer array of smart functionalities," Zhang said.

The executive added that the company is leveraging economies of scale through mass production to bring products to market that strike a better balance between performance and affordability.

"Products refined through mass production tend to bring higher levels of efficiency, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness," he said.

According to data from China Insights Consultancy, Freetech, based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, ranked second among domestic suppliers in China's L2 and L2+ smart driving solution installation volume in 2024, holding a 17.7 percent market share.

From Zhang's view, it is important and rather practical for emerging driving tech companies to follow a step-by-step technological roadmap, evolving gradually from Level 2 to Level 4 autonomous driving.

"This incremental approach allows industry players to align with real-world market demand, commercialize cutting-edge technologies, and build a sustainable business foundation for scaling into higher-level autonomous driving," he said.

The view is echoed by Zhang Xiang, secretary-general of the International Intelligent Vehicle Engineering Association. "Although advanced products above L2+ may offer higher prices and better margins, they also come with significant development costs and risks. If the investment fails, it could all go to waste."

Zhang added that this is why companies need to control the scale of investment, continuing to grow their L2 business while allocating a portion of resources each year to L2+ and higher-level development, ensuring more stable and sustainable growth.

In the second quarter of this year, Freetech secured over 40 new projects from both Chinese and international automakers, with a focus on its newly launched urban NOA (navigate on autopilot) offering.

According to the company, requiring only 128 TOPS (trillion operations per second), the system delivers end-to-end NOA functionality across urban roads and highways, along with memory-based automated parking in complex environments.

The product is built upon Freetech's recently unveiled ODIN 3.0 platform — a full-stack, in-house-developed solution that is designed around artificial intelligence and integrates hardware and software across controllers, sensors, and algorithms.

By combining hardware and software into a unified system, the platform is expected to improve production efficiency and shorten time-to-market in a significant manner.

"Our delivery cycle for intelligent driving solutions can be as short as eight months, well below the industry average of 15 to 30 months," Zhang said.

As of the end of 2024, Freetech had established partnerships with 49 OEMs and secured over 330 program nominations and more than 260 mass production projects, he added.