Geely ignites the automotive AI king competition

Author | Zhou Zhiyu

Editor | Zhang Xiaoling

At the beginning of 2025, the AI competition in China's automotive industry suddenly heated up.

BYD stirred the automotive market under the banner of "high-level intelligent driving equality"; car manufacturers including Changan and Chery also presented their own "universal intelligent driving" solutions.

Geely is not willing to fall behind. At the press conference on March 3, Geely Auto Group CEO Gan Jiayue announced the launch of the "Qianli Haohan" safety high-level intelligent driving system, and that all new and updated products from Geely Galaxy will be equipped with different levels of the "Qianli Haohan" intelligent driving solution.

This is just one aspect of Geely's preparation for the automotive AI era. From building a computing power center to establishing joint ventures in intelligent driving with Qianli Technology and others, Geely is attempting to signal to the outside world through this press conference: in the second half of the competition for intelligent vehicles, the iterative battle of data and computing power is rewriting the industry rules.

After the press conference, Gan Jiayue told Wall Street Insight that to excel in China's intelligent driving, it requires "AI + intelligent driving," which necessitates being fully ahead in the "three-horse carriage" of computing power, algorithms, and data.

Carrying the banners of "intelligent driving equality" and "safety equality," Geely aims to prove to the outside world that it has long been laying out its plans in the AI field and is at the forefront of the industry in multiple areas. In a battlefield surrounded by giants like Tesla and BYD, Geely is breaking through with its "full-domain AI" ecological layout, igniting a "king of the hill" competition in automotive AI.

Launching a "Combination Punch"

In the face of the industry's battle for the popularization of high-level driving, Geely has thrown out a "king bomb," declaring its strong entry into this battlefield.

In terms of high-level intelligent driving systems, Geely launched "Qianli Haohan." Gan Jiayue explained at the exchange that "Qianli" represents the industry's leading general large model and computing power, while "Haohan" represents Geely's industry-leading intelligent driving capabilities and experiences.

At the press conference, Chen Qi, Chief Intelligent Driving Scientist of Geely Holding Group, introduced that Qianli Haohan is divided into five levels: H1, H3, H5, H7, and H9, each with different computing powers and functions. Geely Auto selects the corresponding gradient of intelligent driving solutions based on different user needs and the positioning of different vehicle models.

H1 is the most basic version, equipped with over 100 TOPS of computing power, the highest in its class and price range, supporting high-speed NOA and automatic parking. Moving up to H7, it gradually adds urban commuting NOA and memory parking, urban no-map NOA, full-scene D2D (Door to Door), and parking valet functions. H9, based on H7, has redundancy and can achieve L3-level autonomous driving.

Chen Qi stated that the D2D of Qianli Haohan will also achieve no-map D2D combined with VLM this year, which will be a revolutionary breakthrough.

Yin Qi, founder of Megvii Technology and chairman of Qianli Technology, revealed that H9 will be equipped with dual Thor chips, 13V5R(X) L sensors, and other hardware.

After equipping the Qianli Haohan system, Geely has elevated safety performance to a new height with intelligent driving. The activation speed of AEB (Automatic Emergency Braking) is at 130 km/h; the upper limit activation speed of AES (Automatic Emergency Evasion) reaches 120 km/h. Geely also emphasized at the press conference that the safety capabilities of "Qianli Haohan" are inherited from Volvo's safety experience, and the enhancement of safety is undoubtedly assured Compared to BYD's Tian Shen Zhi Yan intelligent driving system, H1-H7 corresponds to BYD's Tian Shen Zhi Yan C-A, while H9 is Geely's muscle-flexing product. People close to Geely believe that H9 is likely to first be implemented in ZEEKR models.

At the press conference, Geely Auto launched two products, Xingyao 8 and Geely Galaxy E8, both equipped with the H1 solution as standard. Gan Jiayue stated that this year's new models and facelifts will be equipped with different intelligent driving solutions, and only mentioned that multiple models equipped with Qianli Haohan H3 will be launched in the second half of the year, along with a flagship product equipped with Qianli Haohan H7, featuring top-level computing power.

In terms of pricing, Geely did not elaborate much. However, a comparison can be made with the new Galaxy E8, which starts with the H1 solution, yet the official guide price has reached 145,800 yuan, achieving a price reduction while increasing configuration.

Carrying the banner of "AI + Intelligent Driving," Geely has launched a "combination punch" to join this year's intelligent driving battle in the automotive circle. The past two years, where the market primarily competed on price, have already passed; today's competition has made intelligent driving a standard feature, and Geely has showcased its technical prowess through "Qianli Haohan."

Intelligentization is no longer exclusive to high-end models but is a "ticket to survival" for automakers across all price segments.

Four Years of Sword Polishing

The debut of "Qianli Haohan" is one of the tangible manifestations of Geely's AI layout transitioning from the investment phase to the harvest phase.

As early as four years ago, Geely launched the "Two Blue Geely Action Plans," one focusing on intelligent energy-saving and new energy vehicles, and the other on intelligent pure electric vehicles.

Gan Jiayue pointed out that the "Intelligent Geely 2025" strategy released in October 2021 aimed to build a "one network and three systems," which includes establishing a technological ecosystem encompassing chips, operating systems, big data, intelligent computing centers, large models, and satellite star chains, thereby solidifying the technical "foundation" of computing power, algorithms, and data for high-level intelligent driving systems.

After four years of accumulation, Geely's computing power, algorithms, and data have transformed into large computing power, large models, and large data.

A typical data point is the computing power cluster. Geely, in collaboration with partners such as Jueyue Xingchen, Qianli Technology, and Xingji Meizu, has created the Xingrui Intelligent Computing Center 2.0, with a comprehensive computing power reaching an astonishing 23.5 EFLOPS, placing it at the top level among Chinese automakers.

In comparison, Xiaomi's intelligent driving department currently has a reserve of 11.45 EFLOPS of high-performance computing power. Even last year, China Mobile built three large-scale computing centers, with an overall computing power of only 29 EFLOPS.

With the support of large computing power, it can support large models to generate more scenarios, thus integrating AI and algorithms. By using large models + high computing power, redundancy can be achieved, enabling the capability to realize L3-level intelligent driving.

In terms of data, Geely has over 7.5 million vehicles with L2-level intelligent driving capabilities, ranking first among Chinese automakers, with a cumulative real driving data of 10 billion kilometers; the AI-Drive large model in Geely's Xingrui AI large model deeply integrates Deepseek and Jueyue multimodal large models, achieving the generation of complex driving conditions at a rate of 10,000 kilometers per hour, improving autonomous driving training efficiency by 30 times.

At this year's CES, Geely launched the industry's first "Intelligent Vehicle Full Domain AI" technology system, covering the entire chain of intelligent driving, cabin interaction, cloud computing power, satellite communication, and more Geely's layout in the AI field has shifted from early construction of chip, computing power, and data technology foundations to reconstructing technologies such as power and chassis with AI. Now, it has achieved an ecological upgrade from an automotive company to a mobility technology platform.

This is clearly not in the same direction as Tesla and BYD, which are fully integrating software and hardware and pursuing vertical integration. From the vast landscape, it can be seen that under Geely's leadership, it is taking supply chain enterprises and ecological enterprises into action.

Reconstructing Automobiles

The elephant is invisible. While automotive companies are waving the AI flag and even stating their intention to transform into automotive AI companies, Geely offers its own solution.

The automotive industry has moved from the early competition of electrification to the competition of "intelligent entities." The essence of competition in the automotive industry has shifted from motor performance and power battery density to a war of algorithms and ecosystems.

With the penetration rate of new energy exceeding 50%, the penetration rate of AI has become an important indicator for assessing the competitive ability of automotive companies. All participants in the industry will be forced to engage in an infinite war.

If the past was about "software-defined vehicles," then the future will be about "AI reconstructing ecosystems."

As envisioned by Yin Qi, 2025 will no longer be "car + AI," but rather the official arrival of "AI + car." With the explosion of Agent applications this year, the application of Agents in vehicles will also enter a period of explosion, transforming cars from "transportation tools" into "intelligent life forms."

Empowered by multimodal large models, Yin Qi proposed that "AI + car" will have three trends: the birth of superhuman-machine interaction; future vehicles will not only have autonomous driving but also automatic execution; and the scaling of vehicle networking large models, where we will truly see Scaling Law applied in vehicles, innovating and incubating more AI-enhanced scenarios on a complete vehicle + cloud network.

Behind this vision is that vehicles are no longer just a single transportation carrier, but through emotional voice synthesis, multimodal interaction, AI cloud power, and other functions, users can perceive the "personalized" characteristics of the vehicle. This upgrade in experience may trigger a qualitative change in automobiles from "mechanical products" to "emotional carriers."

The development paradigm of the automotive industry is thus changing: future automotive giants will certainly be ecological empires rather than manufacturing factories.

The capital market's evaluation criteria for automotive companies are also undergoing significant changes, with AI capabilities represented by intelligent driving becoming an important reference for market assessment of automotive company valuations.

Cui Yan, an analyst at Minsheng Securities, pointed out that Geely's high-level intelligent driving plan will drop to below 150,000 by 2025, accelerating equality, and is optimistic about the company's push for intelligence, boosting product sales, and reshaping valuation.

Deng Xue, an analyst at CICC, stated that Galaxy is launching price reductions ranging from 3,000 to 6,000 yuan based on existing models and accelerating the pace of intelligent driving model launches, which is expected to continuously strengthen product advantages and achieve the Galaxy brand's sales target of one million vehicles within the year.

Considering the valuation increase brought by the intelligent driving layout, Deng Xue raised Geely's target price by 13.2% to HKD 21.06, corresponding to a 15 times price-to-earnings ratio for 2025.

As electrification enters a plateau, intelligence will inevitably become the second growth curve. The competitiveness of future automotive companies will not depend on a single technological lead but on their ability to transform AI into a continuous definition of products, reshape user relationships, and dominate ecological rules This also means that after Tesla and BYD reign in the era of electrification, Geely is expected to leverage the power of AI to sprint towards the throne of automotive AI in the second half of electrification