In February 2025 in Shenzhen, two press conferences set off a song of ice and fire in China's automobile industry.
When BYD, in the name of "intelligent driving for all", decentralized its high-end intelligent driving technology to the 70,000 yuan market; a week later, Huawei's Hongmeng Intelligent Driving, with the million-level price of the Zunjie S800, used six "autonomous intelligent" technologies to build a Chinese-style super luxury fortress.
Inclusiveness and luxury, scale and extreme, mass line and elitism...
Behind the subtle tension of this intra-city competition is the embodiment of Chinese brands gradually gaining control of the right of interpretation in the automotive industry in the era of smart electric vehicles.
Huawei's Executive Director Richard Yu made a "moment of awakening" declaration at the press conference, claiming that cars will move from the passive intelligent era to the active intelligent era. The core competitiveness of the Zunjie S800, the Tuling Longxing platform, is the main carrier of this technological leap. This system, defined as "the industry's first autonomous intelligent digital chassis", integrates four major capabilities of active perception, central control, intelligent reasoning and autonomous learning through a global fusion architecture, and achieves millisecond-level adjustment of the body posture.
Its disruptive nature lies in that when the vehicle encounters a left front tire blowout while traveling at 120km/h, the system can stabilize the vehicle body through four-wheel torque distribution adjustment within 0.2 seconds, and even maintain a straight track on slippery roads without the need for driver intervention. The on-site demonstration of this scene directly targets the mechanical redundancy limit that is difficult for traditional luxury cars to achieve. The "crab mode" brought by the 16° rear-wheel steering allows a 5-meter-long vehicle to achieve a turning radius of 3.37 meters, which is more flexible than an A0-class car.
If traditional luxury cars pursue "steadiness", Huawei uses algorithms and motors to achieve "light steps". Not only can it climb snowy slopes without stalling, and drive on opposite roads without tailspinning, but it can also predict road conditions through the spatiotemporal reasoning suspension network, allowing the car body to "foresee the future" in bumps and resolve impacts in advance - for example, it can crush sand without blowing up, crush glass without breaking, and "tread on water without leaving any trace".
In terms of safety, the main focus is also on "prevention". The Angel Seat active safety protection system of the Zunjie S800 upgrades the safety logic from "post-collision protection" to "pre-collision intervention". The omnidirectional perception network constructed by 4 laser radars and a distributed millimeter-wave radar matrix can identify invisible vehicles in rain and fog and automatically brake to a stop. It can also actively turn to avoid risks when predicting the risk of front and rear clamping. When a collision is inevitable, the system will automatically tighten the seat belt, adjust the seat posture, and switch to redundant power supply and call for rescue after the accident, forming a "full-link protection".
Communication technology has also made a breakthrough. Huawei's Galaxy Communication System has for the first time achieved in-vehicle satellite calls that can be shared with mobile phones 30 meters away from the vehicle, so there is no need to stop and wait to make a satellite call while driving. Dual-network dual-standby and weak network acceleration technology allow navigation to run smoothly in remote mountainous areas.
The cockpit interaction is also full of Huawei flavor. Hongmeng ALPS cockpit 2.0 can actively purify odors such as nicotine through double-layer air circulation and negative oxygen ion system; the car language system 2.0 uses 2.6 million pixel smart headlights to project dynamic light blankets to achieve "car-to-outside dialogue", such as curve width indication and pedestrian warning.
In terms of energy replenishment, the Giant Whale Battery 2.0 of the Zunjie S800 can achieve a 10%-80% charge in just 10.5 minutes on the extended-range version; the pure electric version refreshes the industry standard with a charging speed of one kilometer per second.
While BYD was shouting "equal rights for smart driving" in Pingshan, east of Shenzhen, using scale to dilute technology costs, Huawei was proving that the Chinese market is inclusive enough to accommodate both "technological accessibility" and "technological hegemony" with 2,100 million-level orders for the Zunjie S800 in Qianhai, west of Shenzhen.
Yu Chengdong's ambition is not limited to crushing parameters. From crab-like steering to satellite communication sharing, every detail is strengthening the cognitive closed loop of "Huawei = top technology" and trying to define a new standard of luxury.
This Shenzhen tale of two cities, held one week apart, seems to have diametrically opposed styles, but in fact they are jointly tearing apart the pricing power of traditional luxury cars. When Maybach users began to discuss whether the crab mode is more interesting than the starry sky roof, this technical drama performed by the "Shenzhen duo" may have quietly rewritten the rules of the game.
