Technology giant Huawei has revealed it will invest $1 billion researching electric vehicle and self-driving car technologies.
Huawei has partnered with BAIC Group, Chongqing Changan Automobile Co. and Guangzhou Automobile Group Co. to co-develop self-driving vehicles. These vehicles will include Huawei badging and help the company rival fellow tech giant Xiaomi which recently committed to investing $10 billion over the next decade into the manufacturing of electric cars.
“The smart car business unit receives one of the heaviest investments from Huawei,” rotating chairman Eric Xu told analysts at the start of the week. “We will invest more than $1 billion in car component development this year. China adds 30 million cars each year and the number is growing. Even if we don’t tap the market outside of China, if we can earn an average 10,000 yuan from each car sold in China, that’s already a very big business for Huawei.”
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As noted by Yahoo Finance, Huawei went through a difficult 2020 after it was banned in the United States, hampering its burgeoning smartphone business. Billionaire founder Ren Zhengfei has since started to grow Huawei into smart agriculture, health care, and electric cars.
Xu is very confident of the autonomous technologies that Huawei has already developed, claiming they are better than Tesla’s.
“I don’t know if they were bragging, but my team said they can have cars driving on their own without human intervention for 1,000 kilometers. That’s way better than Tesla,” Xu told reporters.
