After EV Batteries, China Wants To Dominate Car Brains Too Several Chinese carmakers are developing their own smart-driving chips, aiming to cut costs, move faster, and rely less on third parties. - Chinese EV makers are designing their own smart-driving chips to cut costs and rely less on suppliers. - BYD, NIO, XPeng, and Li Auto want more control over the hardware behind driver assistance. - In-house chip design could make Chinese EVs cheaper, smarter, and faster to develop. The first part of China’s electric car rise was about batteries, an industry it now dominates. Cheaper, better batteries made at an enormous scale helped turn companies like BYD from regional players into global juggernauts with their eyes on legacy automakers. Now, Chinese carmakers are looking at the next expensive EV part: the chips that power advanced driver-assistance systems and increasingly automated driving features. Gasgoo says 2026 looks set to be a major year for Chinese automakers developing their own smart driving chips. BYD, NIO, XPeng, and Li Auto all have in-house chip design projects in progress because advanced driver-assistance hardware is becoming increasingly important—and too expensive—to leave entirely to suppliers. The industry shift is bigger than propulsion. Cars are increasingly becoming software-defined machines, and in China specifically, advanced driver-assistance features are quickly trickling down from expensive flagship models into much cheaper mainstream EVs. That puts pressure on carmakers to make the hardware cheaper, more efficient, and more closely tied to their own software. The most advanced cars available in China are rolling sensor platforms, running cameras, radar, lidar in some cases, driver-monitoring systems, and increasingly ambitious assisted-driving software. The chip that processes all of that is becoming increasingly important, and automakers want more flexibility, independence, and savings by no longer outsourcing this technology. BYD is the cleanest example of how