At an event in Shenzhen on 28 May, BYD said it will cover the economic cost of accidents that happen while a driver is using urban navigate-on-autopilot or intelligent parking in compliance with the rules. It also showed a 4 nm driving chip of its own design. The pledge is the more interesting of the two, because it is the first time a manufacturer has attached its own money to an assistance feature’s mistakes.
Affected#
No car in Europe or Morocco. The coverage is China-only, for buyers and owners upgrading to God’s Eye 5.0 there, and it runs for one year. Nothing in it changes what is enabled, homologated or insured on a European Sealion 7.
It matters here because of the precedent. Every driver-assistance system on sale is legally the driver’s responsibility, and the gap between that and how the systems are marketed is the central problem with the category. A manufacturer volunteering to pay narrows the gap — in one market, for one year, on two features.
Confirmed#
| The pledge | BYD covers “all resulting economic losses” from a legally-liable accident during compliant use |
| Features covered | urban navigate-on-autopilot and intelligent parking |
| Term and scope | one year, China, for buyers and owners upgrading to God’s Eye 5.0 |
| Fleet cited | more than 3.15 million vehicles |
| Chip | Xuanji A3, 4 nm, about 700 TOPS each, over 2,100 TOPS in a three-chip cluster |
| Chip rating | claimed to support L3 and L4 functions |
| Chip status | described as already in large-scale mass production |
BYD describes the A3 as China’s first self-developed 4 nm automotive driving SoC. It is the processor the in-house 4D radar chip is arranged around, and that reporting has it appearing first in a mass-produced Denza in 2027.
God’s Eye 5.0 itself rolled out in January, when BYD put the installed base of God’s Eye at more than 2.3 million vehicles in China and claimed more than 160 million kilometres of driving data a day. The architecture details BYD promotes with 5.0 — a Xuanji Architecture 2.0, a “satellite” sensor arrangement, an upgraded physical-AI model — come from the May release, not the January one.
Wang Chuanfu’s framing at the event: “Our first goal is to achieve zero traffic accidents.”
Unconfirmed#
- How the pledge works in practice. “Legally liable” and “in compliance with regulations” are doing the load-bearing work, and BYD has published no claims process, cap, exclusion list or arbitration route. A promise whose conditions are assessed by the promiser is not the same as insurance.
- “World’s first”. The dual-coverage claim is BYD’s own. SCMP reports the pledge without it.
- Every chip figure. TOPS numbers, the L3/L4 rating and the mass-production status are BYD’s, unmeasured by anyone else. A chip that can compute an L4 workload is not a car that is allowed to drive itself anywhere.
- What 5.0 changed. BYD lists architecture names; no independent comparison of 5.0 against 4.0 behaviour exists, and the January material does not itemise the changes.
- The complaints. In March, Bloomberg reported an owner’s account of a Yangwang U8 accelerating from 60 to 93 km/h unprompted and making an abrupt lane change, originally posted to Xiaohongshu. Several outlets carried it; the original is behind a paywall and we have not read it. As of late March BYD had made no statement, and we found no evidence of a regulatory investigation — the scrutiny reported is owner and press criticism, not an official action.