Huawei Puts Smart Driving in 2 Million Cars, and L3 Changes the Game

Illustration of Huawei Qiankun Smart Driving application scenarios.

At the end of August, cumulative installations of Huawei Qiankun Smart Driving passed 2 million vehicles, and user numbers for HarmonyOS Cockpit and the Qiankun app also surpassed 2 million. This does not look like the sales volume of a car company. It looks more like a company that "does not build cars" has installed the same technology, one deal at a time, into the vehicles of 25 brands and more than 60 models. By the end of the year, the number of equipped models is expected to reach 93, with vehicle scale heading toward 3 million. This business is already substantial: Huawei's Intelligent Automotive Solution business generated full-year revenue of 45.018 billion yuan in 2025, up 72.1% year on year, making it the fastest-growing business within the Huawei group.

Behind 2 Million Vehicles Is a Company That Does Not Build Cars

Yinwang positions itself as a "supplier of incremental components for intelligent connected vehicles." Jin Yuzhi puts it more bluntly: it aims to be an "electronic screw" for the auto industry and does not compete with automakers for the whole-vehicle business. Implementation relies on two cooperation models: full-stack cooperation, participating in vehicle definition and development, used in brands such as HarmonyOS Smart Mobility, Avatr, and Qijing; and component cooperation, where automakers separately purchase Qiankun Smart Driving or HarmonyOS Cockpit as needed. The model is essentially the same as XPeng licensing its platform technology to Volkswagen for licensing fees: both spread R&D results across more customers' vehicles to collect revenue. The difference is that Huawei's customers are not one company, but more than twenty.

Scale Creates a Data Flywheel

The more installations it has, the more Huawei accumulates one thing that a single automaker cannot: real-world road data. In December last year, cumulative assisted driving mileage for Qiankun Smart Driving was still 7 billion kilometers; by the World Intelligent Connected Vehicles Conference on October 21, that number had exceeded 16.9 billion kilometers, an increase of nearly 10 billion in just over 10 months. From 12.8 billion in July to 16.9 billion in October, it grew by 4.1 billion in three months, averaging more than 1.3 billion per month. The first 1 million installations took 44 months, while the second took only about 12 months, nearly 4 times faster. On the user side, monthly active smart driving users accounted for 94.6% in September, with 1.08 billion kilometers of assisted driving mileage in a single month; on the first day of National Day (from September 30 to 9 a.m. on October 1), 1.107 million users activated Qiankun Smart Driving and drove 71.16 million kilometers, with per-capita assisted mileage 3 times the September daily average. Feeding so much real mileage into algorithms for iteration is how reliability under complex road conditions is gradually built. For Huawei, the most valuable part of selling technology lies here: the data is not in the hands of any single automaker, but in its own hands.

Illustration of a vehicle equipped with Qiankun Smart Driving driving on urban roads.

L3 Shifts Responsibility to the System

The real turning point is July 1, 2027. On that day, the mandatory national standard for L3 autonomous driving officially takes effect. At L2, if something goes wrong, the driver is responsible; at L3, the responsible party shifts to the autonomous driving system. For a supplier like Huawei that sells a "system," once the responsible party shifts, that responsibility falls on itself. At the same conference, BYD's Yang Dongsheng said L3 safety requirements are "not a doubling, but possibly hundreds of times" higher, while He Xiaopeng directly raised a question mark over whether "L3 is safer." Whether L3 can truly be safer is something even industry insiders have not fully convinced themselves of.

Huawei Lays Its Safety Data on the Table in Advance

Because responsibility will eventually have to be borne by itself, Huawei launched the Safety Travel Report at the beginning of the year, disclosing assisted driving mileage and safety data to the entire industry. As of October 21, cumulative assisted driving mileage had exceeded 16.9 billion kilometers, with 6.81 million active collision avoidances. After activating smart driving, a serious collision occurred only once every 10.356 million kilometers of safe driving, 5.75 times the average for Chinese drivers. During the seven days of National Day, Qiankun Smart Driving covered 560 million kilometers, averaging nearly 80 million kilometers per day, with assisted driving mileage accounting for 60%. In R&D, Yinwang invested nearly 20 billion yuan this year and plans to invest more than 70 billion yuan over the next five years in core capabilities such as computing power. Beyond data, Huawei is also building an ecosystem: the "Ten-Minute Qiankun Smart Driving Life Circle" has covered more than 300,000 parking lots, 2 million charging pile sites, and more than 3,000 car wash shops. On October 19, it also signed a battery-swapping strategic cooperation with CATL and Shidai Dianfu. Laying out these numbers and this ecosystem is aimed at user trust: once the system has to bear responsibility, if users do not trust it, cars will not sell, and upstream and downstream automakers will no longer install its solution.

Illustration of the interaction interface between the intelligent cockpit and smart driving.