Author | Tian Zhe, Editor | Li Yuchen
In 2025, China produced 34.531 million vehicles, ranking first globally for the 17th consecutive year. Despite the massive scale, China's automobile production continues to grow rapidly, with the output of new energy vehicles (NEVs) increasing by 29% year-on-year.
As Chinese automakers have already outpaced the world on the electrification track, another more covert war has just been decided: the "brain" installed in cars is being taken back from overseas companies by a Chinese firm.
As automobile production increases year by year, shipments of domestic autonomous driving chips installed in vehicles are also accelerating in tandem.
The Journey series by Horizon Robotics, which boasts the highest mass production scale in China, has seen its cumulative shipments surpass 15 million units. The first 5 million units took nearly four years to ship, while by the third 5 million units, the time was shortened to about one year.
15 million units mean that tens of millions of Chinese cars are using domestically made autonomous driving chips for the first time. It also signifies that from commuter cars priced at over CNY 100,000 to flagship models priced between CNY 300,000 and CNY 400,000, the computing power foundation behind the steering wheel is no longer limited to overseas options.
More notably, BYD, Geely, Changan, Chery, SAIC, GAC, FAW, Dongfeng, Great Wall, and JAC—the top ten automakers in China—have all partnered with Horizon Robotics.
These ten automakers have different technological routes, product positioning, and supply chain strategies. But why have they all chosen Horizon Robotics?
The answer to this question lies in the footprints Horizon Robotics has left step by step over its 11-year journey.
01. From 4 TOPS to 560 TOPS: The Four Leaps of the Journey Series
Before answering this question, we need to turn the clock back to 2018.
That year, China's NEV sales reached 1.256 million units, a year-on-year increase of over 60%, accounting for half of global NEV sales. However, the autonomous driving chip market was still dominated by overseas companies.
At that time, mass-produced models from new forces such as NIO, Li Auto, and XPeng extensively adopted the Mobileye EyeQ series, while higher-level advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) models were equipped with NVIDIA Xavier chips. Looking around, not a single domestic autonomous driving chip had entered the pre-installed mass production market.
The high barriers, long validation cycles, and huge costs of failure for automotive-grade chips are enough to deter the vast majority of players. For a chip to be installed in a car, it must withstand extreme temperatures from -40°C to 85°C, pass hundreds of functional safety certifications, and prove its reliability in millions of kilometers of real-world vehicle testing. A problem in any link would cost the automakers their reputation and hard-earned money.
It was not until 2019, when Horizon Robotics launched the Journey 2 autonomous driving chip, that this situation was changed.
Today, a chip with only 4 TOPS of computing power and a typical power consumption of 2W may not seem remarkable, but what matters is that Journey 2 was the first domestically developed automotive-grade autonomous driving chip to achieve large-scale mass production.
Although Journey 2 crossed the automotive-grade threshold and met the mass production needs for ADAS at the time, in the automotive industry, which has extremely high requirements for safety and stability, it was difficult for a newly emerged autonomous driving chip to gain the trust of automakers.
When Changan decided to adopt Journey 2, Horizon Robotics had not yet firmly established itself in the automotive supply chain. At that time, Changan wanted to improve the ADAS experience but could not raise costs by piling on sensors and computing power; overseas mature solutions were relatively closed, and completely in-house development could not keep up with the vehicle development cycle.
The solution provided by Horizon Robotics was to bring not only the chip but also the vision algorithms, software, and engineering teams into the project.
Before the partnership was finalized, both parties conducted a month of intensive testing, repeatedly verifying core capabilities such as target recognition and lane line fitting on public roads. Ultimately, Journey 2 was integrated into the mass-produced Changan UNI series.
Once the first door was broken open, the path ahead was no longer a dead end. That same year, Horizon Robotics launched Journey 3, challenging a higher goal—the world's first autonomous driving chip capable of front-facing support for 8-megapixel cameras.
At that time, advanced ADAS began to become one of the core selling points of smart cars. Tesla garnered massive orders with its Autopilot, while NIO, XPeng, and others made ADAS the core content of their product launch events.
Li Auto was also eager to catch up in ADAS, but the problem was that its autonomous driving team had only a few dozen people at the time. Catching up from scratch on their own would take too much time; simply buying a mature solution would make it difficult to create product differentiation.
It was at this time that Journey 3 came into Li Xiang's view.
The 8-megapixel front-facing camera of Journey 3 not only left room for next-generation products but also provided an opportunity to push the overall perception capabilities a step forward.
In October 2020, both parties finalized the partnership for joint development. People on both sides were highly motivated to push the project forward. From confirming the partnership to the launch of the mass-produced vehicle, it took only 8 months, whereas similar projects usually take two to three years.
Ultimately, the new Li Auto ONE equipped with Journey 3, once released, achieved an average monthly sales volume of over 10,000 units for several consecutive months, becoming a legendary model for Li Auto.
The success of Journey 3 allowed Horizon Robotics to truly gain a firm foothold—it was no longer a new player needing validation, but a reliable supplier capable of fighting tough battles and delivering results.
If Journey 2 and Journey 3 were still cultivating the low-to-mid-tier ADAS market, Journey 5 marked Horizon Robotics' official charge into high-level autonomous driving. Launched in 2021, Journey 5 saw its computing power leap to 128 TOPS with a power consumption of 30W, directly competing with NVIDIA's Orin series.
The significance of this generation of products lies in the fact that Horizon Robotics proved for the first time its capability to develop high-computing-power chips at the 100-TOPS level and its ability to support high-level autonomous driving functions such as urban Navigation on Autopilot (NOA). The integration into models like the Li Auto L8 brought Journey 5 into the mass production validation cycle for high-level autonomous driving.
In April 2024, the Journey 6 series was released.
The Journey 6 series is equipped with Horizon Robotics' latest generation BPU Nash architecture, natively supporting large-parameter Transformer models, which is pioneering in autonomous driving chips. While the industry was still discussing "whether end-to-end requires large models," Horizon Robotics had already made preparations at the chip level.
The most impactful among them is the Journey 6P, with a single chip delivering 560 TOPS, exceeding the total computing power of two NVIDIA Orin-X chips (508 TOPS). This means that Horizon Robotics has achieved a partial surpass of NVIDIA in flagship computing power for the first time, replacing the previous dual-chip solution with a single chip, making the cost and power consumption advantages self-evident.
Unlike in the past, this time also saw the simultaneous launch of the HSD (Horizon SuperDrive) full-scenario ADAS solution. The product form has thus been further expanded from a computing platform to "chip + autonomous driving system."
As autonomous driving enters a critical stage, automakers need more than just a computing chip; they require a complete solution that seamlessly integrates from the bottom layer to the upper layer. Whoever can provide this solution can upgrade from a supplier to a partner.
At the 2025 Chengdu Auto Show, the Exeed ET5, as the first cooperative model for HSD, made its debut and was mass-produced and launched in November of the same year. Subsequently, models such as the iCAR V27 and Fengyun T9L followed suit.
As of now, HSD has been designated for more than 20 models, covering the top 5 domestic independent brands and the top 2 joint venture brands.
For automakers, this means they can directly develop high-level autonomous driving around the same set of software and hardware systems, without having to separately find chip, algorithm, and system suppliers and then spend a lot of time solving the adaptation issues between different links.
And software-hardware integration is precisely what Horizon Robotics excels at. Through the collaborative design of hardware, compilers, and algorithms, it allows algorithm requirements to participate in chip definition from the very beginning.
02. An Ecosystem Grown from a Single Chip and the "Suppliers" It Has Gathered
Why has the Journey series evolved from a single chip into a platform widely adopted by leading Chinese automakers?
The answer lies in the fact that Horizon Robotics not only possesses unique software-hardware integration technology and scale advantages but also opens up cooperation to the outside world.
In the autonomous driving chip industry, "closed" was once the standard answer—Mobileye locked in a generation of automakers with its black-box solution, and NVIDIA bound developers with its CUDA ecosystem. It seemed that being closed was the only way to maximize profits and build a moat. But Horizon Robotics went against the trend, choosing a harder and more long-term path.
In fact, automakers with stronger in-house capabilities actually need more open suppliers. Companies like BYD, Geely, and Great Wall have powerful autonomous driving R&D teams that can quickly adjust their solutions as autonomous driving routes change. At this time, what they need most is for suppliers to cooperate openly and accelerate product development.
Chinese automakers are not cut from the same cloth; some want full-stack in-house development, some want joint development, and some want turnkey solutions. A one-size-fits-all solution is destined to fail to capture this market. Only openness can accommodate all possibilities.
Specifically, automakers can choose to purchase only the Journey chip and develop upper-layer algorithms in-house, or they can use the toolchain simultaneously and jointly develop with Horizon Robotics; customers can further adopt complete solutions such as HSD. Different autonomous driving systems can also be developed around the Journey chip.
The result of long-term open cooperation is that Horizon Robotics has formed an ecosystem of over 200 partners. Around the Journey chip, algorithm companies, Tier 1 suppliers, and automakers can all participate in development, with one chip corresponding to multiple autonomous driving solutions.
For Horizon Robotics, this actually expands the market that the chip can cover.
BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu once publicly stated that the "Journey 6" chip provides more computing power options, offering solutions for BYD to cover different product lines.
Open cooperation has brought considerable product scale to Horizon Robotics.
As of September this year, the cumulative mass production of the Journey series has exceeded 15 million units. For Horizon Robotics, a shipment volume of tens of millions is not just a proof of sales leading the industry, but also a way to further enhance product advantages.
After automotive chips are mass-produced, they must face different cameras, radars, operating systems, algorithm architectures, and vehicle E/E platforms. The more models they enter, the more complex the engineering problems to be solved, and the more validation the chips, toolchains, and delivery systems will undergo.
Ultimately, these experiences will be precipitated back into the product itself, allowing the next generation of chips to start from a higher point.
Just as Journey 6 covers 10 TOPS to 560 TOPS, a single architecture can serve entry-level autonomous driving solutions and also support high-level urban autonomous driving, being applied to models across multiple price bands.
More importantly, the more shipments, the easier it is to amortize R&D costs; the wider the platform application, the lower the cost of repeated development and adaptation for subsequent models will continue to drop.
As a result, urban NOA, which was previously普遍 (commonly) found in models priced above CNY 200,000 to CNY 300,000, has begun to enter the CNY 100,000-level market.
At the same time, switching costs are one of the hardest moats in the automotive industry. Once the platform truly enters the automakers, algorithm adaptation, toolchains, software interfaces, and engineering processes need to be re-established. If both parties have already completed multiple models together, switching to another computing platform means paying another round of development costs. The cost of changing suppliers is not just the price difference of the chips, but the complete rebuilding of the entire system.
Therefore, a single Journey chip is often no longer the end of a project, but the starting point for the next round of cooperation.
Today, more and more customers are not just purchasing Journey chips or adopting or jointly developing the HSD full-scenario intelligent driving solution; they are also showing interest in Horizon Robotics' cockpit-driving fusion vehicle intelligent agent chip "Xingkong" and the vehicle intelligent agent operating system "Kakaxia". From autonomous driving to intelligent cockpit, from chips to software, the product boundaries of Horizon Robotics have been continuously expanding, and there are only a handful of companies in the industry that can cover all these links simultaneously.
Therefore, the shipment of 15 million autonomous driving chips is backed by a series of platforms available for automakers' autonomous driving development.
03. From China's No. 1 to a Global Platform: Horizon Robotics' Next Battlefield
Looking back at Horizon Robotics' journey, in 2019 it was still a new player that had not stepped into the automotive supply chain. In less than ten years, today's Horizon Robotics is capable of competing with overseas leading companies.
Bernstein data shows that in the second quarter of 2026, in China's L2+ autonomous driving chip market, Horizon Robotics' share reached 32%, surpassing NVIDIA's 28% for the first time.
32% vs 28%, a four-percentage-point gap may not seem large, but behind it is the first time a domestic autonomous driving chip has dethroned the once dominant overseas giant in the largest local market.
At new car launch events two or three years ago, "dual Orin" and "508 TOPS" were the standard talking points for high-level autonomous driving, and NVIDIA almost became synonymous with cutting-edge technology.
However, when automakers cooperate with overseas chip manufacturers, algorithms, domain controllers, toolchains, and software must all be developed around their existing architecture. When Chinese automakers need faster iteration, more flexible customization, and more controllable costs, suppliers far across the ocean find it hard to always provide satisfactory answers.
The rise of Horizon Robotics allows Chinese smart cars to use domestic chips, paired with domestic algorithm companies and Tier 1 suppliers, to combine autonomous driving solutions of different levels, costs, and technological routes. Around the chip, a domestic ecosystem of algorithms, toolchains, suppliers, and automaker R&D systems has gradually been established.
The rise of an entire industrial chain is true industrial autonomy. When Horizon Robotics, domestic algorithm companies, domestic Tier 1 suppliers, and Chinese automakers form a closed loop, Chinese smart cars will no longer be "strangled" by anyone.
As product competitiveness improves, Chinese smart cars have begun to go overseas on a large scale in the past two years, becoming an important force in the global automobile market, and Horizon Robotics' autonomous driving solutions are going global in tandem.
As of the first half of 2026, Horizon Robotics has fully covered the top six automaker groups by export volume and 24 brands, cumulatively securing design wins for over 60 export models, covering five major markets: Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South America, and Australia.
Among them, CARIAD, the software company under Volkswagen, has established a joint venture with Horizon Robotics to develop advanced driver-assistance and autonomous driving systems for the Chinese market, and will promote them to the global market. This means that Chinese autonomous driving technology is not just going overseas with Chinese automakers for the first time, but is directly entering the technical systems of global automakers.
04. 15 Million Units is a Journey Co-authored by Industry Partners
Ten years ago, China was already the world's largest automobile market, but in key links such as chips and software, Chinese automakers still relied on overseas suppliers.
That was an era of "trading market for technology"—we used the world's largest automobile market, but in exchange, we only got the assembly profits at the bottom of the industrial chain. Chips, operating systems, and core algorithms, these key links that truly determine the future of automobile intelligence, were firmly in the hands of others.
The rapid development of NEVs has established local advantages in batteries, electric drives, and整车 (whole vehicle) platforms. Chinese automakers have also shifted from following joint venture brands in the past to defining their own products in the new energy era. In the wave of intelligence, domestic chips have entered mass-produced cars, and the R&D teams of domestic algorithm companies, Tier 1 suppliers, and automakers have also grown one after another.
Of course, Horizon Robotics has not been without challenges.
In high-level markets such as urban NOA, NVIDIA still holds nearly 40% of the share, rising rapidly with its full-stack capabilities. Journey 7 is expected to be launched to the market in 2027, at which time it will directly compete with NVIDIA's Thor—the competition for higher computing power has just begun.
But all the way through, Horizon Robotics has proven one thing: in the track of autonomous driving chips, which is monopolized by overseas giants, a Chinese company can rely on its in-house architecture, engineering capabilities, and open ecosystem to go from 0 to 15 million units, and from a follower to the market leader.
Behind every set of chips is a vote cast by an automaker after entrusting part of its product future to Horizon Robotics. The "Journey" that Horizon Robotics has walked is not a solo journey of a chip company; it is the 15 million steps walked together by Chinese automakers and the Chinese autonomous driving industry.