AI Becomes Core Driver as China's Intelligent Connected Vehicles Near Inflection Point Toward Autonomous Driving人工智能成智能网联汽车竞争核心驱动力，产业迈向组合驾驶辅助到自动驾驶关键窗口期
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At the July 27 media roundtable of the 2026 World Intelligent Connected Vehicle Conference (WICV) — attended by officials from MIIT's Equipment Industry Department, the Ministry of Transport's Science and Technology Department, the Beijing Economy and Information Technology Bureau, CAICT, CAAM, SAE-China and CATARC — Qu Guochun, director of the MIIT Equipment Industry Development Center and WICV secretary-general, said AI is becoming the core driver of intelligent connected vehicle competition, shifting China's auto exports from cost/manufacturing/supply-chain advantages toward technology-innovation and intelligence-based competitiveness.
CAAM vice-chairman and secretary-general Fu Bingfeng said the global industry is at a critical window shifting from combined driving assistance to autonomous driving, marked by intense competition, diverse exploration and ecosystem restructuring, with China's overall development level in the first international tier; he noted Chinese firms are catching up in end-to-end autonomous-driving large models, leading in vehicle-road-cloud integration, and globally leading in human-machine interaction and multimodal perception, while LiDAR, high-compute chips and communication terminals have formed a virtuous cycle of mass-production cost cuts feeding back into technology.
WICV, China's first State Council-approved national-level intelligent connected vehicle conference, has run since 2018 and is now in its 9th edition, serving as a key platform for policy release, tech exchange and industry cooperation; SAE-China deputy secretary-general Gong Weijie framed single-vehicle intelligence and vehicle-road-cloud integration as mutually reinforcing, converging paths toward autonomous-driving safety.