Zeekr is a Chinese auto brand that you are likely to hear much more about in 2023. Founded back in 2021, the company is owned by the Geely group which also owns other brands like Lotus, Volvo and Polestar. Zeekr is the group’s luxury brand and on December 30th, announced they had delivered over 70,000 cars to customers in 2022.
While 70,000 is certainly not an impressive number when you put it next to the likes of a Tesla that is estimated to have shipped around 1.3 to 1.4 million electric vehicles in 2022, what is impressive is their ambition with Autonomy, something many automakers are kicking down the road.
Zeekr posted yesterday that their state-of-the-art driver assist functions known as NZP will be added to the Zeekr 001. This leverages the Mobileye SuperVision technology, which they say is the most advanced driver-assist system on the market.
This provides “hands-off” driving and is designed to handle standard driving functions on all regular road types. Just to understand where this will land regarding the SAE levels of autonomy, it’s likely a level 3 system, given it still requires the driver’s full attention and eyes on the road and may require the driver to take over at any time.
Mobileye SuperVision includes features like Lane Centering, Adaptive Cruise Control, Autonomous lane changing, Evasive Maneuver Assist, Point-to-point automated navigation and more. The system is able to operate up to speeds of 130km/hr.
This system leverages 11 high-definition (8MP) cameras that feed data into a computer vision system to handle the perception of the environment around the car. It then leverages radar and lidar to compare the combined dataset against Mobileye’s Road Experience Management (REM) which delivers AV Maps, something they say is updated in near real-time and much better than HD Maps.
It’ll be really interesting to watch customers experience and share their drives using Mobileye’s SuperVision technology, particularly as it offers point-to-point navigation (on-ramp to off-ramp). Given the capabilities of the system can be used in a vast array of locations, it is likely to be the closest wide-scale competition to Tesla’s FSD Beta software, although it does lack the ability to operate on city streets.
This isn’t the end of the story for Mobileye. Mobileye Drive is a self-driving commercial platform for the delivery of goods and services, the result of a partnership between Mobileye and Udelv. Mobileye Drive is slated to enable fully autonomous delivery services in the United States starting in 2023 and plans to put more than 35,000 autonomous delivery vehicles on the road by 2028.
The company is also working on Mobileye Chauffeur, a turnkey level 4 autonomous system due to arrive in 2025 for a cost of under $6,000 per vehicle. It’s easy to make these promises of future targets, but we’ve seen all autonomous efforts be delivered late, so we can watch and monitor, just don’t be surprised to see further delays.
Zeekr will have a presence at CES 2023 showing off their latest development and no doubt a couple of Zeekr 001 vehicles to demonstrate their latest release to attendees.
