China's car companies are turning into tech companies

Both EV makers and AI startups have published aggressive roadmaps for national rollouts of their city NOA services, claiming their customers in dozens or hundreds of Chinese cities will soon be able to experience being driven by their cars through narrow city streets. This morning, I published a story that took a closer look at how city NOAs have become the industry darling in 2023, including how they actually perform and the difficulty in educating drivers on using the system responsibly. You can read all of it here. But during my interview with Zhang Xiang, a Chinese auto industry analyst and visiting professor at Huanghe Science and Technology College, one comment stuck out to me. "The auto industry is very competitive now. Consumers are expecting those vehicles to be tech products, like smartphones. It'd be hard for auto brands to sell their cars if they didn't advertise their products this way," he said.