Chinese automakers are starting to equip electric cars with camera drones. For now, this drone integration is aimed at content creators who want to collect videos of themselves driving. These systems typically enable one-click filming of a moving vehicle, with the action viewable live on the car's interior display as well as recorded for posterity. The flights can also be voice-controlled by the (distracted) driver. The 150,000 Yangwang U8 plug-in hybrid SUV from BYD, the world's largest maker of electric vehicles, sports a DJI drone stored and charged in a dedicated roof space capped with a Thunderbirds-style slide-away panel.

"You won't believe what's coming," warned the title of a January 2023 video from the Inside China Auto YouTube channel. "Europe's premium car makers aren't ready for this," warned another video from the same channel, uploaded in July. Produced by Shanghai-based automotive journalist Mark Rainford, a former communications executive for Mercedes-Benz, the channel is one of several by China-based Western commentators agog at what they are seeing--and driving. The channels tell salivating viewers that the tech-heavy yet keenly priced Chinese electric vehicles that have appeared on China's domestic market since the end of the global pandemic will soon wipe the floor with their Western counterparts. Auto executives in Europe, America, and Japan "didn't believe China's car companies could grow so fast," Rainford told me. "That's an easy mistake to make from outside the country.

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! In 2018, Iowa-based Digital Diagnostics made headlines when it became the first autonomous AI (artificial intelligence) system authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It received FDA approval to use AI to autonomously detect diabetic retinopathy in adults with diabetes, without the need for input from a doctor. Its AI-diagnostic system, the IDx-DR, can be used to identify diabetic retinopathy – one of the leading causes of blindness in the U.S. and other developed countries – as well as other serious eye diseases, including macular edema.