What does China’s ‘perfect EV’ look like? It must be smart, handy, and have stamina to go the distance

In the final instalment of a four-part series on China’s electric vehicles (EV), Daniel Ren and Pearl Liu look at the features, specifications and capabilities of the perfect battery-powered car for the world’s largest and fastest-growing automobile market.

A war of words broke out between two of China’s best-known technology entrepreneurs over social media on the eve of the 2023 Shanghai Auto Show, and became one of the defining topics of last week’s marquee event in the world’s largest vehicle market.

Claims of autonomous driving are all “nonsense” and “hokum”, declared BYD’s founder Wang Chuanfu on March 29 after his company delivered its best-ever quarterly profit on the back of overtaking Tesla as the planet’s largest seller of vehicles that run either partially or fully on electric power.

“It’s ultimately a higher standard of assisted driving,” Wang said, describing the electric vehicle (EV) industry’s obsession with outdoing each other in self-driving as “the emperor’s new clothes”.

“Either he does not understand this technology, or he said it deliberately” to knock the industry, retorted Huawei Technologies’ rotating chairman Yu Chengdong, who also heads the telecoms vendor’s smart car unit.