VW Tiguan to use drone maker DJI’s ADAS technology for urban driving

The newest China-made Volkswagen Tiguan cars will use the advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) sourced from DJI, which the drone maker said will complete most trips autonomously on Chinese urban streets at the cost of just RMB 7,000 ($973) or so. The assisted driving solution will include a pack of affordable sensors, such as seven cameras and a Snapdragon 8650 computing chip from Qualcomm with only 100 TOPS of performance, according to Shen Shaojie, a technical lead at DJI. This will enable budget cars priced at roughly RMB 150,000 ($20,841) to function by themselves without costly lidar and high-precision maps. Shen shared the details on Sunday in Beijing at an annual forum organized by the EV100 think tank. This comes a year after DJI said it had been supplying lower-priced assisted driving technology, which mainly works on Chinese highways but costs only about RMB 5,000, to automakers such as Chery and SAIC-GM-Wuling, a General Motors’ China joint venture. The 2024 VW Tiguan L, the top-selling sport utility vehicle of the German carmaker, is priced at RMB 198,700 in China. [TechNode reporting, Caixin, in Chinese]