BYD cut R&D spending 6.5% while merging cabin, drive and power onto one central brain

BYD reported research and development investment of 28.86 billion yuan for the first half of 2026, against 30.88 billion yuan a year earlier, a decline of 6.54 percent. The company put its cumulative research spending at more than 270 billion yuan.

In the same report BYD described four changes to its God’s Eye driver-assistance system during the period. It said the architecture had been upgraded to what it calls Xuanji Architecture 2.0, carrying a combined cabin, driving and power central brain; that the sensor layout had moved to what it described as an industry-first satellite architecture; that the algorithms had moved from a fully closed-loop end-to-end approach to a physical AI large model; and that its data base is the largest in the industry.

The company said vehicles equipped with its driver-assistance system numbered more than 3.33 million at the end of June, and that God’s Eye generates over 210 million kilometers of data a day. It described the Xuanji A3, released and put into mass production in May, as China’s first 4-nanometer driving chip, supporting Level 3 and Level 4 functions, with three chips together delivering more than 2,100 trillion operations per second and power consumption per unit of compute 20 percent below competing parts.

BYD also said it was the first in the world to offer a safety backstop for both urban navigation and automated parking, and reported the addition of an agent to its DiLink cockpit.