Auto China 2026 Day 4 — People's Daily: 'Intelligence Is the New Horsepower'; China Sells 12.1M EVs in 2025; AI-First Cars Redefine Global Industry Standard

By Day 4 of Auto China 2026 (April 27), China's state media captured the emerging consensus from the world's largest auto show: 'Intelligence is the new horsepower'. People's Daily's headline reflected how Chinese automakers had reframed the global competition — shifting from raw battery range and price as the battleground to AI integration, physical intelligence, and full-stack domestic technology. BYD's 2025 annual milestone of 12.1 million EV and plug-in hybrid vehicles sold cemented its position as the world's undisputed EV volume leader by a wide margin. Across the show floor, every major Chinese brand was showcasing complete domestic AI chip stacks designed to eliminate Nvidia dependency in automotive applications: Xpeng's Turing chips, Horizon Robotics' Starry 6 SoC (integrating cockpit and driving functions), BYD's own automotive NPUs, and Leapmotor's AI computing platforms. Digitimes analysis noted that Chinese automakers have entered a phase of 'AI-first' design where the compute architecture and AI models are designed before the vehicle body — inverting the traditional automotive development process. OMODA & JAECOO's 1 million unit global sales milestone (announced April 26-27) underscores how rapidly second-tier Chinese brands are displacing Japanese and Korean competitors in Global South markets. Pony.ai outlined plans for lower-cost Gen-7 robotaxi vehicles targeting deployment in China and the Middle East. The show's record scale — 380,000 square meters, 1,451 vehicles, 181 world premieres from global and Chinese brands — reflects the gravitational shift: Auto China is now the world's most important auto show by innovation density, superseding Detroit and Geneva. China's auto sector has achieved something unprecedented: complete vertical integration from battery materials (lithium, cobalt processing) through cells, packs, motors, AI chips, LLM models, and full vehicle platforms — all domestically produced, increasingly competitive at the frontier, and scaling globally.