- Huawei Consumer Business Group CEO Richard Yu announced on Dec. 23, 2021, the first car with HarmonyOS will begin deliveries in February 2022.
- The first car with Huawei’s HarmonyOS operating system will be the Aito M5, a car that runs on both electricity and fuel, Richard Yu, executive director and CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, said Thursday at the company’s winter product launch event.
- Nio’s ET7 sedan, set for delivery in March, starts at 448,000 yuan.
Less than a week after Chinese electric car startup Nio unveiled its next Tesla rival, Huawei unveiled details on a vehicle that it claims outperforms the Model Y in terms of specs as reported by CNBC.
Autonomous driving
Chinese tech giant Huawei is best known for its telecommunications products and smartphones and says it will not make cars on its own.
But it has been working with automakers on car technology such as autonomous driving.
Deliveries are set to begin around Feb. 20 after the Lunar New Year, said Yu, who is also CEO of Huawei’s intelligent automotive business solution unit.
Post-subsidy prices for the Aito M5 start at 250,000 yuan ($39,063).
That’s lower than Tesla’s Model Y, which starts at 280,752 yuan after subsidies.
Quality experience
On Saturday, Nio revealed deliveries of its ET5 electric sedan would be in September with a starting price of 328,000 yuan ($51,250) pre-subsidy.
Yu claimed in his one-hour presentation that the Aito M5 offers peak power and driving range that is better than the Model Y. However, unlike Tesla’s cars the Aito M5 is not purely powered by electricity as it has a fuel tank for extending driving range when the battery has run out of power.
Some of the numerous other features Yu described included double-layered sound-proof glass.
“You will know whether it is premium or not by the sound,” Yu said via the company’s English translation of his Mandarin-language remarks.
We are able to offer the ‘library grade’ quality experience.
Operating system
The Aito M5 is the first model under the Aito brand, which stands for “adding intelligence to auto.”
The electric cars each come with a touchscreen for adjusting car functions and listening to music or watching movies.
Huawei launched HarmonyOS in 2019 after former President Donald Trump’s administration put the company on a blacklist that restricted American companies from selling technology to the Chinese company, citing national security concerns.
Huawei has denied it poses such a threat.
But the blacklist cut off Huawei from Google’s Android operating system.
“Many rounds of sanctions of the past three years have plunged us into the longest winter because no winter is as long as three years,” he said.
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Source: CNBC
