Chinese automakers are accelerating DeepSeek AI model adoption to power smart cars

Recently, DeepSeek has exploded in popularity, exceeding 20 million daily active users. Now, Chinese automakers are competing to be pioneers in integrating the DeepSeek AI model in their smart cars.

As He Xiaopeng, CEO of Xpeng, has pointed out, “In the next decade, AI will drive changes in the automobile industry that far exceed electrification”. Additionally, Li Xiang, chairman of Li Auto, has also emphasized that electrification is only the first half, while true intelligence, namely artificial intelligence, is the second half and is the only way to build cars.

On February 6, Geely was the first to announce that its self-developed AI model and DeepSeek’s R1 model have completed deep integration, and will start distillation train. Subsequently, Zeekr announced the integration completion of its self-developed Kr AI model with DeepSeek R1, and that its cockpit assistant called AI Eva will be launched soon.

Then, other automakers including Dongfeng (Voyah, Warrior, eπ, Forthing, and Nammi brands), Changan (Qiyuan brand), Leapmotor, IM Motors, SGMW (Baojun brand), GAC, and GWM all made similar integration completion announcements.

It is understood that distillation training is a technique to transfer the knowledge learned by the large AI model (teacher model) to the smaller model (student model) so that the smaller model can achieve performance as close to the large model as possible while reducing computing resource consumption and inference time.

By integrating with DeepSeek, automakers are expected to improve functions such as:

• more natural voice interaction where the vehicle can understand user commands more accurately
• achieve multi-round conversations and context understanding
• more accurately identify the driver’s intentions
• faster development iteration to continuously improve the AI model

This is only the beginning, more Chinese automakers are expected to integrate their cars with DeepSeek in the coming days to not be left behind.

Source: Automaker official announcements, Yiche, DeepSeek