China's truck industry is buying more driver-assist technology

cnbc.com:

BEIJING — China's truck industry is finding more reasons to buy vehicles with assisted-driving technology.

It's a critical step toward monetization in a nascent business that's drawn many investor dollars, with relatively little to show for it so far.

One broad transformation is that the trucking industry in China is changing from one in which individual drivers dominated, to one with fleets holding the majority share, said Gui Lingfeng, principal at Kearney Strategy Consultants.

He pointed out that five years ago, fleet operators only had about 20% of the Chinese trucking market. Today it's at 36%, and projected to reach 75% in 2025, he said.

The companies trying to sell trucks to fleet operators are including driver-assist tech as a way to make the vehicles more attractive, Gui said.

That early tech integration gives truck manufacturers an edge on the amount of data they can collect — for training autonomous driving algorithms, he said.

In addition, Chinese authorities require all newly manufactured trucks since 2022 to come with basic driver-assist tech for warning against forward collision and lane departure, Gui said.

Chinese driver-assist trucking startup Inceptio claims it already has more than 650 trucks operating in China — mostly for logistics customers — and covered more than 50 million kilometers (31 million miles) in commercial operations.

Inceptio develops the driver-assist tech system, and works with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for mass production.

«In terms of customers, there is a sort of a counter-cyclical effect,» Inceptio CEO Julian Ma said in an interview in late August. «The economy is getting tighter so the cost saving motivation is getting stronger, not weaker — that makes our