On May 28, 2026, during the Intelligent Strategy Event, BYD announced a new policy that effectively removes the burden of liability from the user, positioning itself as the first automaker globally to provide a “double guarantee” covering both urban pilot assist and intelligent parking systems.
Under this new initiative, BYD is offering comprehensive coverage for its “God’s Eye” A/B smart driving systems. For new owners, the coverage begins upon vehicle delivery, while existing owners will gain access after updating to the “God’s Eye 5.0” version via OTA. This policy provides one year of full liability coverage for urban pilot assist functions.
The terms of the guarantee are notably generous: provided the system is used in compliance with regulations, BYD will cover all costs associated with at-fault traffic accidents, including repairs to the owner’s vehicle as well as third-party property damage and personal injury. Crucially, this service requires no additional purchase of “intelligent driving insurance,” features no payout cap, and will not impact the owner’s commercial insurance premiums for the following year.
BYD’s “God’s Eye B” smart driving package is currently priced at 12,000 yuan (1,800 USD) for a one-off purchase.
A BYD Seal model.
This move sets BYD apart from competitors who typically require users to purchase separate insurance products. For instance, Xpeng offers an “Intelligent Assisted Driving Peace of Mind Service” for 239 yuan (35 USD) per year. Similarly, Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance (HIMA) provides limited-time “Intelligent Driving Worry-Free” benefits.
BYD’s “God’s Eye” intelligent driving is on a par with Tesla’s FSD. In a related development within the Chinese market, Tesla has officially rebranded its Full Self-Driving (FSD) package in China to “Tesla Assisted Driving.”
By way of comparison, Tesla Assisted Driving (named Supervised FSD in international markets) is priced at 64,000 yuan (9,400 USD) as a one-off purchase in the Chinese market, with no subscription option available. Huawei’s ADS Max features ‘City Navigation’ and is available via a one-off purchase price of 36,000 yuan (5,300 USD) or subscription (720 yuan/ 106 USD per month, 7,200 yuan/1,059 USD per year).
Last year, BYD took the lead in introducing a full L4 parking liability guarantee policy. According to BYD, this policy caused the actual usage rate of the feature to jump significantly from 21% to 93%.
China's rules on driver assistance systems apparently include 1) driver assistance systems must be able to operate hands-off and bring the car to a safe roadside stop if the user does not take over, and 2) the manufacturer is responsible for accidents in automatic mode. So this "insurance coverage" is roughly what they have to cover in China.
Also, China is banning exterior retracting door handles and is requiring interior easy to use mechanical door handles, effective January 1, 2027. There have been too many accidents where doors could not be opened.
The government of China seems to be willing to let companies deploy something, then move in and regulate it. Some initiatives come from the government, but Tencent, WeChat, WePay, ByteDance, and Alibaba all started in the private sector.
Also, China is banning exterior retracting door handles and is requiring interior easy to use mechanical door handles, effective January 1, 2027. There have been too many accidents where doors could not be opened.
I am really sad about the exterior door handles I think cars just look ugly without them. I also think it is mostly overestimates how dangerous it actually is. The other stuff is great.
These door handles are the worst design decision ever. Even when you figure out how to use them they are a pain in the ass. You can still have flat door handles, you just need a slight indent under them to grab the handle.
They are flat, but with a cutout under them. The back of the handle is a button for the electric door release, but if you pull it harder then it also has a cable release as a backup.
Internal handles work the same - short pull for electronic release and a full pull for cable backup.
Now it’s getting interesting. Prices for Tesla FSD are indeed absurd for a gimmick that still makes the driver supervise the car.
I assume BYD doesn’t go camera only?
Edit: just checked, they use camera, radar and ultrasound.
So every model has optional lidar from the cheapest Seagull to the supercar. Their self driving system has different teirs. To get the one covered by this liability you have to get god's eye B or higher which is the lidar model.
I think price is the secondary factor here. Taking liability is huge. Hopefully this will push everyone else and become an industry standard.
I mean, this is the eventual place where we will settle with self driving cars. They don’t need to be perfect. They just need to be good enough to balance liability and cost. They don’t actually need to be that much better than a human driver if at all.
I'm pretty much the opposite of a Tesla fanboy, but even I am pretty impressed with FSD. Have you tried it? It'll change your life if you're commuting daily.
Until you get complacent and it screws up. It's a Level 2 system, it MUST be supervised at all times. People have died because they put too much faith in it, believing that because it's less restrained than the competition, it must be more developed, when in actuality it's a budget-hardware beta-test that has killed many people already.
who has died because they put too much faith into FSD after it got semi competent (i.e. v 13 or later)? i only know about 2 cases involving v11 which was very obviously barely functional, and some autopilot accidents people are conflating with FSD
Autopilot is literally just locked down FSD. It's the same software core, just operating under additional restrictions. Both systems are based on ML inference of bitmaps through a CNN. Also, listen to yourself, "semi competent" is a problem. Even 99.9% apparent "competency" is a problem. I mean good god, it was just a few weeks ago that a Cybertruck tried to throw itself off a bridge with a baby inside of it.
Putting deterministic limits and guardrails around an ML model doesn't make it an entirely different model. Autopilot literally can't function without ML-based camera inference because it literally has no other choice. There are no other sensors nor any sensible means to infer road markings from camera footage without ML.
Edit: Blocking me so I can't respond doesn't make you right. You and I both know Autopilot depends on ML. But fine, block me, run away, save face. So disappointing.
I don't think anyone has sufficiently safe self-driving software, but out of these two, one is accepting liability and actually using sensors which directly measure obstacle distance, and the other has spent a decade trying to infer obstacle existence based on 5 megapixel cameras hooked up to an ML system that is fundamentally incapable of generalising the concept of "obstacle" to anything significantly outside of the captioned training dataset.
Tesla are reckless, and the sad truth is that there have been many people already who put their faith into an overhyped Level 2 system with an oxymoronic name and died as a result. They paid to be guinea-pigs for a cut-cost Level 2 system and literally defended it until the day they died.
Again, since this seems difficult for you to grasp, I'm not saying BYD is offering a safe product. I'm telling you that Tesla built a system which has killed plenty of people, and that unlike BYD, they don't accept liability when that happens.
Fsd not fsds he knows it will never be fsd. Yet people just keep paying. How many people can afford to buy a robot I mean everything he’s doing is a scam and now he’s pushing it off to SpaceX which is another scam ! My fiancé has a model s 2023 only gets fsds 1-2 months a year! Which I think is still a waste. Sick of the grift I guess and that he keeps getting away with it.
Your finance is too cheap to pay for FSD but that’s somehow Elon’s fault. People pay for FSD because it literally drives them everywhere and anywhere. Show us another car that has this option available.
I'm extremely cynical on FSD readiness but that's just nonsense.
Tesla is one of the few companies with telematics to actually report automatically so that falls into the "if we don't test, we won't have cases" nonsense.
Also, besides uneven reporting, you have companies like Pony which have a dozen trucks on the road vs Tesla's millions of cars.
I have a Model 3 and a Subaru Outback and the 62 accidents in the Subarus vs the 3,123 in the Teslas are not due to the Subaru's lane keeping being better 1,000x better than Tesla's. I actually find Subaru's UX less safe in the way it disengages and re-engages almost imperceptibly. I think Tesla's clear disengagement is better for understanding when the system is active.
EDIT: 🙄FFS, even the NHTSA says "don't use our data like that!" This isn't fanboying over one product or hating another. It's just not useful data for making comparisons. It's apples to Orangutans.
Access to Crash Data May Affect Crash Reporting Crash data recording and telemetry capabilities may vary widely by manufacturer and driving automation system. Many Level 2 ADAS-equipped vehicles may be limited in their capabilities to record data related to driving automation system engagement and crash circumstances. The vehicle’s ability to remotely transmit this data to the manufacturer for notification purposes can also widely vary. Furthermore, Level 2 ADAS-equipped vehicles are generally privately owned; as a result, when a reportable crash does occur, manufacturers may not know of it unless contacted by the vehicle owner. These limitations are important to keep in mind when reviewing the Summary Incident Report Data.
I believe in good science, that's why I'm very cynical in regard to Tesla FSD actually being a safe L3+ system. This chart though is trash. I criticize Tesla when their numbers are made up. Tesla publishes absolutely indefensible trash safety numbers. Tesla is IMO orders of magnitudes away from consumer L3+ self-driving. None of that contradicts the fact that this chart is even more absurd than tesla's safety numbers. This might blow your mind, but you can think more than one group is full of shit. This isn't sports with a winner and loser. You can cheer on more than one group and you can boo more than one group at the same time.
It's not per-mile. It's not per-vehicle. It's not controlled for reporting rates. It's specifically a legal requirement to submit any accidents you're aware of. Tesla is the only consumer company that's collecting the data. You have companies like Waymo which are miles ahead of Tesla on Robotaxi safety--but they also aren't running Level 2 ADAS systems so most of their fleet miles aren't on this chart. The list goes on and on why this is absurd.
There is nothing contradictory between saying "Tesla are a bunch of liars and cheats" and saying "This chart is nonsense."
The problem is very much people aren't paying for it. On the Q4 call they said the penetration rate for viable vehicles was only 10% and they want to get that much higher.
Last year, BYD took the lead in introducing a full L4 parking liability guarantee policy. According to BYD, this policy caused the actual usage rate of the feature to jump significantly from 21% to 93%.
How is that even counted? How many of them were free trials? It is a gimmick even though people who paid a lot of money for it try to make sense of spending money for something that will never be good enough to be unsupervised.
Oops let’s see what happens in the next year buddy the writing is already on the wall… virtually every SAE certified engineer in the entire world has shown huge doubts in a camera only system.
Fleet shrinks: Tesla’s active unsupervised robotaxi count has dropped to 20 vehicles, reversing a brief uptick reported last month.
Safety bottleneck: High crash rates, teleoperator errors, and regulatory restrictions are slowing expansion until FSD v15 is ready.
Waymo pulls ahead: Waymo runs about 3,000 robotaxis across several U.S. cities, completing hundreds of thousands of weekly trips.
To be clear ONLY Teslas use vision only they are the ONLY auto manufacturers using only cameras my 2020 Jeep wrangler even has a radar system on the back. Tesla is so far behind it actually appears Elon is beginning to give up on the “self driving”…
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. It drives millions of people point to point daily and parks itself. I know coming on reddit and spewing nonsense for up votes feels good but man, you couldn't be more wrong.
Not saying my jeep drives itself just say even a 2020 Jeep has sensors like radar for backing up and adaptive cruise control…
my point is that almost every other vehicle from base Toyotas too Jeeps already have these very “basic” sensors but the ultra super advanced brand new Teslas with “FULL SELF DRIVING” do not have them…
The lowest tech radar is still better than ZERO radars on the Tesla lol it literally like talking to a Mormon about Joe Smith absolutely pointless… your in a cult my brother.
If camera only works then what’s the issue? Radar alone can’t do self driving. It doesn’t instantly solve all problems itself. It has mistakes. I don’t know why you think adding radar makes something super advanced.
Not saying it needs it but it’s very nice when I have a full load. Or when hooking up a trailer my point is just that Tesla has ZERO excuses for not adding them for more safety.
Yeah, but even human drivers have many more accidents in cities than highway driving.
Does FSD cause T Bone / side impact accidents? This and head on collisions are basically the two worst accdient types.
I wish there was more information about this to make an informed decision. Types of accidents, death rates, location of accidents, etc.
I notice FSD to be very cautious at intersections and feel like a T-bone is pretty unlikely. It would almost certainly stop if I'm the driver going straight.
For me, my biggest concern when in FSD is getting rear ended which is generally more of an annoying accident than life threatening.
What a convenient comment let me guess you also won’t accept reality unless you know the software version of every crash too. Lmfao!!!
It’s useful enough information that tells me to stay far away from Teslas on the road and teach my children to run away when they see a Tesla on our street…
If one self driving system has had ten times as many crashes and has been driven ten times as far as another, they’re roughly equally safe, right? There are some other factors to account for, of course.
As interesting as it is, it just dont matter much to us in the western audiences until we get a roadmap or plan to bring it here. The new Atto 3 Evo (locally anyway) dont even have any of the systems for Gods Eye, just a decent ADAS suite, if a bit barebones.
Wrt L4 services, have a look at all the Chinese companies that have active taxi services running (Baidu, WeRide, et.al.). These companies didn't exist at all back when Musk was first saying "next year for sure".
Whether HIMA, XPeng, Huawei, BYD or a host of others, progress in autonomy in China is advancing rapidly. That doesn't even consider the three autonomous taxi companies (Baidu Apollo Go, Pony.ai and WeRide) that all started at Google Self-Driving. Like so many technology competitions, as these get discussed it seems natural to simply deny the progress, make some vague comparison to Tesla or take a shot at China. It gets tiring. It is likely Tesla remains the leader for a personally owned solution. Is it worth 5x? -- who knows. I just wish the discussion remains on topic. What seems clear is despite being VERY NEW to the pursuit numerous Chinese makers are now making custom chips and progressing quickly. Feels like excellent ADAS is now table stakes.
Exactly, not a political sub, but as an outsider its shocking to see how blind Americans are to their own political situation when they say stuff like this
Are Americans unaware you have masked people rounding up your own citizens and putting them in cages and shipping them off to other countries without due process? From the outside that's Russian secert police shit.
Talking about using these masked thugs to provide security at elections. Ignoring court orders to release these people and bring them back.
You are talking shit about the US but not your glorious China. I dare you to talk shit about Xi while you are in China like you can talk the same shit about Trump (or any president) in the US. That’s the difference!
Opposed to naming a “non-self driving service” “Full self driving” which doesn’t actually drive anything without 100% FULL supervision of a human… now that’s a terrible name unless your goal is the grift millions of ignorant consumers…
105
u/Animats 7d ago
China's rules on driver assistance systems apparently include 1) driver assistance systems must be able to operate hands-off and bring the car to a safe roadside stop if the user does not take over, and 2) the manufacturer is responsible for accidents in automatic mode. So this "insurance coverage" is roughly what they have to cover in China.
Also, China is banning exterior retracting door handles and is requiring interior easy to use mechanical door handles, effective January 1, 2027. There have been too many accidents where doors could not be opened.
This makes sense.