{"id":50870,"date":"2026-05-21T05:01:32","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T05:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/zooxs-ceo-said-chinas-ev-companies-have-a-leg-up-in-one-key-area\/"},"modified":"2026-05-21T05:01:32","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T05:01:32","slug":"zooxs-ceo-said-chinas-ev-companies-have-a-leg-up-in-one-key-area","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/zooxs-ceo-said-chinas-ev-companies-have-a-leg-up-in-one-key-area\/","title":{"rendered":"Zoox&#8217;s CEO said China&#8217;s EV companies have a leg up in one key area"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6a0e6e327684ba33f73810be?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Pedestrians watch as a Zoox robotaxi passes along East Fifth Street in Austin on Wednesday, March 25, 2026. Zoox began testing the vehicle on Austin streets this week.\"\/><figcaption>Zoox&#039;s CEO said that Chinese autonomous-vehicle companies have a natural edge.<\/p>\n<p>Jay Janner\/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Zoox&#039;s CEO said Chinese EV companies have a major leg up in their software capabilities.<\/li>\n<li>She said they came from a smartphone era in China, where companies had to be good at hardware and software.<\/li>\n<li>Other automobile execs, like Ford&#039;s CEO, have also raved about the caliber of Chinese EVs.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Zoox&#039;s CEO said China&#039;s EV companies have an edge in one major area.<\/p>\n<p>In a Wednesday Rapid Response podcast interview, CEO Aicha Evans said there&#039;s one key reason China&#039;s autonomous vehicle companies are successful \u2014 because they&#039;re great at integrating hardware and software.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;When you look at the ecosystem in China, a lot of these consumer electronics companies that came from the smartphone era had to be good at hardware, software, and system-level thinking by definition,&quot; she said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;They are finding a natural path to EVs and AVs because that foundational knowledge and mindset is already native to them,&quot; she added.<\/p>\n<p>Evans said that for EV companies, the key to success is to &quot;get busy becoming native&quot; if they aren&#039;t already.<\/p>\n<p>She added that progressing from electric vehicles to autonomous vehicles means going from &quot;a machine with wheels to a computer on wheels.&quot; And software will have to be the &quot;first-class citizen&quot; in the car&#039;s &quot;architecture design.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Some of the biggest Chinese EV companies, like Xiaomi and BYD, didn&#039;t start off as automobile manufacturers. BYD started as a battery manufacturer for mobile phones and electronics, while Xiaomi was, and still is, a smartphone and consumer tech company.<\/p>\n<p>Pan Jian, a cochair of a key Tesla battery supplier CATL, said at the World Economic Forum last year that EVs in China are increasingly being called &quot;EIV,&quot; which stands for &quot;electric intelligent vehicles,&quot; emphasizing their software capabilities.<\/p>\n<p>Evans is not the only US-based executive who has said China&#039;s automotive sector has an edge over the US&#039;s. In 2024, Ford CEO Jim Farley said he had been driving a Xiaomi EV for months and didn&#039;t want to give it up.<\/p>\n<p>He added earlier this year that he chose to drive a Xiaomi instead of a Tesla because the latter didn&#039;t have an &quot;updated vehicle.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Zoox, a California-based autonomous vehicle company acquired by Amazon in 2020, now operates robotaxi services in San Francisco and Las Vegas, with plans to expand to Miami and Austin. It also announced a partnership with Uber in March.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Zoox&#039;s CEO said that Chinese autonomous-vehicle companies have a natural edge. Jay Janner\/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images Zoox&#039;s CEO said Chinese EV companies have a major leg up in their software capabilities. She said they came from a smartphone era in China, where companies had to be good at hardware and software. Other automobile [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50871,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-50870","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50870\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}