China

• Chinese automaker Zeekr is offering owners the possibility of upgrading the ADAS hardware in their cars to the latest version.
• The update replaces about 60 individual parts, and technicians need over 20 hours to do it.
• Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Tesla owners are stuck on previous-generation hardware, with no concrete upgrade plan in place.

China’s Zeekr went a little too hard on the hardware front from one model update to the next, so now owners of older models are not exactly pleased with the situation they’re in. To make things right, Zeekr is going on an interesting path to upgrade the hardware in its older EVs to make their advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) more capable.

As spotted by Autohome, the Chinese automaker started a crowdfunding campaign to upgrade the 2024 001 and 009 EVs to the latest Nvidia-based ADAS architecture, which significantly ups the computing power. As you may have noticed, the cars themselves are not even that old–they were made last year–but nevertheless, over 70,000 of them are eligible for the comprehensive hardware upgrade.

Photo by: Zeekr

If the EVs were fitted with a lidar sensor but have a Mobileye EyeQ5H setup, they can be upgraded to Zeekr’s in-house G-Pilot H7 system, which is built on the Nvidia Drive Thor-U architecture and can deliver up to 700 Trillion Operations Per Second (TOPS). That’s a huge increase from the previous setup’s 48 TOPS.

To make it happen, 3,000 Zeekr 001 owners need to cough up roughly $1,900 (13,500 yuan), while the 009 electric minivan upgrade program needs 1,500 initial contributors who need to put down the equivalent of roughly $2,600 (18,500 yuan). The automaker reportedly spent almost $28 million in early development to come up with a solution to owners’ woes, and the result is very labor-intensive.

On the electric 001 liftback, for instance, technicians will need to replace nearly 60 individual components, including the windshield, front bumper and some cable harnesses, which require the disassembly of most of the interior. The hardware alone is reportedly worth over $4,200, so Zeekr is taking a financial hit on this one, especially when cars that haven’t changed hands since being delivered.

According to CarNewsChina, the car manufacturer is offering a $2,800 “ADAS Voucher” to all first owners of eligible 001 and 009 EVs, which can be used to offset the upgrade cost or toward the down payment of a new Zeekr that has the G-Pilot H7 suite.

All of this inevitably brings up the lingering question that hundreds of thousands of Tesla owners have probably been asking themselves: when will their cars get the latest hardware? Current Tesla EVs come with Hardware 4.0, which enables them to smoothly run the latest version of the so-called Full Self-Driving (Supervised). Meanwhile, older-generation cars are stuck on Hardware 3.0, which doesn’t offer the same capabilities as the latest and greatest. 

Elon Musk and other Tesla executives have said in the past that owners of HW3-equipped vehicles would not be left in the dark and that while a hardware upgrade would be hard to implement, it would still happen. The company has not provided a timeline, though.

HW4 and HW3 have different connectors, physical dimensions and cooling requirements, so it’s clearly not as simple as swapping a module, but it can be done, as Zeekr is now proving in China.

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