BYD’s ‘God’s Eye’ flaws expose risk of rush into high-tech cars

WHEN Chinese entrepreneur Zhou forked over 1.1 million yuan (S$203,892) in late 2024 for BYD’s crown jewel, the 3.5-tonne Yangwang U8 SUV, he bought what he thought was the pinnacle of Chinese engineering. Among the draws: a sophisticated system that would spot dangers on the road and practically let the car drive itself.

The feature, branded as God’s Eye in 2025, appears to fall short on its celestial promise. During a clear afternoon in southwestern China, the 38-year-old was cruising when the vehicle suddenly accelerated to 93 kilometres per hour (kph), well above the 60 kph speed limit, and veered onto a roadside median. On another occasion, he said the U8 abruptly jerked into an adjacent lane by performing a “ghost” steering manoeuvre, nearly colliding with oncoming traffic.

“I took a leap of faith in the technologies and the pride of our local manufacturing,” said Zhou, who has been in a yearlong dialogue with the company seeking a resolution for recurring malfunctions, including navigation signal loss and unintended acceleration. He requested to be identified only by his surname for privacy reasons.

Zhou is not alone in being disgruntled, as buyers have taken to social media with a litany of complaints about God’s Eye, compounding the woes of a company whose sales have slumped 36 per cent in the first two months of the year, even ceding the top spot in China’s car market to Geely Automobile. More broadly, the issue questions the limits of some of BYD’s technology and illustrates a potential downside to adding advanced systems to cars before all their kinks are worked out.

Amid great fanfare, BYD last year announced God’s Eye would not only go into its premium vehicles but also become a standard feature across its lineup, even for cheap hatchbacks. The move was designed to cement BYD’s dominance in the world’s largest auto market by offering advanced tech that its rivals charge a premium for but at no extra cost.

While Wang’s company has successfully ramped up electric vehicle (EV) sales at a pace unmatched by peers, the world’s top-selling EV maker’s performance in the realm of cutting-edge driving remains a work in progress.

Popular Chinese social media sites like Xiaohongshu are filled with posts from anonymous users complaining about steering flaws, navigational screen malfunctions and delays in features such as memory navigation in urban roads with its mass market models.

BYD’s Yangwang team has resolved Zhou’s case, the company said. “Yangwang consistently values user feedback and remains committed to providing better products and services,” it said.

The growing pains are hardly unique to BYD. In the US, Tesla is facing a widening investigation into the partially automated driving system marketed as “Full-Self Driving”, following a number of deadly accidents. Ford Motor’s BlueCruise driver-assistance feature is also being probed by US auto safety regulators after a pair of fatal crashes involving the technology.

The perceived prevalence of God’s Eye glitches could also just be a matter of scale. While systems such as Tesla’s assisted driving on city roads are optional upgrades, God’s Eye is standard across BYD’s vast number of models, potentially making the technical hurdles inherent to semi-autonomous driving more visible and widespread.

Yet the problems belie BYD chairman Wang Chuanfu’s prediction that the advanced driver-assistance feature would become “a must-have in the next two to three years, just as a seatbelt or an airbag”.

Execution gap

The system’s problems range from failing to yield to other vehicles to missing automated toll gates and highway off-ramps, according to SBD Automotive’s analysis.

“Putting advanced Adas hardware across virtually its entire lineup at no cost is a scale that Western OEMs simply have not matched,” said Varun Murthy, a senior manager and ADAS Principal at SBD, a global automotive research and consulting firm. “But there’s a real gap between the hardware promise and the software execution.”

Compounding the issue, BYD’s software is not standardised across its lineup. Its most affordable cars are equipped with a pared-back version of God’s Eye called Tier C, with vision-based solutions only. Mid-range vehicles get the more robust Tier B, and BYD’s top-of-the-line luxury models are outfitted with its most advanced Tier A software that includes three Lidar sensors.

BYD currently only offers the complete kit of God’s Eye in its home market, whereas General Motors’ Super Cruise tech is available in the US, China, South Korea and Canada. Ford’s BlueCruise is offered in the US, Canada and more than a dozen European nations.

Tesla is seeking approval from Chinese regulators to roll out its advanced driver-assistance capabilities in the country and expects to get approval as soon as this year. However, the functions will not be marketed under the name of Full Self-Driving (FSD) in China, where regulators are tightening supervision of the marketing of driver-assistance functions.

As at late 2025, more than 2.5 million BYD vehicles sold in China were equipped with God’s Eye, according to company data, which is more than double Tesla’s 1.1 million FSD users globally. Even so, the deployment scale can hardly be conflated with system maturity. “Those are two very different things,” said Murthy.

Some industry watchers also believe BYD’s system trails Tesla when it comes to collecting data used for fine-tuning, for example, by recording unusual scenarios such as unexpected pedestrian behaviour that helps train its software to avoid collisions, according to a recent research report from Piper Sandler.

“The God’s Eye system is impressive, but at best, we think BYD’s platform generates less than half as much data as Tesla’s FSD,” Piper Sandler analysts, who have a neutral rating on BYD’s stock, wrote in December.

The Shenzhen-based titan is expected to launch updates of its Adas software in the coming months, and meanwhile is redoubling efforts to stay ahead of other EV makers with innovations in hardware such as batteries and charging infrastructure. Earlier this month, it unveiled its latest generation of so-called more powerful “blade batteries” and ultra-fast flash chargers.

That could be a bigger pull for buyers, especially those making their first switch from a petrol-powered car to an EV, where range anxiety is a key issue.

“Several factors consistently shape the user experience in smart EVs, and addressing range anxiety has always been one of the most fundamental,” said Chris Liu, a Shanghai-based senior analyst at research agency Omdia. The typical BYD buyer remains far more fixated on charging availability and range than the nuances of self-driving, Liu said.

“BYD’s core customer base is still more concerned about charging convenience than advanced autonomy,” he said. BLOOMBERG