June 3, 2026 - BYD Commits to Damage Coverage for ADAS

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for June 3, 2026, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry. 

Chinese automaker BYD recently held an Intelligence Strategy Launch event where it made a number of interesting announcements related to its driver assist systems, including its intention to cover damage from crashes when using its Gods-Eye driver assist. The Gods-Eye system is offered in three tiers of capability across BYD's various models and brands. The A tier is a multi-lidar, camera, and radar system for high-end vehicles, the B tier is a single lidar solution for more mainstream vehicles, and the C tier is for entry-level vehicles with just cameras and radar. At the event, BYD announced it had developed its own custom Xuanji A3 system on chip that would be used to power the A and B tiers of Gods-Eye. This is part of a new central compute electronic architecture, which also uses satellite sensors with more resolution and all the processing handled centrally. The Xuanji A3 is fabricated on a 4 nm process, making it among the most advanced in the auto industry. BYD claims a three-chip configuration delivers 2,100 trillion operations per second of AI processing. For comparison, a single Nvidia Thor does about 1,000 TOPS. 

Vehicles with the new Gods-Eye systems will get one year of full damage coverage from BYD, including collision, third-party property damage, and personal injury coverage if a crash occurs while using the City navigate on autopilot function. While one year of coverage isn't much, if it turns out that the claim frequency is reduced by using the system, third-party insurers may start reducing premiums for drivers of these vehicles. 

If this works out for BYD, perhaps it will set a precedent for other automakers to follow that could also lead to increased use of assist features. 

Thanks for listening.