How Chery’s Yaoguang 2035 Strategy Reengineers the Global Automaker into a Tech Titan
In October 2026, Chinese automotive giant Chery used its Global Innovation Conference in Wuhu to unveil its ambitious “Yaoguang 2035″ technology roadmap, signaling a decisive shift from traditional vehicle manufacturing to a vertically integrated tech ecosystem encompassing proprietary AI silicon, megawatt charging architectures, robotaxis, and humanoid robotics, motormobiles.de reported.
The company behind brands like Omoda and Jaecoo is backing this transition with staggering financial outlays, having plowed more than 110 billion RMB—roughly 14 billion euros—into research and development over the past five years. While traditional automotive metrics still frame the group’s external perception, the internal architecture is rapidly transforming into a software-first enterprise.
That technological pivot rests on a foundation of massive global scale. During the first three quarters of 2026, Chery delivered 2,207,000 vehicles worldwide, securing the ninth spot among global automakers. Within the alternative energy sector—encompassing battery-electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids, and fuel-cell systems—the company notched 859,000 sales to land in fifth place globally. European markets have proven especially lucrative, with tuningblog.eu noting that Chery’s September 2026 sales surged 187 percent to 56,552 units. By the end of September, cumulative nine-month registrations reached 283,075, a 253 percent year-over-year increase that propelled Chery past rivals like MG and BYD to lead all Chinese manufacturers on the European continent.
Momentum in Europe is anchored by concrete model adoption. The Jaecoo 7 compact SUV achieved 15,470 registrations in September 2026, marking the first time a Chinese model cracked Europe’s top ten vehicle sales. In the United Kingdom, the Jaecoo 7 repeatedly topped local new vehicle registrations across the year, backed by sibling offerings like the Jaecoo 5 and Omoda 5. To bypass looming import tariffs and accelerate regional delivery, Chery has established local manufacturing in Barcelona, Spain. Through a joint venture with Ebro Motors at the former Nissan facility in the Zona Franca, the company invested roughly 150 million euros to spin up the M1 assembly line. Equipped with 97 workstations and over 200 industrial robots along a 696-meter line, the plant targets an initial output of 50,000 vehicles by the end of 2026, scaling to 150,000 units annually and 1,530 jobs by 2029.
Proprietary Silicon and the CheryMind AI Foundation Model
Beneath the sheet metal, the Yaoguang 2035 framework attacks hardware and software dependencies head-on. On the software front, the proprietary CheryMind AI foundation model integrates deeply across operations, deployed daily by more than 60,000 employees across 1,500 business processes linked to over 400 internal systems.
Hardware ambitions are even more radical, spearheaded by Chery’s newly unveiled Ziwei chip family. Split across C-series central computing chips, S-series silicon-carbide power semiconductors, and M-series control units, the hardware aims for elite performance metrics. The Ziwei C100 central computer deploys a dual-chip architecture delivering 2,400 TOPS of NPU processing power alongside a 600 GB/s memory bandwidth. This throughput allows the vehicle to run localized AI models featuring up to 100 billion parameters. End-to-end algorithmic loops process in just 80 milliseconds, creating the low-latency response times required for highly automated driving. Meanwhile, the Ziwei S1500 silicon-carbide semiconductor is rated for 1,500 volts and 1,450 amperes of module current, boasting a 99.6 percent efficiency floor. Fabricated on 8-inch wafers, these chips slash inverter and power electronics production costs by over 30 percent while insulating the company from external supply chain bottlenecks.
Falcon Pilot Offers Three Autonomy Levels and Megawatt Charging
Automated driving functions are governed by the Falcon Pilot suite, stratified into three capabilities. Falcon 500 handles highway and urban navigation alongside standard parking maneuvers. Falcon 700 expands this to point-to-point transit, including multi-story automated valet parking. At the apex, Falcon 900 targets Level 3 highway and urban automation utilizing triple redundancies across sensors, steering, and power supply.
Charging infrastructure pushes past conventional limits via the Xunlong platform. The system delivers a continuous 800 kW at 800 amperes, peaking for 45 seconds at 1.44 megawatts and 1,500 amperes across an input voltage range of 200 to 1,000 volts DC.
Complementing high-power charging, Chery’s Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) architecture enables energy back-feeding with minimal battery degradation under AC discharge conditions.
Chery Faces Reliability Tests on European Roads
Diversification extends far beyond passenger cars.
As Chery transitions from regional exporter to global tech conglomerate, the ultimate test will not be theoretical 2,400-TOPS computing limits, but real-world reliability on European roads, customer service infrastructure, and software polish under demanding everyday conditions.
