Chinese Automakers Geely and Voyah Integrate DeepSeek AI into Smart Vehicles

DeepSeek Is Already Making Its Way Into Chinese EVs

AI is a hot-button topic, especially in the automotive industry. As time marches forward, it seems like we're all shifting from software-driven EVs, to shoehorning AI into every nook and cranny. Will it work? Who knows. But, the world's latest low-cost AI Chinese darling, DeepSeek, is fastly ingratiating itself with China's auto companies. This week, two different companies announced their efforts to add AI tech to their vehicles. First up is Geely. Parent company to brands like Zeekr, Polestar and Volvo, the brand announced during CES that it was embarking on what it called a "Full-Domain AI for Smart Vehicles. At the time, this was to be understood as Geely's own internal model. Geely's AI would span much of the driving experience, from voice commands to putting in the groundwork for fully autonomous driving or furthering its research and development in the vehicles themselves. Geely says that its "ultimate goal is to create a native Autonomous Intelligence for Mobility that is warm, empathetic and continuously evolving." Marketing jargon aside, the company is now looking outside of its walls to improve its AI aspirations. Geely is combining its own model with Deepseek R1, via distillation training. Effectively, DeepSeek is training Geely's own AI and refining it. This dataset training its own AI efforts will help the car to understand speech and commands better. All of this stuff will find its way onto Geely's next generation of smart connected cars. Geely isn't the only one integrating Deepseek into its vehicles, either. Dongfeng's Voyah brand announced that the Courage EV crossover and Dream MPV will be the first mass-produced vehicles ever to have the AI tool integrated into their software. According to reporting from CnEVPost, Deepseek will first be ported to the Courage via an over-the-air update on Feb 14. In this context, Deepseek will integrate into Voyah's existing smart cockpit software and will improve the "AI responsiveness, accuracy and expandability" of the stuff that's already there. It also will enable Voyah to rapidly improve its software and cater better to its vehicles and clientele. No doubt, this is very impressive, even if the utility for AI integration in-vehicle systems is still a little suspect. It's only been a few weeks since the dirt-cheap, but very good model put AI giant OpenAI on notice, and yet it is already making its way into China's car industry. This is part of the lockstep, move-in-unison front I briefly touched on when I went to China last April. China's tech companies and automotive companies are highly collaborative in ways that go beyond just, say, integrating Apple Carplay or Android Automotive. However, this does beg a question: are these brands scaling back their global aspirations? DeepSeek has attracted the ire of Silicon Valley and the U.S. government. Some say that a ban on the technology is coming soon, which would make any EV product that uses it a non-starter. For brands like Voyah, which doesn't have much of a presence outside of China anyway, this isn't such a big deal. But for Geely, which owns Volvo and Polestar, there likely will need to be some serious separation in order to avoid drawing fire from the Trump Administration. Geely has kept most of Volvo and Polestar's software development away from the rest of the Geely group, but that lack of collaboration on software will likely end up being a pinch point for the two brands that assuredly want to continue selling cars in the U.S.

China's Geely partners with DeepSeek to enhance smart car AI technology

After sending shock waves across the world by dethroning OpenAI's ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app on the Apple App Store, China's DeepSeek is rapidly making its presence felt across key sectors in the country. The artificial intelligence company has partnered with Hangzhou-headquartered automaker Geely to integrate its R1 LLM model with the next generation of smart cars. The Chinese EV maker will now conduct distillation training on its Xingrui car control FunctionCall AI model using DeepSeekR1, a process where outputs from a larger, more advanced AI model are used to improve a smaller model's performance.