Geely And Baidu's Joint Venture Unveils Jiyue 01 EV, Priced Competitively Below Tesla Model Y

The Jiyue 01, an electric vehicle resulting from the collaboration between Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co. and Baidu Inc BIDU, was launched on Friday, underscoring the expansion and intensifying competition within the world’s largest automobile market for EVs.

What Happened: The Jiyue 01, the inaugural EV from the Geely and Baidu JV brand JiYue, is a five-seater SUV that starts at 249,900 yuan, reported CnEVPost. It comes in two versions — Max and Max Performance.

The pricing of the new vehicle is below Tesla’s starting price of 263,900 yuan. Further, taking a different route from most cars that rely on high-precision maps for driver assistance, Jiyue 01 is adopting a pure vision system, a strategy also employed by Tesla. However, Tesla’s full self-driving (FSD) software is currently inaccessible in the country, paving the for players like XPeng and Jiyue to fill the market gap.

FSD rival?: The brand names its intelligent driving feature ROBO Drive Max. The feature will offer point to point navigation assistance and AVP autonomous valet parking functionality on 90% of China’s highways and in three urban cities — Hangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai. It will expand to 200 plus cities by 2024 and will be available on a monthly subscription basis.

ROBO Drive also includes many standard intelligent driving functions, such as lane keeping, autonomous parking assist, collision warning, lane departure warning, intelligent cruise control, lane changing and parking spot finding, the company said in a statement.

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