Chinese company Horizon Robotics announced on Thursday that Li Auto began rolling out a major update to the Beijing automaker’s assisted driving system.
Based on a single Horizon Journey 6M chip, the fully electric and extended range vehicle maker Li Auto introduces the AD Pro 4.0 update — becoming the industry’s first end-to-end city Navigate on Autopilot (NOA) solution.
NOA is an advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) that helps drivers navigate highway or urban routes by assisting with tasks such as lane keeping, lane changes, and merging.
Horizon Robotics said the upgrade was developed by Li Auto in collaboration with the self-driving technology company QCraft.
The updated system will roll out to the AD Pro trim of the refreshed L6, L7, L8, and L9 extended-range electric (EREV) SUVs.
The ADAS for the AD Pro variant of the L6 model had already been upgraded to the Horizon Journey 6M chip last May, when Li Auto launched a new iteration of the models aimed to increase demand.
On the other hand, the model’s AD Max trim features an upgraded advanced driver-assistance system powered by NVIDIA’s next-generation Thor-U smart chip.
Li Auto’s Autonomous Driving
After upgrading ADAS in its AD Pro trims, Li Auto is reinforcing its push into autonomous driving.
Last March, the automaker’s head of autonomous driving technology development Jia Peng had unveiled its new-generation MindVLA (Visual-Language-Action) architecture at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference.
MindVLA corresponds to an autonomous driving model based on a dual-system architecture integrating end-to-end learning and Vision-Language Models (VLM).
Despite this architecture, Li Auto‘s founder and CEO Li Xiang said in a post on Weibo at the time that he prefers to describe the system as a “robot large model.”
“MindVLA is here, is truly autonomous driving still far away?” the executive wrote on Weibo.
Last month, the Beijing-based company secured Level 3 (L3) autonomous driving testing permits in its headquarters city, the Chinese media outlet National Business Daily reported.
The permits allow the carmakers to begin conditional autonomous driving tests on designated roads.
Another Chinese automaker, XPeng, also secured L3 autonomous driving road test permits in its headquarters city of Guangzhou and began road testing in the same month, according to local media outlet Yicai.
The report was later confirmed by the brand’s vice president Yu Tao, who anticipated “surprises in the first quarter of next year [2026]”, as stated by CNEVPost.
Additionally, Chinese outlet Cailian reported at the time that Huawei’s Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance (HIMA) had partnered with local transportation authorities to begin internal testing of L3 conditional autonomous driving in Shenzhen.
Horizon Journey 6 Chips
Launched last April, the Horizon Journey 6 chip series includes the Journey 6B, 6L, 6E, 6M, 6H, and 6P.
According to the Beijing-based technology company, its Journey 6E chip provides approximately 80 TOPS of computing power, supporting passive cooling for domain controllers across several powertrains.
However, the Journey 6M chip delivers a maximum performance of 128 TOPS and can support the Transformer advanced algorithm model, among others.
It enables lightweight urban NOA and memory-based driving features, which learn and repeat familiar routes, on a single chip.
The Journey 6M is also equipped with Horizon Robotics’s next-generation BPU Nash architecture and supports multi-modal sensor fusion including cameras, LiDAR, and millimeter-wave radar.
2026 Plans
With a sales target of approximately 550,000 vehicles for this year, Li Auto plans to expand and upgrade its new-energy vehicles (NEV) portfolio.
This year, the company will refocus its product strategy on EREVs, aiming to “reclaim its leading position” in the segment, 36kr reported earlier this month citing a senior executive of the carmaker.
Li Auto is planning to release a new fully electric SUV this year.
The new model will join the BEV lineup that already includes the Mega MPV, the i8 six-seat SUV, and the i6 five-seat midsize SUV.
