# smart cockpit

China’s EVs Are Trying to Turn Cars into ‘Robots’ — But the First Step Is the Hardest

China’s Li Auto and Xpeng are reorganising to build ‘car robots’ by fusing smart cockpits and autonomous driving onto a shared AI platform. Technical, safety and organisational barriers mean the transition will be incremental: common base models and compute may be shared, but driving functions will require strict isolation and staged deployment in low-risk scenarios.