BYD updates God’s Eye ADAS with Level 4-equivalent park assist – will pay for damages from accidents

Earlier this year, BYD introduced its God’s Eye suite of highly-automated driver assists, which it proceeded to fit as standard across its entire range of BYD, Denza, Fangchengbao and Yangwang models. That’s an impressive feat all of its own, but the company has announced a new over-the-air update that boosts the capabilities of the system still further.

According to a post on its Weibo page, the system’s main new addition is an overhauled park assist system that is claimed to offer the equivalent of Level 4 autonomy (hands off, eyes off, brain off), which the company said is a world first.

The system, which is able to park in diagonal spaces in addition to parallel and perpendicular spots, will now be able to park nose-in and it will even detect if there are any overhanging obstacles and avoid them. It will even be able to detect if other cars are not parked properly and park in an offset manner, allowing occupants to still get in and out.

Another new feature is the ability to detect if the car is entering a narrow parking space, retracting the door mirrors automatically. Drivers will be able to choose from three parking speeds – including an “extreme speed” mode – and as the promotional photos show, they’ll even be able to be outside of the car while the parking manoeuvre is being performed autonomously.

Such is the confidence BYD has in the system that it is literally putting its money where its mouth is. It announced that it will assume full responsibility for any accidents arising from the use of its upgraded park assist and pay for any damages caused, including third-party property and personal injury losses. The company says it will do so even if the vehicle is out of warranty or if the driver is not the first owner of the car. This approach mirrors a pledge taken by Volvo in the early days of autonomous driving development.

Other changes to the broader God’s Eye system include improvements to the (still Level 2) semi-autonomous driving features, including the ability to speed up or slow down automatically when changing lanes to match the traffic flow. The car will also now flash the headlights and sound the horn if another driver is changing lanes dangerously, allowing users to become a “public road safety officer”. Sounds like it would make a great feature on Malaysian roads if I may say so myself.

There have also been optimisations made to the general system functionality. For instance, it will automatically adjust the headlights to the highest position when entering assisted driving mode to improve obstacle detection, as well as turning off the indicators once an autonomous lane change is performed. Models equipped with the base God’s Eye C (DiPilot 100, no lidar sensor) also get improved operation guidance and an optimised speed range that gives priority to the speed setting set by the user.

The OTA update will be pushed out to the “Dynasty” models with the God’s Eye C system first, such as the Qin Plus, Qin L, Song L, Song Pro, Yuan Plus (Atto 3), Yuan Up (Atto 2) and Xia MPV, with other models following later on. The news comes as BYD celebrates over one million vehicles with God’s Eye now on the road in China.

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