Anhui Unveils 15th Five-Year Tech Directions for Smart Vehicles, Eyes Embodied AI Cars

Anhui Province released its key technology directions for the smart connected new energy vehicle (NEV) industry under the 15th Five-Year Plan, at a matchmaking conference on industrial cluster development held in Hefei on September 20 during the 2026 World Manufacturing Convention.

Liu Xinglong, deputy director of the Anhui Automotive Innovation Center, offered two judgments: from a technology standpoint, AI vehicles built around smart connectivity will become the industry's main battlefield; from a market standpoint, global NEV sales and penetration will keep rising, approaching 50 percent by 2030, with China expected to reach 70 percent.

Anhui says it will pursue self-reliant innovation and use strength to drive scale, aiming to build a smart vehicle technology and industrial innovation center with international influence.

Anhui's 15th Five-Year Plan technology directions construct a "1+3" framework: the "1" is deep AI empowerment, and the "3" are smart connectivity, new energy and energy-saving, and common supporting technologies.

On AI empowerment, the province will tackle world models for autonomous driving and multimodal large language models tailored to the automotive industry, focusing on car-grade artificial intelligence chips, AI-oriented vehicle operating systems, device-cloud heterogeneous computing, multimodal perception fusion and understanding, behavior planning and decision-making, and self-evolving learning methods.

It will also push AI across the entire automotive supply chain, supporting its use in product definition, simulation design, and testing and validation.