Navigate on Autopilot in China: how city NOA became a mass-market feature
What NOA is, how it moved from highways to city streets without HD maps, how many new cars in China now have it, who makes the software, and what it still is not.
Questo articolo per ora è disponibile solo in inglese. La versione italiana è in preparazione.
If you follow the Chinese car market, three letters come up in every launch event: NOA, Navigate on Autopilot (the Chinese name is 领航辅助驾驶, “pilot-assisted driving”). A few years ago it was a premium feature on a handful of expensive models. In 2026 it is close to a standard item, and the fight has moved from highways to city streets. This article explains what NOA is from a technical point of view, how far it has spread, and what it still is not.
What NOA actually does
Classic driver assistance works inside one lane: adaptive cruise control keeps the distance from the car ahead, lane centering keeps the car between the lines. NOA adds the navigation route. You set a destination, and the car follows it on its own: it changes lane to overtake, takes the right exit, merges onto the next road, slows down for toll gates and speed limits. The driver must keep watching the road and stay ready to take over, so in the SAE scale it is still Level 2.
There are two flavours:
- Highway NOA works on motorways and urban expressways. The environment is structured: no pedestrians, no traffic lights, wide lanes, predictable merges. Most Chinese brands have offered it since 2021 or 2022.
- City NOA (urban NOA) works on ordinary streets: traffic lights, unprotected left turns, scooters coming out of nowhere, double-parked delivery vans, roundabouts. It is far harder, and it is where the brands now compete.
From HD maps to “mapless”
The first generation of city NOA relied on high-definition maps, with lane geometry measured to the centimetre. They work well but cost a lot to build and keep up to date, and in China they also need special surveying licences. That limited the service to a few dozen cities.
Around 2023 and 2024 the leaders switched to what they call mapless (or “light map”) systems: the car builds a local map in real time from cameras and, when present, lidar, using only a standard navigation map for the route. That change is what allowed brands to announce city NOA “nationwide” instead of city by city. The next change was end to end models: instead of separate modules for perception, prediction and planning, connected by hand-written rules, one large neural network goes from sensor data to the trajectory. I describe how these networks are trained, including the recent move to reinforcement learning, in a separate article.
How common it has become
According to figures quoted by an MIIT official in mid 2026, combined driver assistance (Level 2) is now fitted to about 70.5% of new passenger cars in China, and NOA to 34.2% (CnEVPost). One new car in three, in the largest car market in the world.
Price did most of the work. In February 2025 BYD announced its “God’s Eye” system across most of its range, including the Seagull, a small car starting at 69,800 yuan, roughly 9,500 US dollars (CarNewsChina). The system comes in three tiers with different computing platforms, and the cheapest one uses cameras only. Other brands had to follow. In January 2026 BYD moved to God’s Eye 5.0, saying the earlier versions were already on more than 2.3 million vehicles (CarNewsChina).
Who makes the software
The Chinese market has an unusual structure. Some carmakers build everything in house: XPeng, Li Auto, NIO and BYD for its upper tiers. Others buy a complete system from a supplier. The two largest suppliers are Huawei, whose Qiankun ADS runs in brands from several groups (Seres, Chery, BAIC, JAC, GAC and others), and Momenta, which works with SAIC, GAC Toyota, Buick, BMW in China and even BYD. Then there are chip and software providers such as Horizon Robotics, whose HSD stack targets mid-priced cars.
Tesla is the odd one out. FSD in China has been “close to approval” several times since 2024; as of mid 2026 Tesla said it was still working with the regulators, and Chinese buyers could only get a limited version (CarNewsChina, Electrek). Meanwhile local systems trained on Chinese roads, with Chinese data, have had years of head start.
What it is not
NOA is driver assistance. The driver remains responsible, and since 2025 Chinese regulators have been very clear about it. After a fatal crash involving a Xiaomi SU7 on NOA in March 2025, the ministry told carmakers to stop advertising “autonomous” or “smart” driving and to label these systems by level, for example “L2 assisted driving” (electrive). A mandatory national standard for Level 2 systems, including NOA, comes into force on 1 January 2027. I go through those rules in this article.
From an engineering point of view, the interesting part is that city NOA has become a mass-market product while still being, formally, Level 2. Millions of cars drive every day with the system active, and every disengagement is a data point. That flow of data is what makes the training methods described in the next articles possible.
