Huawei Technologies Co. is going to invest billions in researching self-driving and electric-car technologies. The company has been carrying out such plans for a long time. Huawei is finally moving ahead with its intention to build electric vehicles.

Currently, Huawei is working on the creation of prototypes. Reportedly, the prototypes can handle complex urban environments. Huawei Co-Chairman Eric Xu assures that the company has already made astonishing progress. "I don’t know if they were bragging, but my team said they can have cars driving on their own without human intervention for 1,000 kilometres. That’s way better than Tesla," Xu said.

The new self-driving cars will be produced jointly with such Chinese automakers as BAIC Group, Chongqing Changan Automobile, and Guangzhou Automobile Group. For both parties, such collaboration is quite beneficial. Notably, China is considered the most promising market for this industry. The number of electric cars in the country increases by 30 million annually. Electric car sales are projected to grow by more than 50% this year.

The Chinese telecoms giant is looking for new market niches to offset the impact of the US sanctions on its mobile business introduced in 2019. The US sanctions adversely affected the supply of the company in 2020. For example, in the last months of 2020, Huawei shipped 33 million smartphones worldwide, which was 41% less than in the same period of 2019.