Horizon Robotics pushes full-stack autonomy

Horizon Robotics used the Shanghai auto-show week to launch a new self-driving stack built around its own chip, operating system and driving software. (pandaily.com) The April 22 launch included the Starry cockpit-driving chip, the KaKaClaw vehicle operating system and HSD V1.6, the latest version of Horizon’s assisted-driving system. Founder and chief executive Yu Kai called it the company’s next strategic step. (pandaily.com) Horizon said Starry is built on a 5-nanometer automotive process, delivers 650 TOPS of computing power and 273 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and is designed to run cockpit features and driving models on one platform. (pandaily.com) That design replaces separate in-car computers with centralized computing, which Horizon said can reduce hardware space by 50%, cut per-vehicle cost by 1,500 to 4,000 yuan, and shorten development time from 18 months to 8. (pandaily.com) Self-driving systems are shifting from parts lists to full stacks: the chip runs the models, the operating system coordinates the car’s functions, and the software decides how the vehicle moves. Horizon is now trying to sell all three together. (pandaily.com) Horizon said Starry has already won intended mass-production partnerships from more than 10 automakers, including Volkswagen, Chery and BYD, plus suppliers Bosch and Denso. (pandaily.com) The company has been moving toward this for a year. In April 2025, Horizon rolled out HSD for mass production and said Chery’s EXEED brand would be the first global production launch, scheduled for September 2025. (horizon.auto) China’s market is pushing suppliers in that direction. Horizon said revenue rose 57.7% to 3.76 billion yuan in 2025, while intelligent assisted-driving penetration in China’s passenger-car market reached 67.6%. (hkexnews.hk) Rivals are making the same argument with different technology. XPENG rolled out its Vision-Language-Action 2.0 system in March, and chief executive He Xiaopeng said users engage it almost 120% more than the previous generation. (forbes.com) (cnevpost.com) He also said XPENG’s early testing showed VLA 2.0 needed five times fewer driver interventions than Tesla’s Full Self-Driving version 13.2.9 in China, a claim reported by MotorTrend. Tesla has not publicly accepted that comparison. (motortrend.com) For Horizon, the pitch is that automakers no longer want to stitch together chips from one company, software from another and cockpit systems from a third. The company is betting that one integrated stack will be easier to ship, cheaper to update and faster to roll across models. (pandaily.com)