Zoox's CEO said China's EV companies have a leg up in one key area

• Zoox's CEO said Chinese EV companies have a major leg up in their software capabilities.
• She said they came from a smartphone era in China, where companies had to be good at hardware and software.
• Other automobile execs, like Ford's CEO, have also raved about the caliber of Chinese EVs.

Zoox's CEO said China's EV companies have an edge in one major area.

In a Wednesday Rapid Response podcast interview, CEO Aicha Evans said there's one key reason China's autonomous vehicle companies are successful — because they're great at integrating hardware and software.

"When you look at the ecosystem in China, a lot of these consumer electronics companies that came from the smartphone era had to be good at hardware, software, and system-level thinking by definition," she said.

"They are finding a natural path to EVs and AVs because that foundational knowledge and mindset is already native to them," she added.

Evans said that for EV companies, the key to success is to "get busy becoming native" if they aren't already.

She added that progressing from electric vehicles to autonomous vehicles means going from "a machine with wheels to a computer on wheels." And software will have to be the "first-class citizen" in the car's "architecture design."

Some of the biggest Chinese EV companies, like Xiaomi and BYD, didn't start off as automobile manufacturers. BYD started as a battery manufacturer for mobile phones and electronics, while Xiaomi was, and still is, a smartphone and consumer tech company.

Pan Jian, a cochair of a key Tesla battery supplier CATL, said at the World Economic Forum last year that EVs in China are increasingly being called "EIV," which stands for "electric intelligent vehicles," emphasizing their software capabilities.

Evans is not the only US-based executive who has said China's automotive sector has an edge over the US's. In 2024, Ford CEO Jim Farley said he had been driving a Xiaomi EV for months and didn't want to give it up.

He added earlier this year that he chose to drive a Xiaomi instead of a Tesla because the latter didn't have an "updated vehicle."

Zoox, a California-based autonomous vehicle company acquired by Amazon in 2020, now operates robotaxi services in San Francisco and Las Vegas, with plans to expand to Miami and Austin. It also announced a partnership with Uber in March.