Volkswagen will unveil a prototype of its ID.Aura T6 in Beijing, China in April 2026.
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German car giant Volkswagen has announced that it will integrate AI voice commands into its cars for the Chinese market.
Starting in the second half of this year, all vehicles based on Volkswagen’s China Car system will have AI agents that allow people to control vehicle functions with voice commands, the company said on Tuesday.
“The car should be like a companion,” Volkswagen China CTO Thomas Ulbrich told CNBC’s Eunice Yoon.
He said the company’s in-car AI agent would draw on technologies from Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu, among others, to create a tool with “personality” that can anticipate a driver’s needs.
The AI uses a locally trained large language model and runs entirely in the car and not in the cloud.
Volkswagen unveiled four cars in Beijing on Tuesday, including the ID. UNYX 09, which the company says it developed together with electric vehicle manufacturer Xpeng within two years.
The move is part of the company’s strategy to regain lost market share as China has rapidly transitioned from internal combustion engine cars to electric cars.
Volkswagen has invested heavily in China in recent years, taking stakes in Xpeng and automotive chip maker Horizon Robotics.
Through these partnerships, the German automaker does not use Nvidia chips in its cars in China. Instead, Volkswagen uses the Turing chip from
Volkswagen also announced Tuesday that it will use agentic AI to power a unified driver assistance and cockpit control system starting next year.
In November, the German automaker said its research center in Hefei could independently develop and approve technology for its Chinese cars, speeding time to market.
According to a report released on Tuesday by the German Chamber of Commerce in China, German automotive companies in China have significantly increased their research and development activities in the country over the past two years, with the aim of serving both the local and global markets.
Nearly 80% of automotive companies surveyed by the chamber said that localizing research and development in China had reduced these costs compared to Germany over the past two years, while around 43% of respondents said their innovation speed had increased by more than 40%, the report said.
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