Availability of commute NOA functionality will expand to 100 cities in December, and will be available to all users by the second quarter of 2024, Li Auto said.

(File photo shows a Li L9 on display at the April 2023 Shanghai auto show. Image credit: CnEVPost)

Li Auto (NASDAQ: LI) will begin internal testing of commute NOA (Navigate on Autopilot) in September for early bird users, and the feature will initially cover 10 cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, it announced today.

Unlike City NOA, which requires more algorithm training, commute NOA only covers the roads that car owners frequently travel on their daily trips, and therefore requires less work on algorithm training.

For the commute NOA feature, vehicles can be activated for simple routes in less than 1 week and trained for more complex routes in 2-3 weeks, Li Auto previously said.

In November, the available areas for the commute NOA feature will be expanded to 50 cities, and in December to 100 cities, Li Auto said at the Chengdu auto show today.

By the second quarter of 2024, the commute NOA feature is expected to be available to all users, Li Auto said.

As more commute NOA routes finish training, those routes can also be shared between users, Li Auto said, adding that a route-sharing feature will begin tests in the fourth quarter of this year in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen.

Li Auto's BEV (Bird's Eye View) foundation model is also nearing completion of its integration of highway NOA and city NOA, thus allowing users to seamlessly use commute NOA when traveling on highways, ring roads, and city roads, the company said.

This means that Li Auto's highway NOA will also be switched to the foundation model architecture, a key optimization for the feature, it said, adding that the optimized software will be pushed to all AD Max users in January next year and to AD Pro users later.

Li Auto first mentioned the commute NOA feature at its Family Tech Day event on June 17, saying it was expected to cover more than 95 percent of commuting scenarios, making the vehicle an "exclusive elevator" for the owner.

The company also said at the time that its city NOA is the first in China that doesn't rely on high-definition maps, and that with the help of large AI models, it will achieve driving performance close to that of a human driver.

Since Li Auto pushed its first city NOA feature that doesn't rely on high-definition maps to early bird users at the end of June, its iteration speed has increased dramatically, the company said today.

To date, early bird users have averaged more than 50 minutes of city NOA use per day, accounting for more than 90 percent of their city driving time, Li Auto said today.

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