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Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD claims it has delivered what Elon Musk has promised forever but has failed to deliver again and again: a car that can park itself with full Level 4 (L4) autonomy. That means that the car can navigate a parking lot, find a spot, and park completely unattended. Some cars have assisted parking, including brands like BMW, Nissan, and Tesla, but none offers total autonomy except Mercedes-Benz. The latter is only a very limited L4 parking test confined to a single airport parking lot in Stuttgart, Germany, with special equipment installed. BYD’s system operates outside dedicated structures and is not restricted to pre-mapped locations. The company is so confident in the technology that it announced that it will cover any damages to your car or any other vehicle if things go wrong. This means if anything happens, the owner wont have to file a claim and have their premiums go up. The breakthrough comes with the latest over-the-air update of BYD’s God’s Eye intelligent driving system, which now numbers more than 1 million cars across China. Theres no word when it will come to other markets. The eye that sees it all BYD’s confidence stems from a sophisticated sensor architecture. The God’s Eye system deploys multiple sensing technologies working in concert, unlike Tesla’s problematic camera-only approach. Even the entry-level God’s Eye C variantone of three autonomous driving levels included in most affordable modelsincludes 12 cameras, 5 millimeter-wave radars, and 12 ultrasonic sensors with 1-centimeter accuracy. The mid-tier God’s Eye B adds a lidar sensor, while the premium God’s Eye A variant features three lidar sensors for maximum precision. The system’s parking accuracy allows the car to get within 0.8 inches of other objects, enabled by multiple redundant sensors that create a three-dimensional map. This allows the vehicle a deep understanding of its environment. This multi-sensor approach allows the system to detect obstacles. It can even recognize hanging objects over the roof line of the car. The company reports that more than 1 million vehicles now carry the God’s Eye system, an impressive deployment scale that starts with the most inexpensive models, like the $9,550 BYD Seagull, and go all the way to the $236,000 BYD Yangwang U9, a hypercar that can detect potholes on the road and jump over them. Yes. If the Gods Eye detects an obstacle on the road, it will literally jump over it. Mercedes-Benz is the only company that approaches BYDs new ability, and it only does so by cheating. Working with German hardware maker Bosch, it achieved L4 parking certification in 2022. But the automaker’s system operates exclusively in the P6 parking garage at Stuttgart Airport, requiring specific infrastructure and limiting availability to select S-Class and EQS models. Drivers must book parking spaces through the Mercedes Me app and drop off vehicles in designated zones, making the system more of a controlled experiment than practical technology. Even if Mercedes could extend the idea to other parking lots throughout the worldwhich seem impracticalthis approach lacks the flexibility and scalability of BYD’s vehicle-centric solution. BMW and other premium automakers offer advanced parking assistance but remain stuck at Level 2 automation. BMW’s Parking Assistant Professional can perform parallel and perpendicular parking, but requires constant driver supervision and cannot achieve true autonomous operation. The system includes features like remote control parking and recorded path memory, but falls short of the true hands-off capability that defines L4 autonomy, which BYD is claiming with its new Gods Eye update. Chinese manufacturers are heavily investing in AI capabilities for their cars. BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu claims that it has 5,000 AI engineers working exclusively on solving full L4 autonomy. Companies like Baidu (whose open-source autonomous driving system Apollo is used by Volvo), Xiaomi, and Xpeng, are on similar paths. Chuanfu believes that Gods Eyes will provide full L4 in the next two to three years. Tesla’s falling way behind But perhaps the technology gap is more obvious when you compare it to Tesla which has been claiming full autonomous driving next year for the last seven years. While BYD and the other Chinese manufacturers deploy multiple sensor types for redundancy and accuracy, Musk decided that Tesla should abandon ultrasonic sensors in favor of cameras alone, creating dangerous blind spots and unreliable distance measurements. There have been multiple reports of Tesla autonomous driving problems. Like BMW and Mercedes, Tesla has a basic parking assist feature, too. Its owners report persistent errors, particularly in rain, snow, or low-light conditions where cameras lose effectiveness. The system’s unreliability has become so notorious that Tesla forums overflow with complaints about parking functionality that worked better in older vehicles with dedicated sensors. Musk’s dismissal of lidar as “a crutch” and “loser’s technology” has clearly left Tesla technologically behind competitors who have embraced multi-sensor approaches. BYD’s L4 parking achievement and its financial guarantee shows who the real loser is here. Not only Musk, but the entire Western automobile industry. s Fords CEO Jim Farley told the audience at the Aspen Ideas Summit last month talking about his last visit to China: Its the most humbling thing Ive ever seen . . . their cost, their quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the West. We are in a global competition with China, and its not just EVs. And if we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford. Ford and everyone else, Im afraid.
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E-Commerce
The steam engine in the 19th century, the microprocessor chip in the 20thcompanies that figured out how to use them thrived; those that didnt declined. And now the race to embrace AI is on. McKinsey estimates the potential for corporates to grow their productivity through this transformative technology at $4.4 trillion. Todays corporate leaders are acutely aware of thisonly 1% call their companies mature on the deployment spectrumand they certainly want to do something about this: 92% plan to increase their AI investments over the next three years. However, in the rush to embed AI, these leaders are missing, and even contributing to, a far greater issue than slow AI uptake: a disconnect between leadership and their workforce, leading to the erosion of alignment and trust inside organizations. This cultural disconnect is a far more urgent risk to business performance than technical lag. Heres how to tackle this mounting challenge. The problems with a disconnected workforce Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workforce revealed that global employee engagement declined to 21% in 2024, only the second decline in engagement in the past 12 years. This ought to alarm business leaders. Disengaged employees are a huge threat in multiple ways. They do the bare minimum work: studies show disengaged employees are 18% less productive on average. Next consider the impact on the customer experience. Disengagement isnt contained, it leaks, and disengaged employees are likely to lower service quality, slow response times, and diminish brand loyalty. Disengaged employees also kill innovation, problem-solving, and transformation. They dont speak up, challenge ideas, or contribute proactively. They dont resist loudly. They comply quietly via passive resistance. You lose not just output, but the critical energy that drives adaptation and progress. Then they leave. Disengaged employees are 2.6 times more likely to actively seek a new job, creating costly churn. Gallup estimates the cost of replacing an employee is 150% of their salary. But before they go, many poison the culture from within, turning previously engaged employees into disengaged ones. “Disengaged workforce” is a term that gets thrown around a lot by people functions, and too often its dismissed by leadership as HR fluff. But when you connect it to hard facts, it really is like death by a thousand invisible cuts. AI: the disconnection accelerator While this disconnect silently eats away at the corporate world, execs blindly plow on with AI implementation, and in doing so are making the issue far worse. A study of 2,500 workers from the U.S., U.K., and Australia revealed that for 77% of employees AI has increased their workload, with one in three full-time employees saying they will likely quit their jobs in the next six months. Theyre not imagining the increased workload: 81% of global C-suite leaders acknowledge they have increased demands on their workers in the past year. With AI there is just more pressure to deliver more, faster, in less amount of time, and the relationship between employees and employers is eroding. As one commentator recently put it: Companies are announcing layoffs alongside record-breaking financial results. You work hard, focus on impactful projects, and receive praise from your leadonly to find yourself let go by someone who likely doesnt even know you exist. It feels as though the trust between companies and employees is now broken. Companies, it seems, are either unaware of this shift or unwilling to address it. And frankly, Im not sure how they could fix it. Slow down and listen They can fix this. But first, leadership needs to take its foot off the gas. Because if you want AI transformation to succeed, your people need to come with you. And that starts by returning to the roots of effective employee engagement: human insight, gained the human way. Its about spending real time understanding the lived, felt, experienced reality of your workforceironically, the kind of research AI cant replicate. Because while technology can summarize patterns, it cant observe culture in motion. It cant pick up on tension in a room. It cant notice whos talking, who isnt, and why. It cant notice your tiny invisible cuts forming. Consider the approach of Dell which in 2024, imposed rigid return-to-office mandates, introduced employee monitoring, and fast-tracked GenAI, all with minimal listening to its employees. The result? Internal backlash, tanking morale, and public employer brand damage. Contrast it with Toyota which has built its leadership philosophy around Genchi Genbutsu”go and see. Leaders embed, observe, and critically, understand before deciding. Its a major reason why it remains the worlds leading car brand. Connection and understanding From there its about rebuilding connection. Be authentic: own the challenges, and remember that people respect honesty over perfection. Surface and elevate the true human insights that come from the front lines. Then close the loop: when people see changes made from their input, trust grows. Crucially, leaders need to recognise that while AI can help scale tasks, only they, the leaders, can scale trust. And theyll build it by realising that people still come first, AI second. The organizations that win in the AI era wont be the ones that move the fastest. Theyll be the ones that stay closest to the ground. This isn’t a nostalgic plea for pre-AI leadership. Its a call on leaders to simply do better, by showing through actions, not words, that they are something AI can never be: human.
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E-Commerce
When it comes to the future of urban mobility, its not the sci-fi fantasies that will shape our cities. Its functional solutions for the everyday. While tech visionaries promote high-speed concepts like ET3s vacuum-sealed capsules, true transformation will come from transportation solutions that are accessible, reliable, and affordablelike modernizing existing transit infrastructure, digitizing bus routes, and reducing traffic congestion. Sexy, futuristic modes of transportation like autonomous vehicles may dominate the headlines, but what Americans really crave are reliable, inexpensive options to get them from point A to point Bnot a self-driving car. Public frustration around the future of transit is mounting. Waymos are crashing in Los Angeles, congestion pricing is contentious in New York City, and the U.S. lacks a reliable high-speed rail network. These realities make it clear that companies should rethink what the city of the future looks like and reprioritize achievable solutions to real needs. New data from Censuswide, commissioned by Diffusion, offers a closer look at the evolving sentiment on mobility in Americas biggest citiesand the findings highlight a pressing need for better solutions. Alarmingly, fewer than 18% of Americans describe their citys transit as highly efficient and nearly as many say its struggling. With American people driving around twice as much annually compared to their European counterparts, the overreliance on personal vehicles underscores the urgency for investments in reliable public transit that can reduce congestion, cut emissions and improve quality of life. While exciting, the novelty of new mobility tech, like the 2,000 new food delivery bots roaming around Los Angeles, wears off quickly when residents can depend more on their takeout delivery than the bus they take to work. In fact, bus delays are collectively costing L.A. residents more than a cumulative decade on the average weekday. Despite the ability to ask ChatGPT nearly any question and get the answer in seconds, Americans are understandably frustrated that they cant seem to get an accurate transit schedule. Back to the basics The top three priorities for Americans when it comes to urban mobility are affordability (50.8%), reliable public transit (47%), and accessibility (39.3%) demonstrating a need for options that reduce traffic congestion, provide economical alternatives, and are available to all. Visionaries in the urban mobility space need to focus on these core components before setting their sights on mass adoption. Without demonstrating a positive potential impact on cost, convenience, reliability, and ease of use, companies innovating in the space will only continue to be met with skepticism and resistance. Fears around AV Sentiment around automated vehicles (AVs), for example, perfectly illustrates the increasing skepticism and resistance to adapt. Despite AVs being at the forefront of the future and modern urban transit conversation, the public isnt on board, with over half (50.5%) of respondents disagreeing that AVs are the future. Furthermore, 74.5% of Americans said they dont trust the safety of AVs and 66% said that the technology isnt ready. Yet just this month, Waymo announced they are expanding to New York City. This move suggests that companies in the urban mobility space may be out of touch with what American commuters are ready to embrace. AVs still dont feel normal or comfortable to most, so now is the time to build trust. Rolling them out at scale without addressing fundamental mobility concerns risks missing the mark entirely, since commuters need confidence in the safety and reliability of the technology before theyll consider taking the risk themselves. Beyond issues of trust and comfort, however, concerns extend to the broader economic impact of AVs. Nearly 60% said theyre concerned about AVs impact on jobs, a sentiment that isnt surprising given growing fears about AIs effects on the American workforce and the disappearance of certain roles. While businesses race to advance AV technology, assuming widespread excitement for futuristic transportation options, they often overlook how these developments will directly affect everyday people. Job loss is not the only aspect of new technology that concerns Americansprivacy remains at the forefront of conversation, with over 60% of people reporting a concern for their digital safety. Many of these futuristic transport options require a certain amount of data about oneself, location, etc. which can be scary to the everyday commuter. Companies modernizing urban mobility should focus on transparency when it comes to data collection, to help ease users minds, and highlight the ways in which their technology will tangibly improve day-to-day lives. Otherwise, theyll face resistance in the pursuit of mass acceptance. The real ‘City of the Future’ Since what Americans truly want isnt flying cars or futuristic cities, efforts should focus on enhancing existing infrastructure through smart technology instead of pursuing a complete overhaul. Innovations that fail to get someone to their destination quickly and affordably are far less transformative than companies believe. The real future of urban mobility isnt about who has the flashiest new system, its about who solves the real problems. Progress is about improving upon how people live, work and move within cities, not making headlines for futuristic features that dont have real-world impact. Before we prioritize the city of the future, lets strengthen our cities in the present.
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E-Commerce
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