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Coco Feng

The impact of sky-high costs for memory chips is spreading from smartphones to cars, as China’s electric vehicle (EV) king BYD announced a 21 per cent price increase for its high-end driver-assistance system.
Starting on Friday, the price of the optional DiPilot 300 assisted-driving system would rise to 12,000 yuan ($1,757) from 9,900 yuan, BYD said on Tuesday, attributing the decision to “the sharp rise in global storage hardware costs”.
The system, which allows cars to navigate themselves on highways and conduct self-parking, is available in the company’s mid-range and premium models. It employs lidar (light detection and ranging) sensors and requires memory chips for data buffering, processing and storage.
Premium cars would be the next category of consumer products hit hard by the memory “super cycle”, according to analysts.
“High-end car models rely heavily on lidar, multichannel high-pixel cameras and millimetre-wave radar,” said Caroline Chen, an analyst with TrendForce. “They require high-performance chips paired with large-capacity, high-bandwidth memory.”
The impact would be uneven across the market as mid-range models would “bear the brunt of it”, while high-end buyers were “generally less sensitive to price changes”, said Kevin Li, associate director at Counterpoint Research. “Low-end models typically don’t include these expensive tech packages in the first place.”
Li added that price hikes were “spreading to more consumer-electronics categories that use [memory chips], such as tablets and virtual reality headsets”. For example, ByteDance’s virtual reality unit Pico told distributors that it would increase wholesale prices starting on July 1 owing to higher memory costs and supply chain instability.
BYD is the first major Chinese carmaker to explicitly link its price hikes to the global memory market, although other companies have also recently raised prices for models that use similar driver-assistance systems.
In March, Exeed, the premium brand of Chinese carmaker Chery, raised the price of its ET5 SUV equipped with such a system by 5,000 yuan, without offering reasons.
Aito, an EV brand launched in 2021 by Seres in collaboration with Huawei Technologies, said it would charge an additional 10,000 yuan to upgrade to a driver-assistance system using lidar, starting in June. Huawei sold the trademark to Seres in 2024, but still provides technical support such as the driver-assistance technology.

This shift in pricing strategy “could mark a crucial turning point in the Chinese auto market’s ongoing price war, forcing carmakers to pivot from relentless price cutting to more rational pricing strategies dictated by supply chain costs”, said Counterpoint’s Li.
The consensus signals that this is not a temporary blip. Lu Fang, chairman of Voyah, the luxury division of Dongfeng Motor, said earlier this month that price increases were “highly likely to become a trend” as supply chain pressures became unbearable.
William Li Bin, founder, chairman and CEO of Nio, said in January that the biggest cost pressure this year was not raw materials, but memory.
A similar trend has already been felt in the smartphone industry earlier, where Chinese manufacturers Oppo, Vivo, Honor and Xiaomi have all increased prices on certain models to offset rising costs.


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Hit from memory costs spreads from phones to EVs as China’s BYD raises driving-tech price

People watch a demonstration of BYD’s self-parking technology during the 2026 Beijing International Automotive Exhibition on April 26, 2026. Photo: Xinhua

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Carmaker explicitly cites sky-high memory costs as it raises the price of a high-end driver-assistance system by 21 per cent


Carmaker explicitly cites sky-high memory costs as it raises the price of a high-end driver-assistance system by 21 per cent.


Hit from memory costs spreads from phones to EVs as China’s BYD raises driving-tech price

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Carmaker explicitly cites sky-high memory costs as it raises the price of a high-end driver-assistance system by 21 per cent

Carmaker explicitly cites sky-high memory costs as it raises the price of a high-end driver-assistance system by 21 per cent