• Both Geely and Voyah have announced that they are integrating DeepSeek AI into their own connected car and AI efforts.
• Geely will use DeepSeek to help train and refine its own AI efforts.
• Voyah says the Courage EV crossover will gain DeepSeek integration via an over-the-air update on Feb 14.

AI is a hot-button topic, especially in the automotive industry. As time marches forward, it seems like we’re all shifting from software-driven EVs, to shoehorning AI into every nook and cranny. Will it work? Who knows. But, the world’s latest low-cost AI Chinese darling, DeepSeek, is fastly ingratiating itself with China’s auto companies. This week, two different companies announced their efforts to add AI tech to their vehicles.

First up is Geely. Parent company to brands like Zeekr, Polestar and Volvo, the brand announced during CES that it was embarking on what it called a “Full-Domain AI for Smart Vehicles. At the time, this was to be understood as Geely’s own internal model. Geely’s AI would span much of the driving experience, from voice commands to putting in the groundwork for fully autonomous driving or furthering its research and development in the vehicles themselves. Geely says that its “ultimate goal is to create a native Autonomous Intelligence for Mobility that is warm, empathetic and continuously evolving.”

Marketing jargon aside, the company is now looking outside of its walls to improve its AI aspirations. Geely is combining its own model with Deepseek R1, via distillation training. Effectively, DeepSeek is training Geely’s own AI and refining it. This dataset training its own AI efforts will help the car to understand speech and commands better. All of this stuff will find its way onto Geely’s next generation of smart connected cars.

Geely isn’t the only one integrating Deepseek into its vehicles, either. Dongfeng’s Voyah brand announced that the Courage EV crossover and Dream MPV will be the first mass-produced vehicles ever to have the AI tool integrated into their software. According to reporting from CnEVPost, Deepseek will first be ported to the Courage via an over-the-air update on Feb 14. In this context, Deepseek will integrate into Voyah’s existing smart cockpit software and will improve the “AI responsiveness, accuracy and expandability” of the stuff that’s already there. It also will enable Voyah to rapidly improve its software and cater better to its vehicles and clientele. 

No doubt, this is very impressive, even if the utility for AI integration in-vehicle systems is still a little suspect. It’s only been a few weeks since the dirt-cheap, but very good model put AI giant OpenAI on notice, and yet it is already making its way into China’s car industry. This is part of the lockstep, move-in-unison front I briefly touched on when I went to China last April. China’s tech companies and automotive companies are highly collaborative in ways that go beyond just, say, integrating Apple Carplay or Android Automotive. 

However, this does beg a question: are these brands scaling back their global aspirations? DeepSeek has attracted the ire of Silicon Valley and the U.S. government. Some say that a ban on the technology is coming soon, which would make any EV product that uses it a non-starter. For brands like Voyah, which doesn’t have much of a presence outside of China anyway, this isn’t such a big deal. But for Geely, which owns Volvo and Polestar, there likely will need to be some serious separation in order to avoid drawing fire from the Trump Administration. Geely has kept most of Volvo and Polestar’s software development away from the rest of the Geely group, but that lack of collaboration on software will likely end up being a pinch point for the two brands that assuredly want to continue selling cars in the U.S.

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