A Week With Li Auto's Smart Driving 9.1: First Signs of a 'Brain,' but the Big Reveal Is Still Pending

After a year of teasing a VLA architecture, an in-house 'Mach' chip and embodied intelligence, Li Auto's latest driver-assist software finally shows behavior the author describes as observing, reasoning and then acting.

For roughly a year, Li Auto has been drip-feeding teasers about its driver-assistance ambitions — a VLA (vision-language-action) approach, an in-house chip referred to as 'Mach,' and forays into embodied intelligence. That steady buildup left many wondering what the promised breakthrough would actually look like.

To find out, the author spent a week putting the system through in-depth testing. The verdict: version 9.1 of Li Auto's smart-driving software feels qualitatively different from earlier iterations, behaving less like a bundle of pre-programmed reflexes and more like a system with a 'brain' — one that, in the writer's analogy, learns the way a toddler does, by watching, listening, touching and mimicking its surroundings.

On that reading, the software's decision-making has shifted in character: rather than simply reacting on instinct, it now appears to take in what is around it, work through each situation, and only then commit to an action. Even so, the piece frames 9.1 as a first taste of the 'big move' Li Auto has been holding back — not the full reveal.