Smart Driving Ladder, July 2026: Fulwin T9L Ends Bosch–WeRide's Six-Peat as the ADAS War Moves Downmarket

The July edition of D1EV's smart-driving ladder closes one era and opens another. On July 19 in Kunming, a roughly RMB150,000 Chery Fulwin T9L beat the Bosch–WeRide entry, which had strung together six straight competition wins between late 2025 and mid-2026 aboard Exeed's Star Era cars — a longer run than XPeng's five titles or Jiyue's three-in-a-row before it. The editorial team reads the upset as a turning point: China's ADAS race is shifting from lean single-stage onboard models to multimodal large models, and city NOA is set to take off in the RMB100,000 class.

The numbers behind the shift: growth in China's RMB200,000-plus passenger-car segment has cooled from +14.1% in 2023 to a 4% contraction in the first half of 2026, and the traditional luxury six (Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, Cadillac, Lexus, Volvo) have ceded that bracket to a seven-brand cohort the site dubs the "Seven Little Fortunes" — Tesla, Xiaomi, Li Auto, AITO, Nio, Zeekr and XPeng — who sold about 1.2 million units there in H1 against 880,000 for the incumbents. City NOA reached 1.802 million installations in H1, a 20.9% penetration rate, but uptake is lopsided: 47.1% above RMB200,000 versus 7.6% in the RMB100,000–200,000 band and just 1.6% below RMB100,000. With roughly 13 million sub-RMB200,000 cars sold annually, the outlet frames the coming three-year fight for that market as the decisive battle of the physical-AI era, with hit-model sales share the metric to watch.

On the leaderboard itself, compiled from 42 July tests under the V8.4 scoring rules, Bosch–WeRide still leads at 101.79 despite a 2.04-point dip, ahead of Horizon Robotics (99.99) and Huawei's Qiankun ADS (97.65). Momenta rose two spots to fourth (89.69), and Nio was the only player to improve on both score and rank, jumping four places to sixth at 87.76. Zeekr's Qianli Haohan slid to fifth, XPeng fell from fifth to seventh, DeepRoute ranked eighth, Xiaomi ninth, and Li Auto collapsed 7.51 points to last place; Zhuoyu (DJI Automotive) sits on an auxiliary list at 84.92 pending another competition entry. With high January scores aging out and dragging most averages down, this was the final transition-period edition.

Looking ahead, the outlet counts 12 players currently at the table — seven third-party suppliers plus five carmakers running full in-house stacks — with Changan, Leapmotor, BYD, Chery and GAC expected to field self-developed systems within the year, swelling the field to 18, more than the market can sustain. Leapmotor, whose D19 (from RMB219,800) quietly cleared 10,000 monthly sales in July, is flagged as the most plausible newcomer to the top tier.