2026: Smart Driving Focus Shifts to World Understanding Beyond End-to-End Architectures

In 2024, the intelligent driving industry saw a mainstream shift toward "end-to-end" architectures, replacing traditional modular approaches. Integrating perception, planning, and control into a single neural network is widely regarded as key to achieving advanced intelligent driving capabilities. By mid-2026, however, merely adopting an end-to-end architecture will no longer confer a competitive edge; industry focus will instead turn to how to more effectively enable understanding of the physical world on top of end-to-end frameworks.