China’s national broadcaster does not usually crack open the electronic guts of an unreleased flagship SUV on prime time, and it certainly does not do it for a marque less than a year old. That is exactly what happened on July 2, 2026, when CCTV’s “Chaofan Yibu” special turned the Dongfeng-Yijing X9 into a live studio subject and, in the process, gave Huawei’s next-generation Qiankun ADS 5 stack its first public production airing. A day later Yijing confirmed the X9 will open pre-sales inside Q3 2026 and start customer deliveries before year-end, with the Chengdu Auto Show in September set as the mass public reveal.
Key Highlights From the CCTV Reveal
ADS 5 arrives as a hardware step, not an over-the-air upgrade. The Yijing X9 is the first production vehicle to carry the industry’s first 896-line dual-path image-grade LiDAR — a 4.6x jump on Huawei’s previous 192-line unit, running two parallel receive paths that push pedestrian-scale detection out to 400 metres. Behind that sit a 4D distributed millimetre-wave radar array, a next-generation MDC compute board and Huawei’s WEWA 2.0 world-engine backed by 60 EFLOPS of cloud training capacity. On the vehicle side, Yijing wraps the whole package in a six-domain “Tianqiong Shield” safety architecture — 2,400 MPa hot-stamped B-pillars, a triple-layer battery armour cassette with aerospace-grade aerogel and a supercapacitor circuit that keeps the doors unlockable for ten minutes after a 12-volt failure.
Why It Matters for China’s L3 Timeline
Huawei SVP and Yinwang CEO Jin Yuzhi framed the segment as the moment Qiankun leaves the rule-based era: “ADS 5 marks the leap from rule-driven to data-and-AI-agent-driven autonomy. Future co-development will target L3 and L4 platforms.” The three dark-drive test scenarios CCTV ran — 120 km/h anti-glare with a 14 cm floor obstacle, a 100 m rain-fog corridor and an unmapped indoor-warehouse RCA loop with zero takeovers — bracket capabilities most current camera-only stacks cannot deliver in production. For deeper background on the Jing Mode joint-venture template, the sensor teardown and the full three-scenario transcript, iEVChina’s original ADS 5 debut coverage walks through the specs and the on-air remarks in detail.
What’s Next: Pre-Sale, Pricing Band and the L3 OTA
Yijing has locked pre-sale for Q3 with delivery before December. Pricing is still officially undisclosed, but the segment reference set — AITO M9 at RMB 469,800 to 569,800 and Li Auto L9 at RMB 409,800 to 459,800 — combined with the 896-line LiDAR and 2,400 MPa steel bill of materials points to a top ADS 5 Ultra trim above RMB 500,000, with lower Max trims likely opening around RMB 400,000. The bigger read-through is regulatory: with WM/8 amendment expected to clear by end of 2026, the ADS 5 hardware stack is positioned to receive its private-vehicle L3 OTA in Q1 2027 — a launch schedule made possible only because the sensor package on the X9 is already hardware-ready today.
Edited for madeinchinanews.com.
Source: auto.ifeng.com / chejiahao.autohome.com.cn / hao.yiche.com
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