There’s a new buzzword in China’s EV industry

• CATL’s co-chairman said EVs in China have gotten a new label: EIV.
• The term stands for “electric intelligent vehicles,” Pan Jian said at a Davos panel on Tuesday.
• China’s EV industry has seen an influx of affordable vehicles like the Xiaomi SU7 which are packed with AI technology.

There’s a new buzzword in China’s electric vehicle industry.

Pan Jian, the co-chairman of battery manufacturer and key Tesla supplier CATL, told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday that China’s automakers were shunning traditional EVs for “EIVs,” or Electric Intelligent Vehicles.

“We actually no longer call it EV. We call it EIV. ‘I’ stands for intelligent,” Pan said at a session moderated by Business Insider editor in chief Jamie Heller. Other speakers included Rio Tinto CEO Jakob Stausholm and South African science minister Bonginkosi Emmanuel “Blade” Nzimande.

Pan said the reason China’s EV market is booming is because there’s a “perfect marriage between E and I.”

“E enables I, so that offers a whole suite of new features to consumers, which cannot be offered with traditional combustion engine cars,” he said.

A spokesperson for CATL said that the term “EIV” was not yet widespread in China, but was growing in popularity.

China’s booming EV market has seen an influx of affordable models that are packed with high-tech extras in recent years.

Smartphone maker Xiaomi rolled out its $30,000 SU7 sedan, which comes with advanced autonomous driving features and voice recognition that allows drivers to control household appliances from their car, in March, while EV startup Xpeng described its $26,000 P7+ electric car, which released in November, as the world’s first “AI-defined” vehicle.

Not to be outdone, other automakers have invested heavily in intelligent technology, with Tesla rival BYD announcing last January it would spend $14 billion on AI and self-driving technology for its vehicles.

Zoe Zhang, an analyst at energy consultancy Rho Motion, told BI the term “EIV” had become broadly common in China, as automakers battle to stay relevant in the country’s brutally competitive EV market by offering more advanced cockpit systems and software.

“I think more and more, the car manufacturers are going to be really competing over the user experience,” said Zhang.

She said that Chinese automakers are investing heavily in making their EVs more intelligent and building their own hardware, such as chips.

“It’s easier to incorporate those intelligent functions on EVs than traditional combustion engine vehicles because of the chips,” Zhang said, adding that this was one of the reasons Chinese consumer electronics companies like Xiaomi and Huawei have pivoted into EVs.

Speaking at Davos, CATL co-chairman Pan also hailed China’s talent pool of software engineers, nurtured by homegrown companies like Xiaomi, Alibaba, and Tencent, saying it has given China’s EV industry an edge.

His comments come as EV sales in China are set to rise 20% this year to more than 12 million, outpacing conventional car sales for the first time.