BYD eats the crash bill

When BYD added a liability guarantee to its self-parking feature last year, the share of owners who actually let the car park itself jumped from 21 percent to 93 percent, by the company's own count. The tech hadn't changed. What changed was who owned the consequences if it went wrong.

People don't avoid self-driving because they distrust the car. They avoid owning the crash.

Now BYD has extended that promise to city driving. For one year after delivery, it says it will cover repairs, third-party property damage, and personal injury from any at-fault accident that occurs while God's Eye is active and used as intended — with no payout cap, paid by BYD rather than an insurer. The same capability sells for about US$1,770 against roughly US$9,400 for Tesla's assisted driving in China, where Tesla's terms still read that the driver is responsible for the car at all times, FSD on or not.

The lesson buried in the parking numbers is the real news: the thing keeping people from handing the car the wheel was never doubt about the driving. It was the crash bill. Remove the financial risk and usage flips overnight — a faster adoption lever than any model improvement. BYD can afford the bet because its three-million-car fleet already feeds back up to 200 million kilometres of driving data a day, the kind of flywheel Tesla once claimed as its own moat, now running at comparable scale by a rival that also undercuts it five to one.