奇瑞长安东风集体入局，无人配送是「真风口」还是「新泡沫」？

TL;DR - Chinese unmanned delivery vehicles (Robovans) are shifting from pilot projects to a real commercial vehicle category, as OEMs (Chery, Changan, Dongfeng) and Tier 1 suppliers enter alongside L4 startups. It matters because falling costs and clearer road-rights rules are turning a long-unprofitable segment into a scaling business — with an industry report projecting 860k annual units by 2030 vs ~27k produced/sold in 2025.

• Unit economics flipped: vehicle cost dropped from RMB 200k–400k three years ago to under $10k for Neolix (>50% cut in two years), reusing EV supply-chain parts (domain controllers, LiDAR, batteries, e-drives); per-order delivery cost runs 25–35% below human labor.
• Map-free (无图) L4 is the key scaling lever: HD-map collection cost hundreds of RMB per km and months of per-city onboarding; map-free deployment drops that to near zero. Zhiji/Jiushi (九识) expects cumulative L4 map-free mileage to pass 40,000 km by month-end.
• New OEM–L4 collaboration models: Dongfeng + Jiushi launched the "东风OpenVAN" brand (Jiushi supplies autonomy, Dongfeng handles vehicle definition/manufacturing/sales); White Rhino + Xinyuan are forming a JV to share production investment and commercial risk. Zhixing Tech has shipped ~3,000 domain controllers to Geely Farizon.
• Contested outlook: reliability is claimed at >95% order fulfillment (~90% at peaks), and customers are moving from single-vehicle purchases to fleet operations (Jiushi expects fleet orders to reach ~50% of total by year-end). But some OEMs stall after a few dozen units, and Neolix argues the bigger barrier is the absence of unified deployment, operations, and safety standards across cities — not algorithms.