BYD offers unlimited liability coverage for autonomous driving accidents in China

In May of this year, a Chinese automaker made a bet that no other car manufacturer has been willing to make. BYD announced it would pay for everything—every repair, every medical bill, every dollar of damage to someone else's property—if an accident happened because of its autonomous driving system. No cap. No exclusions. No insurance claims. No finger-pointing at the driver. Just the facts from the car's data logs, and then a check.

The system is called God's Eye, and the promise is radical enough that it deserves to be stated plainly: if the car's artificial intelligence causes a crash, BYD pays for all of it. The company had already been doing this since July 2025 for its fully autonomous parking feature. In August of that year, an owner of a Denza Z9GT—BYD's luxury sub-brand—was using the self-parking function to enter an underground garage when a retractable floor bollard failed to retract. The system didn't detect it. The car's undercarriage scraped against the metal. The owner called BYD's service center in distress, unsure whether the warranty would actually cover the damage. Three BYD technicians arrived, pulled the vehicle's data logs, and delivered an instant verdict: no discussion needed, the repair is free. No insurance claim. No impact on the owner's premium. Done.

Now, as of May 28, 2026, BYD has extended that same model to urban navigation—the God's Eye 5.0 system that handles city driving without the driver's intervention. The parking guarantee is for life. The urban navigation guarantee covers twelve months from delivery for new buyers, or from the moment an existing owner installs the software update. Both assume all financial consequences—vehicle repair, third-party property damage, bodily injury—with no monetary ceiling and zero impact on the driver's insurance record. For now, both are exclusive to China.

When an accident occurs, the owner contacts BYD's service center directly, not an insurance company. BYD sends technicians to inspect the scene and extract the vehicle's internal data, which records nearly every action the system took during the incident. If the data confirms the system was active and at fault due to an algorithm error or sensor failure, BYD covers everything without argument. In multi-vehicle accidents, traffic authorities determine liability first. If BYD's system is found responsible, BYD pays. If the other party is at fault, their insurer pays. There is one condition: if the data shows the driver had manual control when the accident happened, BYD does not pay. The company is essentially wagering that its autonomous driving is safer than human driving.

BYD's chairman, Wang Chuanfu, framed the philosophy behind this move as an act of courage rooted in respect for life, rules, and technology—doing what is difficult but right. The company argues the guarantee works. After launching the parking warranty in July 2025, usage of the intelligent parking feature among God's Eye owners jumped from 21 percent to 93 percent. More usage generates more edge-case data, which feeds back into improving the AI models faster than any competitor unwilling to absorb the liability. BYD now has 3.15 million vehicles actively running its intelligent driving system on Chinese roads, and those vehicles spend more than half their driving time under autonomous control—a 50.91 percent autonomous usage rate. That is an enormous reservoir of real-world data backing a system the company believes in enough to insure unconditionally.

Meanwhile, Tesla has been moving in the opposite direction. The electric vehicle publication Electrek discovered, through multiple affected owners, that Tesla retroactively modified purchase agreements for Full Self-Driving to insert language about supervision that was absent from the original contracts at the time of signing. One owner, Oliver Abcarius, found that Tesla had altered his 2019 Full Self-Driving purchase agreement to add the word "supervised"—a term that never appeared in the original. His wife's 2020 Model Y Full Self-Driving contract is now similarly inaccessible; the links lead to dead pages. Every other document in both accounts opens without problem. These original contracts are fundamental evidence in Tesla's active litigation, valued at $14.5 billion, covering deceptive advertising of Full Self-Driving, liability for autopilot accidents, and securities fraud. When a party in ongoing litigation makes relevant documents unavailable, courts can respond with adverse presumptions, sanctions, or dismissal of the case entirely. Elon Musk himself has confirmed that vehicles produced between 2016 and 2023—the ones with these contracts—are physically incapable of achieving unsupervised full autonomy due to hardware limitations. Tesla has no concrete plan to upgrade them.