Mercedes-Benz is putting ByteDance’s AI chatbot Doubao in China-market models. The partnership between the automaker and TikTok’s parent company is an effort by MB to catch up as quickly as possible to Chinese OEMs in Chinese-market in-car tech offerings.
Initially, the interaction between driver and car is to be improved in the new CLA, an electric car specially developed for China and due to be launched this fall. Other models could follow later.
It’s said that 96.2 per cent of Chinese people would already use Doubao from ByteDance, DeepSeek or Yuanbao from Tencent, according to a recent report by the Tencent Research Institute. 67.7 per cent of respondents in a recent survey stated that they do this on a daily basis. There is hardly a situation in life in which the Chinese do not quickly “just ask Doubao” or “just ask Deepseek” on their smartphone. In third place in this ranking is Yuanbao from Tencent.
The partnership also gives Mercedes-Benz improved access to Bytedance content ecosystems in cars, with portals such as Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), the news platform Jinri Toutiao, and “Xigua” (watermelon), another popular video platform.
All of this is accessible to drivers via a well-functioning voice control system, just like on many Chinese cell phones. In China, hardly anyone types on their phone anymore because it is so much faster to speak.
The AI is also intended to help the smart cockpit in German luxury sedans to gradually improve, i.e. to learn the driver’s usage habits and become increasingly helpful. The AI agent can also recognize and adapt to the driver’s four emotional moods, as well as distinguish between language dialects (it is not known whether it can already speak Swabian).
Mercedes-Benz has a lot riding on such technology partnerships in China. In the world’s largest car market, Chinese carmakers are already so far ahead of their foreign competitors, first in terms of electrification and now also in terms of intelligence, that a completely new understanding of luxury is spreading and sales of the German premium manufacturers Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi are increasingly crumbling.
