SAIC Volkswagen Takes Orders for the ID. ERA 5S, the First VW Sedan With City Assisted Driving
SAIC Volkswagen began taking deposits for the ID. ERA 5S plug-in hybrid saloon, the first Volkswagen-badged sedan anywhere to offer city-street assisted driving, with limited-time prices from 115,900 yuan.
- 115,900-145,900 yuan
- 4
- 160 km CLTC
- Chengdu Auto Show, 21 August
What Happened
The ID. ERA 5S, a mid-size plug-in hybrid saloon sold in four versions, opened for orders at SAIC Volkswagen on Tuesday. Pre-sale prices run from 119,900 to 149,900 yuan, discounted for a limited period to 115,900 to 145,900 yuan, and putting down 1,000 yuan is worth 5,000 against the price. The formal launch waits for Chengdu, where the motor show opens on 21 August.
The claim attached to the car is that no Volkswagen-badged saloon has previously offered navigation-on-autopilot on city streets. The Xingyun Zhixing system handles motorway and urban assisted driving, automated, valet, remote and cross-floor memory parking, and reverse tracking. Its automatic emergency braking is rated to work up to 140 km/h.
The engineering behind that is not Volkswagen's own. The system is heavily customised from Horizon Robotics' SuperDrive algorithms into what SAIC Volkswagen describes as a Volkswagen-exclusive single-stage end-to-end model. The battery cells come from Rept Battero Energy, and are lithium iron phosphate.
- 160 km CLTC
- More than 2,000 km
- 2.82 litres per 100 km
Power comes from a 1.5-litre engine built for hybrid use, rated at 80 kW, paired with a 130-kW (174 hp) drive motor. The car also feeds 3.5 kW back out for external appliances. At 4,836 mm long on a 2,766 mm wheelbase, it carries a fastback roofline, a closed nose, semi-hidden door handles and, SAIC Volkswagen says, 15 separate aerodynamic measures that bring the drag coefficient to 0.247.
The cabin follows Chinese convention rather than German: a wraparound layout, a 15.6-inch floating 2.5K screen, no physical buttons on the centre console, a 255-colour light strip, voice control co-developed with iFlytek, and a front passenger seat that reclines 145 degrees. It is the second ID. ERA model, after the 9X extended-range SUV.
Why this matters
Volkswagen is not building this capability itself. The driving system is customised from Horizon Robotics' algorithms, which is the German group conceding that in China the software has to come from a Chinese supplier to be competitive at all. Fitting it to a saloon at 115,900 yuan sets the price at which city assisted driving becomes an expectation rather than a luxury.
Terms in This Story
- Urban NOA
- Navigation on autopilot in city traffic: the car follows a route through junctions and lights with the driver supervising, rather than only on motorways.
- End-to-end model
- A driving system where one neural network turns sensor input straight into steering and braking, instead of chaining separate perception and planning modules.
A brief summary; details can be imperfect — always verify against the original source.