Huawei Steps Back From Aito, and Owners Are Already Worried About What’s Next

HIMA is Huawei’s alliance of car brands built around its software and smart driving technology, and it currently covers five brands, each built with a different Chinese automaker. Aito, built together with Seres Auto, is the oldest and best selling of the five, and until now Huawei was firmly in charge of it, the same way it leads Luxeed with Chery, Stelato with BAIC BluePark, Maextro with JAC and Shangjie with SAIC.

That’s just changed for Aito. Huawei has handed day to day control of the brand to Seres Auto, and according to CarNewsChina, Seres now handles Aito’s product development, design, manufacturing, marketing, sales and after sales, while Huawei steps back into a supporting tech provider role. HIMA insists Aito stays a member of the alliance and that customer benefits and after sales services are unaffected. Aito owners in China aren’t fully convinced, and they’re reacting with a mix of mockery and genuine worry.

What Actually Changed Inside HIMA

Aito becomes the outlier among HIMA’s five brands, the only one where Huawei has stepped into a supporting role instead of leading.

According to Caixin Global, Seres posted a net loss of €217 million (1.7 billion yuan) in the first half of 2026, a reversal from a €370 million (2.9 billion yuan) profit a year earlier, with revenue down 7.9 percent. Chinese outlet Che Shi Du Ping reported that Huawei had been taking a cut of around €6,400 (50,000 yuan) from every Aito sold under the old deal, which CarNewsChina calculated at up to 22 percent of the transaction price. Seres’s numbers explain why it pushed for a bigger share of control.

The Risk in Software Defined EVs

Modern EVs are defined by software more than hardware, and when an automaker leans on an outside partner for that software, its cars are only as reliable as the partnership behind them. Renault found this out in 2013, when battery swap company Better Place collapsed and its cars lost access to charging and management systems overnight, forcing Renault to shut down a production line in Turkey. Fisker owners faced a similar scare after its 2024 bankruptcy, when thousands of SUVs risked losing software support for good. Chinese automaker WM Motor’s bankruptcy left its customers without updates too. None of these are edge cases anymore, and I covered how declining dependability now tracks software problems more than mechanical ones in my look at JD Power’s 2026 dependability study.

To be fair, that’s not what’s happening to Aito right now. Huawei says it’s staying on as a tech provider, and HIMA says after sales support continues as before. But the anxiety among owners isn’t irrational. A car brand’s product, marketing, sales and support used to sit under one roof at Aito, and now they’re split between two companies, with the one that used to lead reduced to a subcontractor. If a future renegotiation goes worse than this one, owners could be dealing with real software problems, not just a punchline. Volkswagen and Xpeng have built a similar dependency in Europe, where VW’s own software leans on its Chinese partner, as I wrote in my piece on their autonomous software strategy. If either side’s priorities shift, that arrangement faces the same kind of test.

Owners Are Rebadging Their Own Cars as a Joke

Owners on Weibo started swapping their Aito badges for those of DFSK, a budget micro EV and van brand under the Seres group. It’s a self deprecating trend, mocking Aito’s fall from what one post called HIMA’s crown prince to a lowly Dongfeng commoner. One Aito M7 owner who paid over €38,300 (300,000 yuan) for his car said the price no longer matches what Seres alone can back. He compared Aito’s outlook to Neta Auto, a brand that collapsed.

The alliance was built to let automakers borrow software and brand power they couldn’t build alone. Aito’s case shows what happens when that borrowing arrangement gets renegotiated. Owners worried about being left stranded before anything actually changed, which says something about how fragile buyer trust really is. I’ll update this article if Seres’s new control leads to any real changes in software support.

Featured Image: Aito