GUANGZHOU, China, Jan. 27, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- WeRide (NASDAQ: WRD, HKEX: 0800), a global leader in autonomous driving technology, today announced the launch of WeRide GENESIS1, its proprietary general-purpose simulation model. WeRide GENESIS bridges physical AI and generative AI, connecting the real and simulated worlds to accelerate the development, training, and validation of autonomous vehicles (AVs) at scale.
Leveraging generative AI, WeRide GENESIS can rapidly generate highly realistic virtual worlds, building simulated cities within minutes and accurately reproducing rare, extreme real-world driving scenarios that are difficult to capture on actual roads. This enables AVs to undergo large-scale training and validation in simulation. Insights generated are continuously fed back into real-world operations – significantly enhancing AV performance in complex scenarios, speeding up iteration cycles, and reducing time and cost compared to traditional road testing.
WeRide GENESIS was developed to address the challenges of commercializing autonomous driving on a global scale. Cities differ greatly in road networks, traffic behaviors, infrastructure, weather conditions, and regulatory environments, placing greater demands on the generalization capabilities of autonomous driving technology. However, real-world testing is costly, slow, and limited in scenario coverage, making large-scale validation across multiple cities and conditions extremely difficult. A high-fidelity simulation platform capable of fully replicating real-world environments has therefore become indispensable.
Such simulation platforms allow AVs to "drive" in virtual cities, exposing AI drivers to diverse road, weather, and traffic scenarios – including rare and high-risk events. This overcomes the cost and coverage constraints of real-world testing, improves training efficiency, and ensures AVs are safer and more reliable on real roads.
As one of the industry's most advanced autonomous driving simulation platforms, WeRide GENESIS integrates four core AI modules – AI Scenarios, AI Agents, AI Metrics, and AI Diagnosis – to handle any driving scenario, create virtual worlds in minutes, and replicate real-world conditions with centimeter-level fidelity. This provides powerful support for the training, validation, and iteration of autonomous driving algorithms.