Single-frame surround-view reconstruction faces severe geometric instability and rendering artifacts due to minimal inter-camera overlap. While existing methods rely on complex decoders or auxiliary cues, they remain bottlenecked by the weak geometric capacity of upstream features. We argue that leveraging pretrained visual geometry priors strengthens upstream representations and alleviates the geometric ambiguity in sparse surround views. To this end, we propose VGGD, a visual geometry foundation-aware 3D Gaussian Splatting framework for feed-forward surround-view driving reconstruction, which shifts geometric modeling to the frontend and adapts foundation priors to the driving camera setting. First, VGGD leverages VGGT to provide transferable multi-view geometric prior tokens. Next, we introduce a Dual-Path Neck to decouple geometry-consistent and appearance-aware representations, improving appearance completion in weakly observed regions. We further apply Scale Warmup to stabilize early geometry learning and suppress scale drift under ego-pose changes. Finally, we use a hybrid pixel--volume Gaussian decoder to produce a renderable 3D Gaussian scene for novel-view synthesis. Experiments on the nuScenes single-frame benchmark show that VGGD achieves the best overall rendering quality among the compared methods and improves relative geometric consistency.
Dense 3D reconstruction has demonstrated immense potential for spatial understanding, yet its viability as a real-time, onboard representation for autonomous driving remains an open challenge. Existing large-scale visual geometry models typically require substantial computational resources and lack the long-range geometric fidelity, surround-view consistency, and real-time efficiency demanded by dynamic driving environments. To bridge this gap, we present \textbf{LiAuto-GeoX}, an efficient grounded driving transformer designed for deployable, ego-centric 3D scene understanding. Our approach begins by learning a high-capacity driving geometry model from large-scale surround-view data, utilizing sparse LiDAR priors to provide robust geometric grounding in distant, ambiguous, or structure-sparse regions. We then instantiate this capability into a highly compact 155M-parameter onboard model through a novel geometry-preserving distillation framework. This framework employs mask-guided depth-aware distillation to retain fine-grained metric structures by emphasizing geometrically informative regions, and relative-pose relational distillation to enforce cross-view spatial consistency through pose-induced geometric relations. Extensive evaluations reveal that \textbf{LiAuto-GeoX} runs at 220 FPS on KITTI while maintaining high-fidelity dense reconstruction, enabling real-time deployment. The learned geometry transfers seamlessly to downstream autonomy tasks, achieving 90.6 PDMS in trajectory prediction, 24.63 mIoU in occupancy prediction, and 47.67 IoU in future-frame prediction. These all demonstrate that efficient dense 3D reconstruction can transcend its traditional role as a perception target to serve as a scalable, foundational geometric representation for next-generation autonomous driving.