China’s goverment wants to be a global leader in emerging technologies and has identified robotaxi’s and autonomous driving as a key target.
The top robotaxi and autonomous vehicle companies in China are:
AutoX
Baidu Apollo
Didi Chuxing
Pony.ai
WeRide.
Baidu Apollo seems to be a world leader with more rides given and miles driven than Waymo (Google backed US leader in robotaxi).
Apollo, AutoX, Pony.ai, Didi and WeRide each have hundreds of robotaxi vehicles and operate in 10 to 25 cities in 2024 and could be up to 65 cities in 2025. Apollo, Didi, AutoX and Pony.ai could have thousands of robotaxi in 2025. Apollo is targeting to become profitable in 2025.
Dozens of cities have been granted licenses for pilot zones for some forms of autonomous vehicle. In December 2023, China’s first national regulations on commercial operation of autonomous vehicles went into effect. Roboshuttles or robotrucks still need to have in-car safety operators, while robotaxis can use remote operators. The ratio of robotaxis to remote operators cannot exceed 3:1, and operators need to pass certain skill tests. There are also rules specifying what data the companies need to report when accidents happen.
Robin Li, co-founder and CEO of Baidu, said Baidu Apollo Go aims to expand services on its autonomous ride-hailing platform Apollo Go to 65 cities in 2025, and to 100 cities in 2030. They plan to deploy tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles across China. They are moving toward a future where taking a robotaxi will be half the cost of taking a cab today.
By April, 2024, Baidu Apollo had accumulated over 100 million kilometers (60 million miles) of autonomous driving distance without major accidents. The sixth-generation Apollo Go self-driving vehicle, costing 60% less than its predecessor, will see its first batch deployed in Wuhan immediately, with a fleet of 1,000 units expected by the end of 2024.
Apollo benefits from access to Baidu’s vast stores of search queries, images, video, and positioning data, which provide crucial training for its AI to confront myriad situations on the road. Baidu also produces various hardware parts for its AVs, including devices to collect and process data crucial to autonomous driving. In March of 2022, Apollo announced it had hit 25 million kilometers (15.5 million miles) of test driving, and it blew the competition out of the water in rankings for most test driving done in Beijing from 2018 to 2020.
Apollo Go currently covers more than 10 cities in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou and Shenzhen in Guangdong.
BloombergNEF’s 2022 Electric Vehicle Outlook said China will operate the world’s largest robotaxi fleet with some 12 million autonomous vehicles by 2040, followed by the US, with about 7 million such vehicles.
Other Chinese tech companies, such as Pony.ai, WeRide and Didi Autonomous Driving, the self-driving technology arm of Didi Global, are stepping up efforts to launch self-driving taxi services.
Go to Nextbigfuture at substack for the rest of the in depth coverage of China’s robotaxi industry.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts.? He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Maybe so, maybe so. What could go wrong with a Chinese-made, Chinese AI-powered, Chinese alt-GPS, Chinese alt-WiFi enabled car, posing as a rational actor for wide roll-out across the easily duped countries of the world? What could go wrong.
The ultimate infestation of rather alarmingly easy-to-re-program vehicles, with potential nefarious actions ranging from quite smart to boorishly dumb. Robotaxis drive across bridge (obviously at peak commute) and rapidly arrange to cluster, then all decide to stop across all lanes. (Boorishly dumb.)
No one will be amused. Except the perps.
Makes take-over of American freeways by [fill in the blank … pro-Paleolithians, pro-BLMers, pro-Environmentalistas, pro-neurodivergentesque drag queens, …] look positively ante-Diluvian. Chains, superglue, cans of soup, bright festive baggies of suspicious powder, not needed. 25 cars, stopped up like a wall of dead bricks.
And NO DRIVER! Like your smartphone that “bricks” with its own whims as a cautionary guide, the 25 commuter bridge bricks ain’t going to be restarted WITHOUT “permission” from the perp-group.
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As I said, that case is “boorishly dumb” as an example. There are no end of gambits that one can imagine along similar lines, basically “DoS attacks” … being picked up by da Taxi, but delivered to middle of nowwhere. Or middle of “the hood”, for a custom-delivered robbery. Or never picked up at all, but taking your cash anyway, with a synthesized GPS track recording showing you (weren’t) actually picked up and delivered.
Oh, the fun goes on and on. A whole bunch of the robo-taxis deciding on cue to jam-up the causeways to airports on Christmas and New Year’s. The possibilities are immense. Running unwary drivers off the road. Deciding to drive against traffic, opposite lanes. Crashing into pedestrians while walking. Running delivery trucks off the road. MAYHEM.
And we want these? What about the ARMIES of insanely poor taxi/über/lyft drivers who have the microscopic income axed? How do they feel about all this? Methinks … “not so enthusiastic”.
I DARE NOT list the four score and seven sophisticated attacks I’ve thought through. Let us just say … NO ONE would want them to happen. Yet and still, with relatively modest time-and-money investment, they could be hacked into place.
?-?-? Just saying, ?-?-?
?-=≡ GoatGuy ? ≡=-?
You’re actually downplaying how bad an idea importing Chinese self driving vehicles would be.
A lot of people just haven’t internalized the situation: China isn’t just an economic competitor: They’re a hostile totalitarian state, which could at any unpredictable time launch a military attack on nations we’re committed to defending. And the first notice we’re likely to get of that will be nation-wide power outages as critical transformers get shot out.
Importing at our own expense hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of what amount to huge remote controlled drones with incendiary batteries is a cosmically bad idea.
#:-{|>
A totalitarian state is, of course, perfectly capable of deciding that self-driving cars are better than manually driven cars. After all, you decide to arrest somebody, the next time they get in a car it drives them straight to the police; Very handy! And it keeps track of everywhere they go, also handy in a totalitarian state. And they don’t have to worry about the accidents, either, because, hey, they’re just expendable proles anyway, you can just tell their relatives and friends to go pound sand.
They actually have to work quite a bit better to get accepted in a free society, and a free society is going to be a bit dubious about the police state utility aspects. Though in practice most tech manufacturers are going all in on the police state utility front without even being forced to.
If generative AIs have yet to show up in the nations’ GDP, robo-trucks and self driving taxis are GDP altering technology, where the bots are directly put to work on something people use to generate riches.
The USA and Europe are putting stiff tariffs to Chinese cars nowadays, to protect their internal markets from being taken over by dumping practices.
But anywhere else without an internal market to protect, these cars can soon change the landscape and make the world a much more sci-fi looking one.
see my main level comment
Oh yeah, the “sci-fi-like” part isn’t necessarily a compliment.
Putting your roads and economic machinery in the hands of a few Chinese companies, easily swayed by the PRC whims, doesn’t strike me as a particularly good idea, but let’s notice, many countries are betting their future in Chinese investment already.
In Africa, China is taking over lots of the decaying or non extisting infrastructure. At a price. Usually paid in sovereignty and dependency.
Of course. But who cares?
Calling China a totalitarian state is simplistic; as a heavily fascist system with a Fortune-500 company-type hierarchy, they are simply embracing a utilitarian, efficient method of labor and capital execution. I am a huge believer in the concept of: “…every People get the government they deserve…” They are a state such as they are because authority, hierarchy, and productivity are fundamental to the value system within each family, community, and region – which of course perpetuates itself in each member of each generation – sort of brainwashing, sort of history. Unlike the US, UK, Canada, Australia value systems of individualism, entrepreneurialism, and productivity, which naturally encourages pro-growth democracy.
All else? meh. Feudal. Tribal. Post-industrial rural/town systems within loose geo-political boundaries. These other countries below the G7 have such a low productivity, modern innovation-, and socio-economic-ambition system, that it may take the ‘tough love’ aspect of China to provide any kind of development boost – western style ‘invest/ educate/ partner/ globalize from US home base’ has obviously failed and the chance of these places developing peacefully with or without outside tech is deteriorating. I welcome China’s attempt to ‘bootcamp’ them; chinese tech doesn’t make them chinese vassals; though disobediance may have its penalties.
Anyway, let the ‘developing’ world have Chinese tech; and certainly restrict such vehicle AI/ network/ chip-based tech into all G7/ NATO countries. People in rich countries will simply have to embrace the EV (hopefully hybrid) and networked tech developed internally – as it will always be more reliable; if likely not as cheap. I doubt that Level 4 and similar type of autonomy will really ‘catch on’ in daily usage by regular people acting regularily. Parking assist with highway speed/ lane management is likely about the max that would be ‘standard’ throughout — though, I do personally wish that communities would privately partner with AI/FSD companies to provide ‘autonomous routes’ within urban areas to get you within the last mile of your destination from a highway or other artery with as little driver attention as possible.
Wow, talk about white washing a government that runs slave labor camps and commits genocide. No, China actually IS a totalitarian state.