To find China’s best driverless technology, look in Silicon Valley
CHINA’S home-grown search giant, much like its US counterpart, has a division focused entirely on driverless vehicles. And just like its rival, Google-born Waymo, both efforts are based in Silicon Valley.
It’s not only Baidu with a toehold in Northern California. China’s self- driving startups are sprouting major R& D outposts 6,000 miles from Beijing. China’s congested megacities may have a need for self- driving cars, but the expertise is elsewhere.
Just ask Pony.ai founders James Peng and Tiancheng Lou. When they decided over a drink in Beijing three years ago that it was time to leave Baidu’s selfdriving car unit, the plan was always to start in California. “Silicon Valley is definitely the place to be,” Peng said in an interview. “That’s where all the talent is. China has a lot of raw talent, but with hardcore artificial intelligence, it takes years to build up. China has work to do.”
Baidu recognised this fact back in 2014 when it created an office in Sunnyvale, California, with 200 engineers and scientists working on A.I. and self- driving software. The tech giant said it’s currently adding 150 more people in a second facility in the same town. That research hub has been an overseas incubator for Chinese programmers and engineers, many of whom gain skills from US institutions and colleagues before returning to China. But some leave Baidu and launch startups such as Pony and two other Chinese-backed selfdriving firms, Roadstar.ai and Jingchi.ai, while poaching from elite US tech companies.
The push into self- driving cars is part of China President Xi’s mission to make dominance in artificial intelligence a pillar of the country’s economic future. To get there, however, many of China’s biggest tech giants and most interesting startups need Silicon Valley’s knowledge. Engineers working in theUSsome Chinese visa holders who went overseas for degrees, some American hires-are a major part of China’s push to develop autonomous vehicles. Didi Chuxing, the ride-hailing giant that pushed Uber out of China, also keeps most of its driverless research in the US
New tariffs imposed by the US have come with a threat to block any company with 25 per cent Chinese ownership from buying any American company that makes “industrially significant technology.” But the transPacific nature of these driverless efforts makes President Donald Trump’s push to wall off American technology difficult, if not impossible.
Trump has also made intellectual property a trade issue, and US companies worry about theft. In July, US federal prosecutors accused former Apple engineer Zhang Xiaolang of downloading files containing proprietary information on driverless cars and selling it to a Chinese startup.
Regardless of Trump’s concerns, the Chinese tech companies are already here. Even if the Trump administration succeeds in stopping deals, it won’t prevent Chinese companies from hiring data scientists, software engineers and technical leaders from the likes of Alphabet Inc., Tesla Inc., and other major players in the driverless field. Qing Lu, the chief financial officer of Jingchi, came from Velodyne Lidar. Liang Heng, Roadstar’s chief technical officer, worked at Google and Tesla.
Peng started Pony two years ago with about 20 people in Fremont, near Tesla’s car factory, and now has more than 100 engineers working on cars that drive themselves. He has raised US$ 214 million from investors in both the US and China, with the latest being led by China-based ClearVue Partners and Eight
Silicon Valley is definitely the place to be. That’s where all the talent is. China has a lot of raw talent, but with hardcore artificial intelligence, it takes years to build up. China has work to do. James Peng , Pony.ai founder
Roads Ventures, an offshoot of Fidelity Management.
The company’s test cars can navigate traffic and drive at highway speeds. Those cars have been on public roads thanks to superior testing conditions found in the US China until very recently had a strict ban on driverless test vehicles. Next year, Peng said, Pony will deploy a test fleet of robotaxis in Guangzhou-about the same time General Motors plans to start a driverless ride-hailing business, most likely in San Francisco. Pony plans to deploy the technology commercially, in either ride-hailing or delivery fleets, within three to five years.
Peng exemplifies the way China’s tech leaders come into their own through contact with US institutions and employers. After an education in both China and the US, he worked for seven years at Google as a software engineer developing big data applications and artificial intelligence. He was lured away in 2012 by Baidu, where he led its autonomous-vehicle project in Sunnyvale. That’s where he met Pony co-founder Lou, who worked to develop self- driving cars at Google before the formation of the Waymo autonomous unit.
“I was always fascinated by cars and mechanical things,” Peng said. “The potential really fascinated me.”
Roadstar had a similar path. Founder Xianqiao Tong is a Chinese engineer who got started in autonomy by working on Nvidia’s driver assistance systems and then at Apple before joining Baidu.
To lure more talent, Tong set up a large R& D centre in Cupertino, where Apple is based, and gave that office responsibility for self- driving tech. Roadstar is targeting 2020 to deploy thousands of robotaxis in Guangzhou, Tong said in an interview. The cars will be able to drive in Level 4, which means they will be fully autonomous within a mapped- out area.
“The Chinese startups are spending money to hire talent and they are attracting top talent,” said Grayson Brulte, cofounder of autonomous vehicle consulting firm Brulte & Co. “By setting up in Silicon Valley, they are getting the knowledge that they don’t have and they can export it back home.”
Roadstar is working with Renovo. auto, a Silicon Valley company that creates the operating system for self- driving cars, to connect its software to lidar, cameras and other sensors, said Renovo CEO Christopher Heiser. The operating system takes what the hardware sees and sends it to Roadstar’s computer brain, which then drives the car. Renovo can also connect Roadstar’s cars to mapping systems and even to a ride-hailing system like Uber or Lyft.
The idea is that even if Roadstar is starting out far behind American tech leaders such as GM’s Cruise or Waymo, the partnership with Renovo could speed up deployment. Roadstar, Heiser said, “learned a great deal working on AV tech in the Valley and have now built an international company that combines Chinese and Silicon Valley features.”