Chinese firms floor the pedal in driverless car race
A clutch of Chinese startups are accelerating efforts to get autonomous vehicles onto roads in the world’s biggest auto market, a country their American peers from Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo to General Motors Co.’s Cruise may find tough to crack.
Roadstar.ai is testing electric self-driving cars in the southern metropolis of Shenzhen and hopes to get 1,500 of them into the business districts of major cities by 2020. Sequoia Capital-backed Pony.ai plans to deploy a fleet of at least 20 self-driving vehicles for public ride-hailing services in Guangzhou as soon as next year, co-founder James Peng said in a recent interview. And Daimler-backed Momenta just inked a contract with the government of eastern Suzhou to deploy a selfdriving fleet in the city within the year and open the service to citizens “at a suitable time.”
They join the likes of Baidu Inc. and NIO in taking advantage of local governments’ eagerness to open their city streets to testing, as each vie to become a nexus for developing future mobility. They’re making up for lost time and a deficit of crucial data but have two advantages: a government keen on seeing 30 million driverless vehicles on roads within a decade, and a base of 300 million-plus drivers.
“It remains difficult for foreign self-driving companies to gain a foothold in the Chinese market,” Tong Xianqiao, CEO and co-founder of Roadstar.ai, said in a WeChat message in response to Bloomberg’s queries. “In contrast, Chinese companies have a natural advantage domestically.”