Shenzhen residents will see truly self-driving cars on the road starting Thursday. AutoX, a four-year startup backed by Alibaba, MediaTek and Shanghai Motors, is deploying a fleet of 25 self-driving cars in downtown Shenzhen, marking the first time any autonomous vehicle in China has been tested on public roads without safety drivers or remote operators.
The vehicles intended as robotaxis are not yet open to the public, an AutoX spokesman told TechCrunch.
The milestone comes just five months after AutoX received clearance from California to begin driverless testing, following in the footsteps of Waymo and Nuro.
It also indicates that China wants to bring its smart driving industry on par with U.S. cities from Shenzhen to Shanghai competing to attract autonomous driving upstarts by clearing regulatory hurdles, touting subsidies and splicing up 5G infrastructure.
As a result, each city ends up with its own poster child in space: AutoX and Deeproute.ai in Shenzhen, Pony.ai and WeRide in Guangzhou, Moments in Suzhou and Baidu Apollo Fleet in Beijing, to name a few. Autonomous driving companies, in turn, are working closely with traditional automakers to make their vehicles smarter and more suitable for future transportation.
“We got support from local authorities. Shenzhen is making great rapid progress in self-driving car legislation, "said an AutoX spokesman.
The decision to remove drivers from the front and operators from a remote hub seems like a bold move in one of China's most populous cities. AutoX is equipping its vehicles with its proprietary vehicle control unit called XCU, which it claims has faster processing speeds and more computing power to handle complex road scenarios in Chinese cities.
“The XCU provides multiple levels of redundancy to handle this kind of situation,” said AutoX when asked how its vehicles would react if the cars ever go rogue.
The company also highlighted the experience it has learned from the "million miles" operated in China's densest urban centers through its 100 robotaxis in the past few years. Its competitors are also aggressively accumulating mileage to train their self-driving algorithms, while the bank is investing heavily to fund R&D and pilot trials. AutoX itself, for example, has raised over $ 160 million to date.