Baidu BIDU -2.6%, the leading search engine in China, has launched a robotaxi service in Shougang Park - an industrial park on the west side of Beijing which will be a site for the 2022 winter Olympics. Baidu claims the service is “fully driverless” and will be the first service in China where members of the public can hail a paid robotaxi of this sort.
The Baidu Apollo project is one of the most established such efforts in China. It recently reported over 10m kilometers of on-road testing in China, the first Asian company to reach that level. As we count the milestones to true deployment, without hard safety data, the best thing we can look at is how close a company is to the final goal. That final goal must check several boxes:
It operates over a wide and financially viable service area
The service is generally available to the public, or a specific commercially viable subset of the public
It’s a real commercial operation, charging a competitive but profitable (at least on a COGS+ basis) fare
There is no safety driver anywhere in the vehicle or any chase car
Any remote operations center is just for occasional strategic advice, and there are significantly fewer (one quarter or less) remote operators than in-service vehicles
Bonus points for particularly difficulty in driving the service area
Nobody is quite there. Waymo is closest, though their service area is currently limited and they have not disclosed their ratio of remote ops staff to vehicles. In addition only a portion of vehicles meet criteria #4. Starship (disclaimer, I am a stockholder) ticks all the boxes but does small deliveries, not passenger service.
AutoX was the second company to announce progress here, with a service in a quiet suburb of Shenzhen. A test ride of their service by a member of the press impressed me, showing the territory is considerably more complex than Waymo’s service area in Chandler Arizona, though not as complex as more urban parts of the USA or China.
Yandex YNDX -1.6% in Russia has offered service with a safety driver in the passenger seat. This safety driver can still hit a kill switch and grab the wheel, so it’s an odd choice — the capability of the safety driver to do their job is impaired, so it’s mostly a show of confidence, a partway step to removing the driver. Others have also done this, or done non-public tests with no safety driver at all. WeRide recently demonstrated test operations in Guangzhou with no safety driver, so things are moving fast in China.
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