AutoX has more than 1,000 driverless cars worldwide, and commercialization is still far away

AutoX, a domestic autonomous driving company, recently announced that the company has deployed more than 1,000 robot taxi test vehicles around the world. A new data released by AutoX shows that this figure is almost equivalent to the total number of driverless taxis of Google Waymo and General Cruise.

AutoX did not disclose the cost of a driverless taxi. Last year, Baidu and BAIC jointly released the Apollo Moon driverless taxi, reducing the cost from the original million yuan to less than 500,000 yuan, close to the price of commercial vehicles.

Late last year, Geely's high-end electric vehicle brand Zeekr announced that it would produce electric vehicles for Waymo, Google's self-driving arm, and deploy fully autonomous ride-hailing services in the United States in the next few years.

But for Robotaxi to deploy on a large scale, there are still barriers to cost that need to be overcome. Xiao Jianxiong, founder, chairman and CEO of AutoX, told the first financial reporter: "The price of autonomous driving hardware is actually directly related to the amount, if it can go up to a very large amount, the price will fall." ”

Xiao Jianxiong said that the way to promote the commercialization of autonomous driving technology includes making good use of Moore's Law and increasing in-depth strategic cooperation with semiconductor manufacturers to achieve cost optimization.

Last month, AutoX announced that the autonomous driving area in China totals more than 1,000 square kilometers. The first financial reporter learned that the company's autonomous driving project is still being tested in other regions except for the commercialization pilot in Pingshan, Shenzhen.

The global competition for self-driving taxis has shifted towards a contest between tech giants. Founding teams have disbanded after the sale of some smaller technology companies, such as self-driving startup Zoox and drive.AI will be sold to Amazon and Apple, respectively, and ride-hailing platforms such as Uber and Lyft have abandoned the work of developing autonomous driving in-house due to concerns about profitability and cost pressures.

Google and GM are two giants that currently dominate Waymo and Cruise, the closest projects in the driverless taxi space to commercialization. Last week, SoftBank Group's Vision Fund invested an additional $1.35 billion in Cruise.

Cruise is preparing to launch its self-driving Robotaxi free ride pilot service in San Francisco this week, and Cruise, who has a lot of money, said there are no plans to go public in the near future.

But Cruise offers the Robotaxi pilot service in San Francisco from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., which allows it to avoid the challenge of traffic congestion, the city's toughest traffic. For self-driving cars, driving late at night is easier and there are far fewer challenges on the road because there are fewer pedestrians, bikes and other vehicles at night, and there are fewer roadblocks at night.

Although the risk is reduced, the application scenarios of autonomous driving are also greatly limited. Xiao Jianxiong told the first financial reporter: "RoboTaxi to really land, need to ensure three aspects of the prerequisites, including full unmanned capabilities, large-scale coverage, high coverage density, so as to meet the normal travel needs." ”

Advocates of Robotaxi say self-driving technology is a multi-trillion-dollar market with potential and will revolutionize the way transportation is done. Last month, Ark Invest, an investment firm that invested in Queen Cathie Wood, predicted that the future of self-driving ride-hailing platforms would add $26 trillion to global GDP and generate $2 trillion in profits.

However, Cruise, like the entire self-driving industry, is still struggling to turn its self-driving taxi projects profitable. In fact, expectations for the commercialization of autonomous driving were overly optimistic. Cruise said in 2017 that if its growth rate remains constant, it will offer driverless taxis on a large scale in complex environments in 2019.

But three years later, that goal is still out of reach. Under cruise's current approval from the California Department of Motor Vehicles Management, DMV, the company can operate only 52 self-driving taxis and does not include popular business districts, which is still far from the concept of "large-scale" applications.