China’s robotaxi industry is “on the cusp of commercial breakout”, reckons HSBC, a bank. Revenues will grow from a little over $50m this year to nearly $50bn by 2035, according to Goldman Sachs, another bank, by which time a fleet of 1.9m robotaxis in China will account for 25% of all ride-hailing vehicles. UBS, one more bank, is even more bullish, forecasting that the market could be worth around $180bn by the late 2030s.
There are several reasons to believe China may win the race to build a robotaxi industry at scale. One is strong state backing. China’s central government is pushing autonomy as a means of strengthening the country’s technological heft. At the same time, many local governments, which are keen to attract investment, have approved robotaxi pilots at a rapid clip and are installing the necessary infrastructure. In the city of Wuxi in eastern China, for example, traffic lights at 1,723 crossroads have been connected to intelligent networks, while sensors are in place at 330 sites in the city to ease the passage of robotaxis.
China’s self-driving cars are also relatively cheap. Waymo,
, spends between $130,000 and $200,000 each on its current generation of vehicles, which are equipped with a multitude of sensors and oodles of computing power. HSBC puts the average cost of a Chinese robotaxi at $40,000. Baidu’s RT6, made in partnership with Jiangling, another state-owned carmaker, costs just $35,000. Cars and the peripheral technology needed to make autonomy work are much less expensive in China. An enormous domestic market and fierce competition have pushed down vehicle costs in general, while the availability of basic self-driving systems in even cheap cars has brought scale and lowered prices for the sensors required for autonomy, such as the laser-based lidars that create a 3D model of the area around a vehicle. Four Chinese companies, led by Hesai, control around 90% of the global lidar market.
