China leads way with self-driving vehicle tech

Revenue of nation's autonomous auto market expected to exceed $500b by 2030

WeRide, a global autonomous driving company headquartered in Guangzhou, Guangdong province in South China, created a splash when the United Arab Emirates awarded it the country's first national license for self-driving vehicles. This was the first such license globally, giving WeRide a place in history.

With the move, WeRide, which mainly offers level-4 autonomous driving solutions, is able to conduct various road tests of autonomous vehicles on open roads across the Middle Eastern country. Level-4 autonomy means the car can drive by itself in most conditions without a human backup driver.

Backing the achievement is the latest momentum gained by Chinese autonomous driving companies in terms of self-driving technologies and commercialization. These companies are increasingly recognized by enterprises and governments globally for their overall capacity to make self-driving on roads a reality.

"From a global perspective, Chinese autonomous driving companies have demonstrated strong technological innovation capabilities and can cope with various driving scenarios in different climates, environments and urban roads," said Regan Luo, director of business development for WeRide's Middle East and North Africa markets.

In the UAE, for instance, the high temperatures easily lead to the failure of electronic components of self-driving cars. In response to this constraint, WeRide quickly developed a thermal management system, which can effectively perform heat recovery and cold emission management, Luo said.

According to Luo, WeRide is one of the first global autonomous driving firms to launch robotaxis in Abu Dhabi, capital of the UAE, and has already served nearly 20,000 robotaxi orders for its residents.

For years, carmakers around the world, especially in the United States and Europe, have promised a world of self-driving vehicles — it increasingly appears that China will likely make it happen.

According to a report from global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co, China will become the world's largest market for autonomous vehicles, with revenue from such vehicles and mobility services expected to exceed $500 billion by 2030.

It is predicted that by 2030, total sales of autonomous vehicles are expected to hit $230 billion and autonomous vehicle-based services will generate around $260 billion in sales.

More than 15,000 kilometers of testing roads for intelligent connected vehicles, most being self-driving cars, have been opened nationwide by mid-September, with a total road testing mileage of over 70 million km, latest data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology showed.

As of mid-September, 17 demonstration zones, 16 pilot cities and seven national car networking demonstration zones had completed the intelligent upgrading and transformation of over 7,000 km of roads nationwide.

Guo Shougang, deputy head of the equipment industry department at the MIIT, said: "China's intelligent connected vehicles have achieved positive results in terms of industrial scale, key technologies and demonstration applications.

"In particular, a batch of key technologies, including the new generation of electronic and electrical architecture, car operating systems and high-power computing chips, has been applied on a large scale in vehicles."

In the first half of this year, the sales of new passenger cars with autonomous driving functions accounted for 42.4 percent of the nation's total passenger car sales, which represents an increase of 10 percentage points year-on-year, he added.

Industry experts said that such huge strides in recent years are part of China's broader efforts in prioritizing autonomous-driving technology and commercialization, making policies for internet-connected vehicles increasingly transparent and open.

Last November, the MIIT and the Ministry of Public Security launched a guideline saying that road tests for autonomous driving vehicles will be gradually carried out nationwide.

In July, the Office of the Beijing High-Level Autonomous Driving Demonstration Zone announced the launch of the commercial operation of autonomous vehicles. It is expected that a larger fleet of driverless taxis will soon become available in Beijing.

According to a report by BloombergNEF, China will operate the world's largest robotaxi fleet with about 12 million units by 2040, followed by the US, which is expected to have around 7 million autonomous vehicles by that time.

Another report by global consultancy IHS Markit said that China's self-driving taxi market alone is expected to reach 1.3 trillion yuan ($178 billion) by 2030, accounting for 60 percent of the country's ridehailing market.

Jia Yuanhua, a professor of transportation engineering at the school of traffic and transportation at Beijing Jiaotong University, said the autonomous driving industry is nearing a "golden inflection point of growth", as central and local government policies become more open and clear.

Bolstered by such a blueprint for connected and intelligent cars, companies like Pony.ai and Baidu have been operating robotaxis in designated areas in Beijing and Shanghai after clearing high regulatory hurdles.

Other AI firms are also striving to improve autonomous driving technologies, including high-definition maps, smart cockpits and V2X, or vehicle-to-everything networks, which rely on sensors, cameras and the internet to keep drivers informed about road conditions, to gain a foothold in international competition.

For some time now, they have been gearing up driverless technologies in minibuses, trucks, forklifts and aerial vehicles, which are expected to enjoy huge commercial value in a variety of businesses like industrial logistics, express delivery, food takeaway, fresh produce ordering and retail pharmaceuticals.

"China has been at the forefront of optimizing traffic and road safety. What is likely to follow once the technology is adopted is a rollout in more crowded cities where traffic congestion has been a deep pain point," said Howard Yu, director of the IMD Center for Future Readiness.

In March, the IMD's 2023 Future Readiness Indicator ranked the world's top revenue-generating players in finance, automotive and consumer packaged goods, in terms of their ability to anticipate future challenges as well as limit risk exposure.

One key finding was the rise of Chinese players in the autonomous driving industries, Yu told Xinhua when the report was released. For the first time, BYD, Li Auto and XPeng from China all made into the top 10 rankings of the global indicator.

During his speech in July in Shanghai, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk said that he admires the Chinese people's wisdom and determination and as long as the Chinese people decide to do well in one thing, they will, including in artificial intelligence.

There are reports that Tesla, a global leader in autonomous driving, could be getting ready to test its full self-driving technology in China. The company is forming a 20-member operation team to promote and deploy its proprietary full self-driving technology in the country and has already dispatched engineers from its headquarters for training.

As ChatGPT takes the tech world by storm, the ongoing AI boom is also likely to lift China's autonomous driving development to another level above its international competitors, industry experts said.

Earlier this year, Haomo Zhixing Technology Co, which is backed by domestic automaker Great Wall Motor Co, launched DriveGPT, a generative model that marks the first of its kind in the global autonomous driving sector.

The startup developed what it called RLHF, or reinforced learning with human feedback, technology, which is like ChatGPT and enables working with real-time data and drivers' decisions to improve safety and help vehicles act in a more human-like way.

Haomo's CEO Gu Weihao said that the large model has been trained with the data of over 40 million km of driving and will enable cars to run more safely and act in a human-like and smoother way.

He said that the company is set to commercialize the technology and its driver-assisted products will be sold in vehicles in Europe, Israel and other parts of the world.

However, He Xiongsong, executive president of Estar Capital, pointed out that costs are still a challenge for the country's autonomous driving technologies and it will take time for the country's unmanned vehicle industry chain to grow and reduce costs.

At present, some auto manufacturers can achieve a total vehicle cost of about 200,000 yuan to 250,000 yuan, but most unmanned cars cost at least 500,000 yuan each, he added.