The writer is co-founder and CTO of Chinese autonomous vehicle company Pony.aiAt this year’s Beijing auto show, robotaxis moved from the margins to the centre for the first time. Automakers, mobility platforms and technology groups all presented their versions of autonomous ride-hailing. The show signalled that robotaxis are no longer an experiment conducted by a handful of specialists but the next phase of how we travel.
Still, a crowded race is not the same as a mature one. Launching a robotaxi is becoming easier but building one that can scale commercially and operate safely remains difficult.
For much of the past decade, the autonomous-driving industry has behaved as if the decisive breakthrough would come from a lab: larger models, more training data, more simulation and more compute. That view is wrong. A robotaxi’s own reactions will change the behaviour of other road users in ways that historical data cannot always predict.