In Beijing's Yizhuang district, driverless vehicles have become a common sight. Robotaxis weave through traffic alongside ordinary cars, while autonomous delivery vans glide along the inside lane as they carry packages to collection points. The district has become one of China's testing grounds for autonomous driving, with companies including Baidu, WeRide and Pony.ai operating commercial robotaxi services within designated areas. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
Booking a ride requires little more than opening an app. Within minutes, a robotaxi pulls up with nobody behind the wheel. After confirming the journey on a touchscreen, the vehicle merges into Beijing's dense traffic, navigating buses, cyclists, scooters and pedestrians with little hesitation.
The technology is still evolving. But a bigger question now looms: can Chinese companies turn robotaxis into another sector they dominate globally, as they have with electric vehicles (EVs)?
China's autonomous driving companies already have a powerful advantage - the industrial ecosystem that helped turn the country into the world's largest EV market. Unlike Tesla, which designs much of its technology in-house, China's self-driving industry is built around a network of companies. Established carmakers including BYD, Chery, Geely, and SAIC build the cars, while specialist firms develop the software.
Autonomous vehicles rely on many of the same batteries, sensors, chips and onboard computers as electric cars. Because those supply chains already exist at enormous scale, companies can develop technology faster and at a lower cost. "What you see is a pace of innovation and adaptation in the Chinese EV industry that I don't think is matched anywhere else around the world," says Kyle Chan, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution. "China's EV capacity doesn't just stop there. It actually spills over into other related industries through something that I call these overlapping tech industrial ecosystems."
Government policy has also played a role. Pilot programmes in several cities allow companies to test the technology on some public roads. But China also offers something else to firms that are trying to make the technology smarter: complex driving conditions. A single journey through Beijing can require an autonomous vehicle to deal with buses, scooters, cyclists, pedestrians and unpredictable traffic.
"The traffic environment here in China is very complex," Maeve Zhang, chief marketing officer at WeRide, told the BBC. That diversity of road users generates vast amounts of data to help improve software. Although driving data from China is useful, there are other challenging conditions abroad which could hinder any rapid expansion in overseas markets. "In the Middle East, the temperature is very high. In South East Asia, there is heavy rain... and in Switzerland, winter temperatures can be very, very low," says Zhang. Extreme temperatures can reduce battery performance, while heavy rain, snow and fog interfere with the cameras and sensors that autonomous vehicles rely on.
Robotaxis are only one part of China's autonomous driving ambitions. QCraft is applying its autonomous software to passenger cars, as well as autonomous buses and delivery vehicles. It says its buses already operate in more than 20 Chinese cities and it is expanding overseas. "It's very promising on the technology side that maybe the next five, seven, at most 10 years, it will get into everybody's life," says James Yu, the company's chairman and chief executive.
Chinese companies are expanding globally, and fast. Their biggest commercial competitors are in the US. Waymo, Alphabet's robotaxi business, remains the commercial leader, operating paid driverless services in several US cities. Amazon-owned Zoox and Tesla are expanding more cautiously, while Uber has abandoned the development of its own autonomous vehicles, which had been marred by a fatal accident in 2018. Uber, and its ride-hailing rival Lyft, are now partnering with Chinese firms. That gives them automatic "access to millions of customers that they wouldn't have if they created their own app," says Tu Le, founder of consultancy Sino Auto Insights. "Through these partnerships, they're able to commercialise and broaden their scope." Although Chinese companies are able to manufacture cheaply, Waymo has spent years building expertise in customer service and the app technology.