Chinese tech giant Baidu and self-driving car unicorn Pony.ai have been given permission to operate their fully autonomous ride-hailing services and charge for robotaxi rides in about 300 square miles of downtown Shanghai, where Tesla has also sought to roll out its robotaxis.
“This means our robotaxis are now available for commercial services in China’s single largest city by GDP,” Pony.ai’s founder and chief technology officer Lou Tiancheng told TechNode on the sidelines of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) held on July 26 in Shanghai (our translation). “We now have permits for robotaxis fare-charging services in all four top-tier cities in China, namely Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen,” Lou said.
Shanghai, where Tesla’s China Gigafactory is located and Volkswagen’s partner SAIC is headquartered, is poised to catch up with other leading cities in the country in terms of robotaxi adoption, as China has emerged as a global leader in both autonomous and electric vehicles over the past decade.
The city’s authorities announced at this year’s WAIC that it would allow self-driving car companies to gradually broaden their geofences to cover the entire Pudong New Area of the city and part of the Minhang and Fengxian districts by 2027. This would allow them to operate in an area of 2,000 square kilometers (772 square miles), and complete more than 6 million autonomous rides by then, according to a government official from the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology, the city’s industry regulator.
Baidu and Pony.ai will start limited operations of their fully autonomous services across 759 square kilometers (293 square miles) of the Shanghai Pudong New Area, the city’s financial district. The companies did not reveal the full details of their plans, such as how many robocars will be available at what cost, but the regulator said that citizens currently have access to around 100 robotaxis with the number set to rise significantly to 500 by the end of this year. A human driver will stay alert in the passenger seat as required.
Chinese and US regulators are moving faster than the readiness of self-driving car technology because they know the industry, according to Lou. China’s local governments have been using a step-by-step approach to gradually expand the availability and ensure the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs), using measures such as issuing permits at different levels to govern the testing and deployment of AVs.
Pony.ai was first allowed by Shanghai to test self-driving cars with a safety driver in the city’s suburbs back in mid-2020, TechNode reported, but it was not until now that the company was allowed to launch a paid, fully autonomous driverless car service. It launched China’s first commercial robotaxi service in mid-2022 in Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong province, followed by similar operations in Beijing and Shenzhen in late 2023 and early last year, respectively.
Lou voiced confidence that Pony.ai can compete with Alphabet’s Waymo in overseas markets, as it is among the companies, including Baidu and Momenta, striking deals with Uber for robotaxi deployment. Waymo is undoubtedly the leading robotaxi operator globally. The company said in May that it hit 10 million trips with more than 1,500 robotaxis in several major cities across the US, and its fleet completes more than 250,000 paid rides each week.
Tesla’s long-awaited robotaxi service, initially with 10 Model Y crossovers, began on June 22 in an area of 42 square miles of the US city of Austin. The US automaker featured its robotaxi launch in a video at its WAIC 2025 booth on the first day of the event. The company now aims to roll out its Full Self-Driving (FSD) advanced driver assistance system in China and Europe by the end of this year, Shanghai Observer reported (in Chinese), a move which has been delayed by a few months compared with its original plans.
Baidu said it completed 11 million rides as of May and operates more than 1,000 fully driverless vehicles across 15 cities worldwide. Guangzhou-headquartered and Nasdaq-listed Pony.ai is aiming to expand its autonomous ride-hailing fleet from its current level of almost 300 cars to 1,000 by the end of this year. The average rides per day were 15 per vehicle, according to its prospectus, which it revealed in October.
READ MORE: China’s Waymo rival Pony.ai slashes self-driving stack cost by 70%
