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China's Robotaxi Companies Are Racing Ahead of Tesla (spectrum.ieee.org)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Tesla's robotaxi debut in Austin got people excited. But can the company compete on the global stage with Chinese AV giants like Baidu and Pony.ai?

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[–] 30 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Anything but trains, subways, trams, or buses?

Tech won't solve traffic, proper investment into public transportation will. Investment in these startups should be funneled into self driving public transportation.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    It could. Imagine 80% autonomous vehicle traffic, 30% of that is multipassenger capable taxi service. Autonomous vehicle lanes moving reliably at 75mph. With this amount of taxi service the advantages of personal vehicle ownership falls and the wait time for an available pickup diminishes rapidly.

    China has many areas with pretty good public transportation. In the US, tech advances and legislation changes to enable the above model is better suited to the existing infrastructure.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    China has quite a number of trains already. Arguably they overbuilt their train network as much of it is heavily underutilized.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Heavily underutilized for now. It's significantly cheaper and easier to build the network too early than too late, when you have to coordinate property acquisition and demolition across the full length of the network.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Heavily underutilized for now.

    China has a birthrate of 1.15 children per woman. When is this later time you allude to when there will be more people to utilize the heavily underutilized network?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    690 million women in China, let's say 30% are in age to give birth, that's 207 million. If only 50% of those actually give birth in the next 5 years, that's a whooping 47.6 million kids per year.

    Yeah, that population will climb, just not overnight.

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