TechCrunch Mobility: A new robotaxi scorecard shows China’s dominance
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Today is Juneteenth, a U.S. federal holiday marking the end of slavery in the United States. About 10 years ago, there was a lot of chatter about who was winning the self-driving car race. One of the problems with that debate — besides assuming there would be just one winner — was that no one had a reliable way to measure it. This was an early era filled with a lot of demos and capital, but little substance — at least what the public, and folks like myself, had access to. Advisory and research startup Autnmy AI has developed a generative AI platform to create a benchmarking system that evaluates and ranks autonomous vehicle companies in an effort to answer that question in real time. And this week, the startup released its Road to Autonomy Index, which searches relevant global public databases, including federal and state reports, SEC documents, public exchanges, and other data. The system weighs the company’s operations, scale, revenue, commercial partnerships, manufacturing, and safety record based on that data and provides an update every 12 hours. There are four indices that rank robotaxis, autonomous driving licensing companies, autonomous trucks, and delivery bots. One important note, per Autnmy AI co-founder Rob Grant, the AI platform doesn’t just scrape information off the internet. “We agreed early on, we don’t scrape information,” he said. “If it’s publicly available or if it’s available under a Creative Commons license, we will use that information.
We do have some license data that we pay folks for, and under that agreement too.” The indices take a global approach, which produces some interesting results. One of the initial takeaways that made an impression on Grant was China’s stronger ranking across multiple categories. As of Friday, the robotaxi leader was not Waymo. It was China’s Baidu Apollo Go program — just barely. Waymo was in the secondary position, followed by Chinese companies Pony.ai and WeRide. Tesla was in the fifth position. A little bird Image Credits:Bryce Durbin I was reminded recently by a little bird to keep an eye on the Texas automated vehicle tracker tool that launched in May. And I am glad they did; looks like Tesla, Waymo, and Zoox are building up their respective fleets in the state. Reminder: This doesn’t mean every one of these are being used commercially. Zoox, for instance, cannot operate commercially until it receives an exemption from the federal government. It currently has the ability to give rides in its custom-built robotaxi but cannot charge customers. As of May 28, Waymo had 577 autonomous vehicles registered in the state. It now has 620 of them, about a 7.5% increase in less than a month. Tesla now has 69 registered autonomous vehicles, a 64% increase from the 42 it had on May 28. Zoox, which had 35 registered autonomous vehicles last month, now has 43. Avride, Nuro, and Volkswagen subsidiary MOIA are holding steady at 317, 47, and 12, respectively. Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or my Signal at kkorosec.07, or email Sean O’Kane at sean.okane@techcrunch.com.
The BriefWire