China ahead of the US in some areas of autonomous driving, robotics, executives say

China is ahead of the US in some areas of autonomous driving and robotics, according to executives from Pony.ai and UBTech, who spoke at the South China Morning Post’s annual China Conference on Wednesday.

“Although the start-up wave in self-driving started earlier in the US, China has caught up in terms of policymaking. China has been making agile policies that allow fast proof of concept, [as well as] failure and retry, which facilitates really quick iterations,” said Ann Shi Yu, vice-president of autonomous driving company Pony.ai.

“The competition in China is fiercer, which forces [companies] to progress,” Shi said, noting that in the US only Alphabet-backed Waymo is capable of operating hundreds of fully autonomous robotaxis on public roads. In China, there is “definitely more than one company doing that”.

Pony.ai was operating around 250 robotaxis and roughly 190 robotrucks as of the end of 2024, according to Shi. Domestic rivals have also achieved a fleet size in the hundreds, including Baidu’s Apollo Go which operates more than 400 robotaxis in Wuhan, Hubei province.

In the field of robotics, UBTech’s chief brand officer Michael Tam said that US competitors, including Tesla and OpenAI, “are a little bit advanced” in terms of developing the “brain” of robots, which is the artificial intelligence (AI) technology that controls a robot’s sensors and movements.

But the recent rise of Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek, which trained its large language model with fewer resources but ended up with one that matched or even exceeded in certain areas the performance of larger US competitors such as OpenAI and Facebook parent Meta Platforms, proved that “there’s not so much [of a] gap between the US and mainland China” for AI, Tam said.