Pony.ai gets approval for deployment of fully driverless vehicles in Beijing

Pony.ai has been granted permission to deploy its driverless robotaxi in Beijing. The company is one of the first batches of companies to obtain such a type of permit to test autonomous vehicles in the country.

As per Reuters, Pony.ai, which is an autonomous vehicle technology company, is also testing fully driverless autonomous taxis in Guangzhou. The other firm that was given the permit for similar road testing is Baidu Inc. tech company.

Baidu said it obtained its first license to test out driverless vehicles in China. It also revealed its plans to release more robotaxis to be deployed across China this year. The aim is to add at least 200 units to its network.

It was noted that Baidu is mainly known for its internet search engine business, where it is also getting most of its profits. But lately, it has been focusing on its self-driving technologies, and for the past five years, it was able to do more in this line of business as it looks to diversify and have another source of revenue.

In fact, last year, Baidu unleashed its Apollo Go robotaxi service and also started to charge fees for the rides. Apollo Go has been operating in two cities - Wuhan and Chongqing - with no safety driver onboard; thus, they are completely autonomous. Baidu said that these taxis had already engaged in a total of 1.4 million driverless rides at the end of the third quarter of 2022.

Meanwhile, Pony.ai stated in a press release that “The issuance of this permit represents that autonomous testing in Beijing has entered the third stage of ‘fully driverless. The company added that “to enter this third stage, AV test vehicles need to have met strict technical and operational requirements such as test mileage and disengagement rate, Pony.ai’s ten test vehicles successfully passed the tests without any safety issues.”