RIDING in a car with no one behind the wheel must sound like a nightmarish vision. But this is no bad dream, rather a smooth cruise along the roads of Beijing with no one but the vehicle itself driving me to my destination.

Without a driver, the car stopped at traffic signals and waited for pedestrians at zebra crossings, too. It slowed down in traffic and picked up speed in the fast lane.

Once, when another car going the opposite way ran a red light, it also avoided it with the precision of an expert driver. After coming to a smooth halt to let me, its passenger, catch a breath, it was back on its way.

I was on a test ride inside Pony.ai’s ‘Robotaxi’, a driverless car that runs on artificial intelligence thanks to several cameras and sensors. There was no one, absolutely no human, controlling the car’s steering wheel.

The driver’s seat and the passenger seat next to it were empty, although there were screens on the dashboard and behind the front seats for the passengers, displaying various signal inputs the car was receiving. These inputs seemed to form a kind of a blue force field around the vehicle, which prevented it from any kind of impact with anything on the road.

Founded in Fremont, California in late 2016, Pony.ai have pioneered autonomous mobility deployment to benefit people in both the United States and China.

Just one year ago, in 2023, Pony.ai and Toyota Motor (China) Investment Company Ltd went into a memorandum of understanding. Pony.ai uses Toyota’s Lexus RX 450h model and Pony.ai’s own driving systems to move on the road.

Another model is the Toyota Sienna AutonoMaas (S-AM) vehicle which has been equipped with Pony.ai’s sixth generation autonomous driving software and hardware system, which started public road testing of which I was a part of earlier this week.

Among its self-owned fleets, Pony.ai currently has around 200 Toyota and Lexus brand Robotaxis located in all four of China’s tier-1 cities — Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen for road tests and public-facing Robotaxi operations.

And it was just this year in May that Pony.ai also became the first to receive a permit to provide autonomous truck ‘platoon’ formation testing in Beijing to become the only company in China to have obtained such permits in two cities — Beijing and Guangzhou.

Published in Dawn, September 17th, 2024