After much testing, it is now possible to ride the motorized taxi without a driver in China thanks to AutoX, which has become the first company in the country to offer public trips in self-driving vehicles without a safety driver.
And you need to sign up for a pilot program in Shenzhen and use the membership credits, but then you can ride a modified Chrysler Pacifica to travel across town without seeing another human.
Cars are recalled using a universal app that can summon both human-driven ride-hailing vehicles and driverless motorized taxis, and trips are supervised by the remote operations center in Shenzhen.
As with Waymo One, there is help if you need it, and you can speak to customer support reps if you have questions or need help.
Shenzhen is the fifth largest city in China, with more than 12 million people, and AutoX has released a new video in English announcing that the automated taxi service is open to the public in China.
AutoX, funded by Alibaba Group, is eager to promote the driverless automated taxi’s ability to handle real-world conditions after several months of stress testing.
The video shows the Chrysler Pacifica turning left bends, around parked vehicles, overtaking cars on two-lane roads, and stopping for pedestrians and cyclists.
The vehicles use a combination of LiDAR, radar and blind-spot sensing to recognize their environment, which qualifies them to be Tier 4 autonomous, all with no driver in the front seat.
And fully automated driverless taxi is still very rare anywhere in the world, and it requires a combination of improved technology and updated regulation before it becomes relatively popular.
The video shows the existence of designated areas for the unmanned taxi ride and disembarkation in Shenzhen, as China adjusts human cities to make driving easier with computer vision technology.
AutoX has applied to test its technology on California roads, and the US and Europe need to work together on autonomous vehicles, encouraging growth in an orderly way, or risking ceding the future to China.
