The Rise of Robotaxis in China

Yashad Kulkarni50min

Speaker 1

17:53

Hi everyone, we're very grateful to have three female executives from three of the fastest growing autonomous driving companies in China with us today. So we have one, GM for Europe for momenta in sojo and then Joe from auto x. She is CEO. And then we also have Jennifer from Wainwright. She's the VP for corporate finance. We rising Guan Joe Joe's not far from her. She's usually in Shenzhen. So all of you have been working on level four Robo taxis, but with slightly different strategies to which I'm sure we'll get to today. I know that moment. You've been working with a lot of tier one, big automakers, and then auto x, you guys have trucks and then we arrived, you guys have syllabuses. And another thing that really strikes me as the difference is your choice of location. So as we know, most of the autonomous driving startups in the US, they're concentrated in California, though they might have operations and tests in different states. But you guys kind of scatter across China, and a lot of people think of China as a top down policy system, but it's actually in reality. I know it's a patchwork of different regulations. So I want to start by asking why you're in the city that you are about one. I know the moment I has a giant office in sewage. Oh, and you've also been working with the local governments. I'm curious to know how you came to pick soochow. And how has the local policy advanced your business?

Speaker 2

19:43

Yeah, yeah, actually, the US? Yeah. sudo is one of our office we actually started out in Beijing in 2016. And then we build our office in pseudo in 2018. And this year, we are opening our Shanghai office as well. So when We are working with local governments, we have this feeling that in China, actually, each local government is incentivized to really act like intrapreneurs, like us who they are very, they are they're very progressive in developing local economy, like his or her own company. So the success of local economy, or the success of the local government is actually measured by their structure of their local economy, how the local economy is built. So what we feel is that autonomous driving technology can actually greatly improve and upgrade their local economies structure, the new technologies, and they will transform their local economy. So we are very excited to be in pseudo Shanghai and Beijing and we have very good experience in working with local government in China, where we find we actually have the same dream to bring autonomous driving to the local economy, huh? Yeah. How about you? Why are you in Schengen? Yeah, our Robo taxis are deployed

Speaker 3

21:12

also in multiple cities, not just in Shenzhen. It's in Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, we're coming to Gwangju as well. However, we choose Shenzhen as our headquarter from the very beginning. And one of the reason was that Shenzhen is a like a Silicon Valley in China. It's a beautiful coastal city right across Hong Kong with a lot of tech giants headquartered there. But the more important reason is that shinjin is what is called a special district. It has its own independent legislation power. That means a law making power outside the central government. legal framework. For example, the the first city to allow civilian drones to fly in the city was Shenzhen, perhaps because of DJI is headquartered in Shenzhen. And we are very proud and happy to be the major force pushing forward to make shinjin also the first city to change legislation and allow Robo taxis to be commercialized.

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