The head self-driving companies in China and the United States lead California, and Google has a significant decline in an indicator

On February 10, the California Transportation Authority DMV released the 2021 full-year Autonomous Driving (Robotaxi) test data report, and the top self-driving companies in China and the United States continue to occupy the top of the list.

According to California DMV data, the highest number of autonomous driving miles in 2021 is Google's Waymo, which has reached 2325842 miles, far ahead of all other competitors. The second-highest-mile-driven route was the GM Cruise, with 876104 miles; China's Pony Zhixing, with a mileage of 305616 miles, ranked third; Amazon's self-driving Zoox ranked fourth with 155125 miles; and Nuro in the United States, Wenyuan Zhixing in China, and AutoX were close behind.

In addition to mileage traveled, one of the core metrics that measures the performance of autonomous driving is the average number of takeover miles (MPI), which is the average number of miles driven by autonomous driving that needs to be intervened at a time. According to official DMV statistics, AutoX set a new record average takeover mileage in 2021, reaching 50,108 miles, surpassing the 41,719 miles of the second-ranked General Cruise, followed by China's Didi and Ford and Volkswagen-invested American self-driving company Argo, with MPI of 40,744 miles and 36,733 miles, respectively.

Compared with 2020, the mileage and MPI of autonomous driving companies in 2021 have increased significantly. But Google Waymo's MPI unexpectedly plummeted sharply to 7,965 miles. In 2020, Waymo's MPI exceeded 20,000 miles.

Although Chinese companies rank high in MPI, the number of autonomous driving is far less than that of U.S.-based self-driving giants Google Waymo and General Cruise. Waymo's surge in self-driving vehicles in California last year to 693 also explains why the company's vehicles have been taken over more often; Cruise also has 138 self-driving vehicles in California, and it's worth noting that Apple also has 37 self-driving test vehicles. The largest number of autonomous vehicles in California by Chinese companies is AutoX, with 44, Xiaoma Zhixing with 38, Wenyuan Zhixing with 14, Didi with 12 and Baidu with 5.

The first financial reporter noted that at present, the home of most Chinese autonomous driving companies is still in the domestic market. A domestic person in charge of Baidu's self-driving project told the first financial reporter that Baidu in China has about 500 self-driving cars on the road, and it is expected to continue to increase this year.

In terms of autonomous driving accidents in California in 2021, Wenyuan Zhixing had 3 cases, Xiaoma Zhixing had 2 cases, and all other Chinese companies had no accidents. In addition, due to the accident, dmv suspended the Pony Zhixing driverless test license last November.

Xiao Jianxiong, founder, chairman and CEO of AutoX, told the first financial reporter that the commercialization of autonomous driving requires technical guarantees of safety and multiple redundancies, as well as the ability of large-scale mass production, to provide large-scale, high-density any point-to-point autonomous driving services in urban scenarios.

However, due to the huge uncertainty facing the commercial prospects of Robotaxi, many domestic autonomous driving companies are also carrying out multi-dimensional autonomous driving layout, such as the market participants of roboBus, including Wenyuan Zhixing, Baidu Apollon, and Qingzhou Qcraft; the competitive market for roboTruck autonomous driving trucks is equally fierce, including Tucson Future, Zhijia Technology, Yingche Technology, Xiaoma Zhixing and Baidu. In addition, Huawei, Xiaopeng, DJI, Horizon, Yuanrong Qixing, MiniEye, Xiaoma Zhixing, etc. are also competing in the field of passenger car assisted driving.