On April 24, Xiaoma Zhixing announced that it won the bid for the 2022 taxi capacity index in Nansha District, Guangzhou, which is the first taxi business license issued to an autonomous driving enterprise in China. The winning bid notice is clear, allowing autonomous vehicles that meet the safety technical requirements of the demonstration operation of intelligent and connected vehicles in Guangzhou to provide taxi operation services.
This means that autonomous vehicles are officially included in the scope of transportation operation and management of general vehicles, and the standardized management of national unified taxis is adopted, which is a major breakthrough in the process of promoting technology commercialization in the autonomous driving industry. Pony Chi Heng also became the first company to be approved to commercialize Robotaxi services in both Beijing and Guangzhou.
Pony Chi Heng was allowed to invest 100 self-driving vehicles in Nansha, Guangzhou, to provide taxi services. It is expected that from May, Xiaoma Zhixing will start charging operations in the entire area of Nansha in 800 square kilometers, and gradually expand its services to other parts of Guangzhou as the business is gradually expanded. Passengers can use the service and complete the payment through the PonyPilot+ app, the service period is from 8:30 to 22:30, and the charging standard is in accordance with the unified pricing standard of Guangzhou taxis.
Since last year, Xiaoma Zhixing has simultaneously promoted the commercialization process of passenger car and truck business from multiple dimensions such as research and development, cooperation and service - product research and development level, Xiaoma Zhixing released the sixth generation of mass-produced automatic driving software and hardware system solutions at the beginning of this year; at the business cooperation level, Xiaoma Zhixing actively expanded the upstream and downstream industry chain cooperation ecosystem and reached a number of important strategic cooperation; at the application service level, Xiaoma Zhixing successfully became the first batch of demonstration enterprises after the breakthrough of autonomous driving commercialization policies in various places.
Lou Tiancheng, co-founder and CTO of Xiaoma Zhixing, said that the next step will be to further optimize the experience, reduce costs, and quickly promote the productization process of autonomous driving technology.
On November 25, 2021, Xiaoma Zhixing was approved to pilot commercialized autonomous mobility services to the public in Beijing. In the next step, Xiaoma Zhixing plans to implement autonomous driving travel commercialization services in other first-tier cities before next year, and expand its successful experience to more cities by 2025.
As of mid-April this year, the PonyPilot+ service has served more than 700,000 orders and has nearly 80% of "repeat customers".
On March 1 of this year, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) issued a Commercial License for Robotaxi (Self-Driving Taxi) to Self-Driving Company Waymo and its rival General Motors' Cruise, allowing both companies to charge passenger fees after providing Robotaxi services, provided they have security officers. Waymo recently provided employees with self-driving services without safety officers in their cars in San Francisco, and the company also said that it will expand its self-driving travel business in Phoenix, Arizona, in the future, and plans to provide hundreds of rides per week.
On April 21, at Tesla's first quarter 2022 earnings call, Tesla CEO Musk said that the company is developing a self-driving taxi that hopes to achieve mass production in 2024. Previously, it had publicly stated at several events that Tesla was building a self-driving taxi that "looked very futuristic" and that the car was not equipped with a steering wheel or pedals.