Opportunities abound abroad for Chinese self-driving companies

Chinese self-driving companies have been presented with both opportunities and challenges in their expansion overseas with China's advantages in new-energy vehicles and self-driving technology, as well as a large demand for self-driving products in developed countries.

This June, WeRide, a Guangzhou-based company founded in 2017, made a splash in Singapore when its Robobus self-driving minibus took passengers from a hotel to vacation destination Resorts World Sentosa. It marked the official opening of Singapore's first pre-production open-road, L4-grade, self-driving minibus passenger-carrying operation route.

Only a month later, the first national license for self-driving vehicles in Dubai was granted to WeRide, allowing the testing of all types of self-driving vehicles in the country since then.

It is gradually becoming a trend for Chinese self-driving companies like WeRide to venture overseas.

Unlike the traditional manufacturing industry, Chinese companies are leading the world in NEVs and autonomous driving technology, with China's NEV market share reaching 35.2 percent in the first half of this year, according to official sales figures.

China's NEVs, which are also gaining fame overseas, have paved the way for self-driving companies to expand overseas.

Li Xuan, chief financial officer and head of international business of WeRide, said autonomous driving technology could help in areas where there is a large labor shortage.

Li added that autonomous technology could also help perform many tasks that are difficult for human beings, such as operating in extremely hot or cold weather. Many developed countries have a great need for self-driving products and technologies, thus creating plenty of business opportunities.

"For example, in some relatively remote areas of Japan, the aging population has intensified due to the influx of young people to big cities, leading to a shortage of staff in the local public transportation system, which needs to be filled by self-driving cabs and buses."

"In addition, the overall level of road infrastructure in these areas is relatively well-preserved, with a good automotive and electronic components industry chain basis, which is perfect for the application of autonomous driving," she said.

However, along with opportunities come a series of practical problems, the first of which is how best to localize.

From technology development, product production, and marketing, to customer service, each part matters. It is especially important to understand the local situation and adapt to different markets and customer groups.

At present, Chinese self-driving companies' overseas business has two modes: The overseas business of products and self-driving technology, and the form of localized cooperation that includes the setting up joint ventures with local enterprises or organizations, or reaching direct cooperation with local governments.

Using WeRide as an example, its domestic Robotaxi is operated on its platform "WeRide Go," while its overseas vehicles are handled by its partners. In the United Arab Emirates, its vehicles are first sold to local partners and then operated on the partner's taxi platform "TXAI", with WeRide collecting vehicle sales and service fees.

In contrast, Pony.ai, another well-known domestic company in the field of automatic driving, has mainly focused on technical service income generated from technology transfers.

At present, in ports, large warehousing logistics, and some other special scenes, autonomous driving has been the first to realize a practical appliance, with the large-scale popularization of automatic driving on the open road expected to take some time.

Mei Songlin, chief data officer of Weimar Automobile, believes that there are still a lot of difficulties to overcome for Chinese autonomous driving companies to go overseas.

"In the past, most of the tests done by Chinese automatic driving companies were conducted in the domestic market, but the environment, roads, and regulations in other countries are different," Mei said.

"They need to do data-based adaptive training tests for each market, as well as to understand local road rules and consumer habits. There will be a lot of requirements in terms of privacy data management and data compliance. So the overall workload is very large," he said.

On top of that, infrastructure could also be a major challenge.

China's self-driving vehicles are all NEVs with a more complete charging system, while overseas, the overall operation, charging, and parking systems need to be re-established.

"The most important thing is to have products that are technologically advanced, of high quality, and trusted," Li said.

(This article was adapted from one published by Jiemian.)