Autonomous vehicles from Pony.ai start without a safety driver

Legislation relating to autonomous driving has picked up speed in the last few weeks and months. In this country, for example, the government has decided that such vehicles can be driven without a driver at the wheel, but the new rules are not yet perfect in some respects. Meanwhile, more and more providers of autonomous cars are entering the market.

This has also been the case with the Chinese company Pony.ai for some time. The company from Guangzhou and Silicon Valley has been on the streets of California since 2017, but until now a driver always had to sit behind the wheel. With a new approval from the California traffic authority, this restriction is no longer applicable.

Accordingly, the company’s vehicles are allowed to serve areas in Fremont, Milpitas and Irvine without a safety driver. The prerequisite for this is a maximum speed of 45 miles per hour (approx. 72 km / h), nice weather and use at bright times of the day (between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.).

This is followed by Pony.ai AutoX, Baidu, WeRide, Cruise, Nuro, Waymo and Zoox, all of which are already allowed to drive autonomously without a driver. A total of 55 companies in California have already been able to test their autonomous technology, and only one – Nuro – is even allowed to earn money commercially with it.

Pony.ai remains on the road to success, after a 400 million dollar investment by Toyota in 2020, the company is now worth around 3 billion dollars. After the People’s Republic, one now hopes to conquer the American market. Maybe we will soon see the company in Europe.

Own opinion:

A few years ago I would have said that it would be a while before we saw the first autonomous vehicles without safety drivers. But the companies mentioned above are already showing what is possible with today’s technology. It is a shame that we have mostly only seen widespread use in China or the USA so far, so more freedom in Germany would be desirable in the foreseeable future.

Via The Verge