On 27 November, Mo Luyi, Vice President of Pony.ai, shared her opinions on the highlights and challenges of innovation in self-driving technologies at the Technology Innovation and Smart City Forum of the Asia Youth Leaders Forum 2021.
The full speech is as below.
I'm very happy to attend the Asia Youth Leaders Forum today and share my views with you. Allow me to make a brief self-introduction first. My name is Mo Luyi. I'm the Vice President of Pony.ai and the head of the Robotaxi business of Pony.ai. I want to welcome you all to Nansha. The China headquarters of Pony.ai is in Nansha. And I'm a native of Guangzhou. Welcome to my hometown as well as the China headquarters of Pony.ai. If you have time, you can use your mobile phone to try the Robotaxi service of Pony.ai in Guangzhou and experience the new technology of autonomous driving.
Regarding smart cities, first of all, I want to talk about what the goal of smart cities is from my understanding. I think a smart city is one that provides safe, reliable, and efficient lifestyle services for future life. And all smart city development should be based on this. Transportation is an indispensable part in the building of smart cities. The mobility of people and the transportation of goods are two main parts in the field of transportation. Next, I would like to share what we have been doing in the past five years in autonomous driving, including some new scenarios we've explored, new technologies we've used, and new experiences we want to give people in the future during our development of smart transportation and the transportation of people and goods.
Allow me to introduce you to Pony.ai. Our company was established in Silicon Valley in the United States five years ago, at the end of 2016. Only 4 months after its establishment, our China R&D Center was established. At the end of 2017, we set up our China headquarters in Nansha. In February 2018, the GAC GE3 vehicles equipped with our latest self-driving software and hardware system at the time hit the road in Nansha and began regular autonomous driving tests. That was the first time China saw an autonomous vehicle on public streets.
It has been four years since February 2018. During these four years, the industry and Pony.ai have gone through a lot of changes. At that time, we test-drove the cars on a path of several hundred meters in Nansha, between the district government and Citizen Square. Today, we have launched the self-driving taxi service in Nansha, covering a core urban area of more than 300 square kilometers in the district, as well as in Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area and Jiading District of Shanghai. Now it is very convenient to use our service. It's like a ride-hailing service. You can take our self-driving taxis in the aforementioned three places in Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai for daily travel needs. Whether it's on a rainy day or on busy city streets during rush hour, you can see robot drivers from Pony.ai who can take you wherever you want. It's a whole new experience: a safe, comfortable, and efficient travel experience. In addition, in terms of freight, we apply self-driving technology to heavy trucks to replace human drivers. We have found that in the freight industry, manpower shortage is a very serious problem, especially with the accelerated aging of the population. But with our robot drivers, this problem can be solved very easily. At the same time, it can greatly improve the safety of the entire travel or transportation process. We have found that 90% of traffic accidents are actually caused by human drivers. Through new technologies such as autonomous driving, we can experience something from the future in the field of transportation.
When it comes to the challenges we have been facing in the development of autonomous driving, there are two aspects. The first aspect is the challenges of technological development in the company. And the second is the challenges from applying the technology to real life, including laws, regulations, and other social problems. Now I'll talk about the first aspect: technological challenges. In the development process of autonomous driving, two issues are very important, which must be settled before large-scale application can be carried out.
The first issue is autonomy. For a vehicle to be safe enough for autonomous driving, many technological challenges need to be solved, because there are many unexpected situations on the road. In the face of various emergencies, our system needs to respond flexibly and ensure the safety of passengers. At the same time, it is necessary to improve the comfort and efficiency of the rides. This means a lot of challenges. In June this year, our two founders got on one of our autonomous vehicles on the road in Nansha. Why would we start doing this at that point in time? In fact, we have been analyzing the security of the entire system. We think that the goal of autonomous vehicles is to improve traffic safety. So, they must firstly be safer to ride than with human drivers. Like in Nansha, how to analyze the system’s capability against a series of detailed evaluation indicators is very important. We have actually been improving our capabilities in this area. Against such evaluation indicators, we have found that our system can actually be better than humans in safe driving. However, there is still distance from large-scale application. One of the most important challenges is how to continuously improve the system to face more complex scenarios and ever-changing road conditions.
Then, what is the second issue? If we want to apply autonomous driving on a large scale, we have to solve the problem of scaling or mass production. This is why we have deep cooperation with many domestic and foreign automobile manufacturers including GAC, to solve the problem of mass production. Autonomous driving system must be organically integrated with the vehicle, just like the brain and body of a human being, which must be coordinated in order to run fast. Our system needs to be well coordinated with the vehicle before we can apply this technology on a large scale. This is our second issue in the technology aspect. The realization of autonomy and large-scale application is the prerequisite for the wide deployment of autonomous driving. I think these are the challenges that enterprises themselves need to overcome.
In addition, when we apply such technology to real life, there needs to be innovation in laws and regulations. In this regard, I also have two points of view. On one hand, of course, we very much hope that the policy is pioneering, innovative, and sufficiently inclusive of new technologies and encourages the practice of innovation and entrepreneurship. On the other hand, policies also need to be continuously improved. Policies need to raise the threshold and set standards and industry indicators. Only in this way can we ensure sustainable and healthy development of this industry. So, regarding these issues, be it policies or industry standards, we have conducted many in-depth discussions with upstream and downstream partners in the industry as well as relevant government agencies such as legislative departments. This past week, we obtained a license for China’s first commercial demonstration of Robotaxi service in Beijing. To obtain this license, we need to meet many new regulatory requirements, such as requirements for technology and security, including vehicle system security, information security, and data security. This is also an outcome of our discussion with relevant regulatory authorities. We believe that a high threshold and good industry standard can benefit the future development of the entire industry. In particular, in the coming five to ten years when autonomous driving further matures and is applied in every aspect of our life, this problem will become one that must be solved.
In the end, we hope that through our efforts at Pony.ai and cooperation with other relevant companies, we can make greater contribution to the development of this industry.
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