As for autonomous cars, Beijing and Silicon Valley are not so different

Beijing looks a lot like Silicon Valley – at least when it comes to autonomous vehicles.

The city's first ever self-driving test report in Beijing was released last week and seven of the eight companies included are also on the road in California.

While California has 62 companies that strive to make self-driving accessible to the public and Beijing only counts eight, there is a lot of overlap. There is also a clearly dominant player in each market. In the United States, it's Google's Waymo. In China, Baidu.

In a translated table provided by Baidu, seven of the eight companies conducting tests in the Chinese capital are also testing in California, headquartered in Silicon Valley. Tencent did not have a certification examination permit since the beginning of the year, but it would have built a stand-alone research team in Palo Alto. BAIC BJEV is present in Silicon Valley, but does not yet have autonomous vehicles on the road.

Baidu and Pony.AI, the leading companies in Beijing in terms of kilometers driven, lead both to the United States and China. Baidu has been conducting road tests in California since 2016 and has dominated the Beijing report with over 80% of the qualified vehicles in circulation.

Baidu's American counterpart has a lot more mileage (Waymo reported for the last time more than 10 million miles traveled on his own, while Baidu has nearly 90,000 miles in Beijing), but conceals respectively the closest competition .

Another similarity: Waymo launched its stand-alone taxi service, Waymo One, in Phoenix, Arizona, at the end of last year. Despite many limitations, this is the first company in the United States to offer autonomous car service. to the public. Baidu launches 100 robo-taxis over 130 miles of road in Changsha, Hunan Province.

KPMG's 2019 Autonomous Vehicle Readiness Index ranked the country in the United States as the fourth most autonomous driver, while China was in 20th place, mainly because of the late approval of the tests by the government.