Chinese Auto Firms Shine in California DMV’s Autonomous Driving Reports

The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) released 2021 annual reports on Wednesday, summarizing feedback reported during local testing of autonomous driving technology. They also revealed that test vehicles traveled approximately 4.1 million miles in autonomous mode on California’s public roads during the reporting period – an increase of more than 2 million miles from the previous reporting cycle.

In terms of miles driven per each instance of human intervention, the top ten companies were AutoX, Cruise, Didi, Argo, WeRide, DeepRoute.ai, Pony.ai, Waymo, Zoox and Nuro. Among these, drivers for AutoX, Didi and Argo only took over once during the 30,000-mile autonomous driving mileage. This means the three firms almost realized complete autonomous driving.

As for the number of robocars running in California last year, Waymo ranked first with 693 vehicles, while Cruise and Zoox followed with 138 vehicles and 84 vehicles, respectively. Chinese autonomous driving companies AutoX, Pony.ai and WeRide ranked fourth, fifth and eighth, respectively.

California has the largest number and longest combined driving time of global autonomous driving enterprises, collecting a large amount of test data every year. In addition, it was the first license issuing authority for autonomous driving companies.

In 2020, AutoX won the second unmanned driving license in the world – and the first for a Chinese firm – in California. In 2021, Chinese companies including Baidu, WeRide, Pony also obtained autonomous driving licenses issued by the California DMV.

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