Google and Tesla are doing everything they can to have their respective self-driving cars impact roads by 2020. Several other automakers are involved in autonomous vehicle development as well, all in a race to have their cars hit the market in four years.
That's in the United States.
In China, developers in the same space are in a position to make strides toward becoming the worldwide leader of autonomous vehicles. A New York Times feature story Sunday put the spotlight on self-driving car development in China, revealing how the country could edge the U.S. in quicker adoption since its national and local government will likely not hit companies in the space with too much regulatory red tape.
In fact, the feature story points to research from the Boston Consulting Group, which predicts that China will be the largest market for autonomous vehicles within 15 years, with self-driving taxis expected to lead the charge and sort of serve as guinea pigs for the adoption of the technology.
"It's not that people are more willing to use the cars in Beijing or Shanghai, it's that the economic value is much higher in China than in the U.S.," Xavier Mosquet, a managing director at the Boston Consulting Group, told the Times.
Chinese search engine company Baidu is mashing the dash on self-driving vehicle development, but it's far from the only company making headway in the sector. Another Internet company in the country, Leshi Internet Information & Technology, has a dedicated self-driving car unit, and Chinese automaker Great Wall Motors has launched a research center in Silicon Valley.
There's also the Uisee Technology startup, which was launched by Gansha Wu, a former director of Intel Labs China. The Times reports that Wu's company even plans an autonomous technology demonstration at next year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
"His team is an unusual collection of supertalent," Kai-Fu Lee, a venture capitalist and ex-head of Google in China, told the Times about Wu's team. "They combine a mechanical expert from a university, a top computer vision expert and machine learning from Google as well as Gansha and his team of semiconductor experts. Gansha is an excellent leader that binds these people together."
Added Wu: "We see a few stages toward fully autonomous driving."
Wu added that Uisee will test driverless cars on private roads at low speeds to further work on and improve the technology.
While China may not have the regulation challenges that the U.S. has, it does have other obstacles, such as getting autonomous vehicles up to speed by learning the country's complicated environment, which includes a massive amount of bicycles, pedestrians and vehicles overcrowding roads.
The race is on.
