Yesterday we published a piece I wrote for Fortune magazine’s next issue, on how Alphabet’s Waymo is—for now, at least—the front runner in self-driving cars. You can read it here, but the gist is that Waymo was able to take a more cautious approach than rivals such as Cruise and Uber, and this seems to be paying off in the form of a steadily-expanding business and a relative lack of regulatory woes.
One thing that I all-too-briefly touched on in the article was the subject of Waymo’s Chinese competitors, which have begun testing their vehicles on American roads—companies like Pony.ai, AutoX, and Apollo (owned by Baidu, China’s answer to Google) that have long been allowed to ply robo-taxi services on limited routes in cities like Shenzhen and Beijing. AutoX and Apollo even have California DMV permission for fully-autonomous “Level 4” tests without a driver present.
