On January 28th, AutoX, the Robotaxi company, officially announced that the total area of their autonomous driving operations has exceeded 1,000 square kilometers.
AutoX’s road tests mainly take place in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, including the “unmanned domain” in Shenzhen with a total area of 168 square kilometers where AutoX can achieve smooth driving from the main road to the urban village.
In addition, AutoX also released a video of a full 5 hours and 40 minutes of unmanned driving tests. The test vehicle was fully unmanned throughout the journey, including urban ground roads, elevated roads, tunnels, and even stopping by the side of the road to wait for the safety officer to get in the car, and passing through the toll station on its own. The test also took place from daytime to nighttime, demonstrating the stability of AutoX Robotaxi in multiple scenarios.
Three things to note are:
- AutoX Gen5 Robotaxi
For this test, AutoX used its Gen5 Robotaxi vehicle developed in collaboration with Chrysler. Last month, AutoX showed the entire production process of this car to the public. After the Dodge Grand Caravan was offline, it entered the AutoX Super Factory for refitting, equipped with cameras, millimeter-wave, ultrasonic radar and lidar, and the vehicle also carries the AutoX XCU computing platform.
- Point-to-point unmanned driving
AutoX vehicles can achieve fully unmanned automatic driving within a limited range, whether it is in urban villages or on urban expressways, and can stop at any location within the operating range.
- Test operating range of 1,000 square kilometers
For Robotaxi, the most important thing is the operating range, which is the fundamental of commercialization.
As early as 2019, AutoX had accumulated autonomous driving experience in 13 cities around the world. Although the 1,000 square kilometers is still far from meeting the needs of user travel scenarios, with increasing data, improved capabilities and the opening up of relevant regulations, we believe that this number will continue to expand.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.