BEIJING, CHINA – July 11, 2024: People take photos of the WeRide Robobus, a fully driverless shuttle capable of SAE Level 4 autonomous driving, at the Beijing High-Level Autonomous Driving Demonstration Area in Beijing, China. (Photo by Jia Tianyong/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)
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Self-driving technology company WeRide is accelerating its global expansion as the artificial intelligence boom accelerates the adoption of machine learning in transportation.
“Logistics delivery and waste transportation, these two areas are progressing from indoor robots to outdoor robots to autonomous driving outdoors. Now, with the development of AI, things are moving relatively fast,” said Sebastian Yee, WeRide's director of business development in Singapore.
The company began safety testing of its “Robo Sweeper” in Singapore in June, after conducting similar trials in several Chinese cities.
Once safety tests are passed, these vehicles will operate fully autonomously without a safety driver. These AI-enabled vehicles can perform various sanitation tasks such as cleaning, watering and disinfecting roads, as well as sense road conditions to avoid pedestrians and obstacles.
That same month, WeRide also launched a self-driving public shuttle bus service with a safety driver on board at Resorts World Sentosa, a resort island in southern Singapore.
Founded in Silicon Valley in 2017, the company launched its robotaxi service in Guangzhou, China in 2019 and has received strategic investments from global automakers such as the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance and GAC Group.
The company is developing and testing a range of self-driving technologies, with the most advanced being one in which the vehicle can drive itself, but has a safety driver in the driver's seat as a precautionary measure.
“WeRide is, [driverless] Permits from the US, China, UAE and Singapore. [companies] “Previously we only had permission from one or two countries, but now we have permission from four,” said Kelly Xu, WeRide's Singapore general manager.
“We're not just a Chinese company, we're an international company. We've actually started expanding into other countries,” Xu said.
WeRide is now looking at other markets such as Japan and Europe.
“We're going to Europe. We actually went to the French Open two months ago. We've got our vehicles in place. So we're going to slowly expand our reach. And I think this is just the first step,” Yi said.
WeRide filed for an initial public offering on Nasdaq on Friday but did not disclose how much it plans to raise, which could be the largest U.S. listing by a Chinese company since Didi Chuxing's IPO in 2021. The ride-hailing company was later delisted after reports that Chinese regulators had asked executives to draw up a delisting plan.
WeRide, which is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, said in a Friday SEC filing that it may face “various legal and operational risks and uncertainties associated with being based in or conducting business primarily in mainland China.” WeRide declined to comment on the IPO.
WeRide decided to expand into Singapore and the UAE because they are hubs of Southeast Asia and the Middle East respectively and both are “very open” to autonomous technology, Mr Yee said.
“You need the government and you need a well-established ecosystem,” Ye said, adding that the market needs a certain level of regulation.
Each country needs to have not only “commercial sense” but also “a certain level of understanding of AI development.”
“Some countries may not be at a commercial level, but they have a vision they want to build. If they don't have that vision, it's pointless.”
Singapore has been testing self-driving vehicles for several years, with A*STAR's self-driving car becoming the first to be approved for public road testing in July 2015. Changi Airport will begin trialing self-driving buses to transport workers within restricted areas from this quarter as part of an effort to improve productivity.
The development of AVs could help ageing countries such as Japan and Singapore overcome labor shortages, with one of Singapore's goals being to use AVs to boost public transport and ease the strain on a growing and ageing road population.
While U.S. giants such as Tesla and Alphabet's Waymo have made great strides in the self-driving industry, Chinese automakers are leading the way in innovation and production.
In its latest move to broaden adoption, the Chinese government in June gave approval for an initial group of nine domestic automakers, including BYD and NIO, to begin testing conditional autonomous driving technology on certain public roads.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is aiming to win regulatory approval for the company's fully self-driving technology in China by the end of the year.
