China’s Autonomous AI-Based Car Is Getting the Test Permit for the US

 China’s Robo Taxi startup Pony.ai has four-wheelers that can run on roads without a driver. The Chinese startup has now been allowed to test its driverless car in the US. Autonomous AI-based cars continue to get permits in many countries of the world, but Pony.ai driverless cars are not common in the following context. The reason behind it is that this startup car does not have a human being, which means that these cars run entirely in collaboration with machines equipped with machine learning and artificial intelligence. 

 The company has currently got a permit to conduct testing in three states, and with this, Pony has become the eighth company in the US to get a driverless vehicle testing permit. The list also includes Baidu, WeRide, AutoX, and Waymo. It will surely enhance the future of driverless automobiles.

Pony.ai took to his Twitter handle in a tweet announcing the permit. The company said they had been allowed to test their driverless car in California. The permit has been issued by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). It is an agency that controls automatic vehicle testing. The Yahoo Finance report suggests that Pony.ai was allowed to test these autonomous trains with safety drivers since 2017.

The report further states that Pony.ai can test six of its driverless cars on specified roads within the cities of Fremont, Milpitas, and Irvine under this permit. Several limits have also been fixed in the permit. These cars will have to work within a speed of more than 72.5 kmph in clear weather and lite rain. Testing will have to be done between 10 am and 3 pm at Weeks in Fremont and Milpitas.

Pony.ai was founded in 2016 by former Baidu developers James Peng and Lou Tiancheng. The company has partnerships with several other automakers and suppliers, including Bosch, Hyundai, and Toyota.

As per the information available on Wikipedia, Toyota is planning to invest a whopping amount of $400 million in the company. 

Companies that receive these driverless permits have to deliver evidence of insurance or a bond equal to $5 million and follow various other guidelines, such as training remote operators on the technology. According to the DMV, driverless testing permit holders also need to report to the DMV in 10 days any collisions involving a driverless test vehicle and submit an annual report of rescues.

It is clear that the future of automobiles is technology-driven and mainly AI-driven; the permits provided to a vast number of companies clearly show us that the future of driverless cars and other vehicles is bright. While in Phoenix, Arizona, robotaxi rides are available to the general public, and Waymo became the first service provider which offers robotaxi to the general public.

The best part about these AI-enabled vehicles is that they are reprogrammable, and having digital traces, can save the time of parking as they will have a self-parking feature in them.  

The cons are always there with technology, but that can be overcome, and the benefits are always bigger and helpful for humans. To reduce the safety issues, companies have begun to open-source parts of their driverless systems; Udacity is one of them who is going to provide an open-source software stack, while some other companies are having this in mind, which shows that collaboration and innovation is going to help in developing these autonomous vehicles easy and safe to use.

In 2019 survey conducted in America concluded that the US adults are not in favor of highly autonomous vehicles, which shows that here also the hybrid will be going to work, complete autonomous is not yet accepted, but in the upcoming future, when the technology became better and more people begin trusting in the autonomous vehicles then maybe the survey statistics will show a different result.

Source :- China’s Autonomous AI-Based Car Is Getting the Test Permit for the US