china has one thing going for them, they are willing to break a few eggs to make omelettes, one of the advantages of having an authoritarian government is that public feedback doesn't mean a whole lot.
Well there is more nuance than that. Firstly the feedback may not seem similar in appearance to western democracies (demonstration / public statement etc), but there are lots of protests (many violent) hence the vast monitoring system. How decisions are changed according to these feedbacks (negative or positive) never made western press. A typical, and more agreeable 'feedback' mechanism is the often trial and test rollout in a designated city/area.
Secondly any event in Beijing will bear significance that's not found in the lower prefecture level cities and everyone understands the stake and unsaid subtext. So in my opinion the government is actually more prudent than you think despite the lack of public feedback.
I think their strategy is to launch fully driverless taxi service in a restricted region and then gradually expand, depending on the acceptance and improvement of the system.
Comparatively, Tesla wants its autonomous driving feature to be usable anytime/anywhere with the condition that it might disengage and still rely on human judgement in early versions.
Tesla’s is more viable technically and more scalable, except the problem is that system is laughably unusable in scenarios where it is needed. I have looked at so many FSD beta videos, in most of the disengagement’s the car would have crashed and burned, very badly.
I don’t think any sane regulator would ever approve such a system.. ever. The improvements are still too slow and corner cases still deadly.
On the hand the geo-fenced systems like Waymo, Baidu etc, might be difficult to scale are orders of magnitude safer. Perhaps better overall both short and long/term.
Yes I don’t know either but that’s my unconsidered opinion.
While Uber and Lyft are selling their autonomous driving units, Baidu launches driverless service. Have they figured out how to do it right or just regulatory?
Note that they are only launching in a very limited and geofenced area away from the centre of Beijing.
For this sort of things the regulatory environment is usually very flexible. Probably a chat with the local government and they're fine as long as it does not attract bad coverage.
