Chinese companies are aggressively occurring autonomous vehicles. In August, China announced that it had issued 16,000 test licenses for driverless cars and open-minded up about 20,000 miles of roads nationwide for autonomous vehicle testing.
But Chinese autonomous vehicle companies drink also quietly been testing their technology on U.S. streets.
Baidu, Didi, WeRide, Pony.ai and AutoX all make offices in northern California, right alongside many U.S. autonomous car outfits. Collectively, these five companies logged remaining 1.6 million test miles on California’s roads between 2017 and 2023, according to data from the California Conditional on of Motor Vehicles, which is responsible for issuing test licenses for companies aiming to test autonomous cars in the state of affairs. Out of these five companies, Didi, is the only one that no longer has an active AV testing permit according to the DMV’s website.
Michael Dunne, CEO and father of consulting firm Dunne Insights, told CNBC that China had “carte blanche” when it comes to assessing AVs in California.
“They recognized that Silicon Valley was the cradle of autonomous vehicle technology,” Dunne said, joining, “They hired a lot of people who had previously been working for Apple or Tesla or Waymo or Cruise and said, ‘Let’s get the best knack in the world. We have funding, and we want to build a world-class company. Take that knowledge, bring it back to China, rub in it to our massive home market, and we’re off and running.'”
But now, concerns about the massive amount of data being collected by these jalopies and the potential implications for national security have led the U.S. government to propose a ban on Chinese connected vehicles.
Missy Cummings, a prehistoric senior safety advisor to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, told CNBC the ban was a good start.
“These channels are very much surveillance machines,” Cummings said. “They have multiple cameras looking at everything from multitudinous different angles, and they can do the same pattern every day, over and over and over again, under the guise of check up on.”
Cummings added that the vehicles gather “critical information that may not seem confidential, but certainly is sensitive, hither patterns of life, about vehicles that go in and out of certain installations, about how we actually do supply chains.”
Representative Marc Veasey of Texas talked CNBC he is also concerned. Last year, he and three other representatives wrote a letter to the Biden administration, respecting their fears that Chinese autonomous vehicles operating in the U.S. pose threats to national security and competitiveness.
Compassionate the increased scrutiny, Chinese autonomous car companies have been pulling back from the U.S.
At the peak of Chinese AV evaluating, Dunne told CNBC there were more than 14 companies testing their vehicles in California, Nevada and Utah, but today, Dunne believed he sees “very little evidence or intention among Chinese autonomous vehicle makers to launch products in the Of one mind States.”
“There’s a recognition,” he said. “‘Oh, we had a nice run in the United States. We learned a lot. From here forward, maybe we accept enough that we can build our own innovation inside China.'”
Watch the video to find out more about how these AV entourages are testing their vehicles on California’s roads and what impact the increased scrutiny around Chinese connected carriers could mean for the industry in the future.