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China's Robotaxi Companies Are Racing Ahead of Tesla
(spectrum.ieee.org)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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Anything but trains, subways, trams, or buses?
Tech won't solve traffic, proper investment into public transportation will. Investment in these startups should be funneled into self driving public transportation.
China has quite a number of trains already. Arguably they overbuilt their train network as much of it is heavily underutilized.
Heavily underutilized for now. It's significantly cheaper and easier to build the network too early than too late, when you have to coordinate property acquisition and demolition across the full length of the network.
China has a birthrate of 1.15 children per woman. When is this later time you allude to when there will be more people to utilize the heavily underutilized network?
When many who still aren't in cities move into them. Urbanization in China has yet more runway and that drives rail utilization.
690 million women in China, let's say 30% are in age to give birth, that's 207 million. If only 50% of those actually give birth in the next 5 years, that's a whooping 47.6 million kids per year.
Yeah, that population will climb, just not overnight.
China's birthrate is 1.15 children per woman. Replacement birthrate is 2.1 children per woman.
If each woman is having less than 2.1 children, the population falls.
Isn't that now for their cross country trains as opposed to their subways?
They literally have the largest high speed rail network in the world
It could. Imagine 80% autonomous vehicle traffic, 30% of that is multipassenger capable taxi service. Autonomous vehicle lanes moving reliably at 75mph. With this amount of taxi service the advantages of personal vehicle ownership falls and the wait time for an available pickup diminishes rapidly.
China has many areas with pretty good public transportation. In the US, tech advances and legislation changes to enable the above model is better suited to the existing infrastructure.