Pony A.I. Racing to the Top for Self Driving.

[G. David Felt]

China Leads the market in EV sales and now they have decided they cannot allow anyone to lead in self driving autos. pony.ai is an autonomous technology startup that is raising funds to push science fiction to reality not just in China but around the world. Recently they just raised $102 million in funding to expand their testing. They currently are a Level 4 autonomous vehicle startup with the HQ in Beijing and remote offices in Fremont California and Guangshou, China. This company founded in 2016 by Tiancheng Lou who worked previously at Baidu an AI company and James Peng a programmer who was part of Googles autonomous program started the company to build systems that could work on any auto. 

The focus is a complete software stack that works both internally in the auto and externally taking into account action of what is going on around the perimeter of the auto, what is being done inside the auto and what humans may try to do to the auto. The goal is a software solution that is fully independent that can be sold to any auto company.

With a quality management team / founders, young staff of graduates and their A and B funding secured, the company is now worth $1 billion dollars without selling a single software solution yet. GAC Group (Guangshou Automotive Group Co) has signed a strategic agreement with pony.ai in February 2018 to cover all aspects of self driving for their product line of auto's. Currently they have a public course that the AI auto's are available for use by the publik in Nansha, Guangzhou and covers a total of 2.8km route.

While China currently lags behind the US in AI autonomous driving, no one should ignore them as China is the new Silicon Valley hotbed for tech startups. 

From software, motors, to battery tech, the Chinese government is helping companies to become global players and take over the markets due to their market protectionism. This does bring up big questions around protecting their market at the cost of competition from the US, Europe or other Asian countries. Japan and Korea have decided to open AI development centers with partners in China to keep from getting blocked out. Does this mean that GM's ownership and work in San Francisco that Honda just bought a piece of could be in jeopardy of getting into the Chinese market?

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