Self-driving car companies’ first step to making money isn’t

On Jun 2, 2022

A WeRide robotaxi with health supplies heads to Liwan district on June 4, 2021, in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.

Southern Metropolis Daily | Visual China Group | Getty Images

BEIJING — While governments may be wary of driverless cars, people want to buy the technology, and companies want to cash in.

It’s a market for a limited version of self-driving tech that assists drivers with tasks like parking and switching lanes on a highway. And McKinsey predicts the market for a basic form of self-driving tech — known as “Level 2” in a classification system for autonomous driving — is worth 40 billion yuan ($6 million) in China alone.

“L2, improving the safety value for users, its commercial value is very clear,” Bill Peng, Hong Kong-based partner at McKinsey, said Monday in Mandarin translated by CNBC. “Robotaxis certainly is a direction, but it doesn’t [yet] have a commercialization result.”

Robotaxi businesses have made strides in the last several months in China, with Baidu and Pony.ai the first to get approval to charge fares in a suburban district of Beijing and other parts of the country. Locals are enthusiastic — Baidu’s robotaxi service Apollo Go claims to clock roughly more than 2,000 rides a day.

But when it comes to revenue, robotaxi apps show the companies are still heavily subsidizing rides. For now, the money for self-driving tech is in software sales.

Lucrative tech

Investment analysts from Goldman Sachs and Nomura point to opportunities in auto software itself, from in-car entertainment to self-driving systems.

Last week, Chinese self-driving tech start-up WeRide said it received a strategic investment from German engineering company Bosch to produce an assisted driving software system.

The goal is to jointly develop an L2/L3 system for mass production and delivery next year, Tony Han, WeRide founder and CEO, told CNBC. L4 designates fully self-driving capability under specific circumstances.

“As a collaborator, we of course want this sold [in] as many car OEMs in China so we can maximize our [revenue and] profit,” he said, referring to auto manufacturers. “We truly believe L2 and L3 systems can make people drive cars [more] safely.”

In a separate release, Bosch called the deal a “strategic partnership” and said its China business would provide sensors, computing platforms, algorithm applications and cloud services, while WeRide provides the software. Neither company shared how much capital was invested.

The deal “is very significant,” said Tu Le, founder of Beijing-based advisory firm Sino Auto Insights. “This isn’t just a VC that sees potential in the overall market and invests in the sector.”

He expects the next step for commercialization would involve getting more of WeRide’s technology “bolted on the partner OEM’s products in order to get more pilots launched in China and experimenting with paid services so that they can tweak business models and understand the pricing dynamics and customer needs better.”

WeRide has a…