China’s WeRide Can Now Test Robotaxis in California – CleanTechnica

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Waymo, Cruise, Tesla, Zoox … but who’s thinking about WeRide? The China-based company has just gotten approval to test robotaxis in California. Okay, it may not be the first company that comes to mind when you think of robotaxis, but it does have some notable points to highlight, which I’ll get to in the 3rd paragraph.

This is for testing with passengers in cars with or without human drivers, and it’s a three-year license. It’s not a license allowing WeRide to charge the passengers for these rides, as Waymo has, for example. That’s a separate approval that WeRide could get later on from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which is the agency that grants all of these robotaxi permits.

At the moment, WeRide has just 12 vehicles in California — in the San Jose area — for testing. But don’t take that to mean it’s a small or nascent robotaxi company. WeRide is the first company to have self-driving test vehicles in four different countries at the same time. Those are the US, China, the UAE, and Singapore.

Overall, the company has operations in 30 cities in 7 countries. (I assume it’s doing private testing or other operations in three of those countries.) “WeRide has operated a self-driving fleet for more than 1700 days,” the company says on its website.

The company has several different vehicle bodies to go with its self-driving software: Robotaxi, Robobus, Robovan, Robosweeper, and Advanced Driving Solution.

I’m not going to lie — the Robosweeper has me smiling for multiple reasons. 😀 I love it.

“WeRide plans to raise $440 million in its initial public offering (IPO) as well as in a concurrent private placement, with certain investors having agreed to purchase $320.5 million in class A ordinary share, according to its prospectus,” CnEVPost writes. “The company has completed 10 rounds of funding from investors including Nvidia, Bosch, and GAC Group. WeRide closed its last Series D + round in 2022, when it was valued at $5.1 billion. The company plans to issue 6,452,000 American depositary shares (ADSs) in its US IPO, with each ADS representing three ordinary shares. Its IPO pricing range is between $15.50 and $18.50 per ADS.”

WeRide claims it has the highest revenue of any company in the industry, and it made $21 million in revenue in the first half of the year. But it had a net loss of $124 million. So, there’s a long way to go toward making this a financially profitable business.

You can learn more about WeRide on its website. As the highest-revenue robotaxi company in the world, I’m eager to see how WeRide does in California and how long it takes until it’s providing robotaxi services like Waymo is.

All images courtesy of WeRide.

Related story: Waymo Doubles Robotaxi Trips in 3 Months — Is Waymo Finally Scaling Exponentially?