China's Robotaxi Industry: Unlocked (w/ CFO @ Pony.ai Dr. Leo Wang)

Certainly, we've seen the number of deployments, both US domestic, China domestic, and also international in Europe.

Certainly, they've skyrocketed.

We'll talk about all of that in a little bit, but I want to dive into some of these achievements that I just listed off.

I want to talk about some numbers because this sort of really blows my mind.

In April, you told me that the Gen 7 bomb cost was around like 300 RMB, which is around like 48,000 US.

Since then, you've announced that the target that you're trying to hit is under 230,000 RMB.

which is about 33,000 us dollars, which is insane.

I don't even think you can buy a car in the U S that has any sort of, uh, drive assist capability for under, for under $40,000.

Um, that's for the 2027, uh, hardware, which actually, I believe you've sort of already started.

leaning towards right in your deployments yes like how do you intend to achieve that price target is it just like your scale is it like new suppliers or hardware design or is it like a cheaper car how do you do it

It's actually made by several factors.

First of all, of course, I would contribute that to the success of supply chain in China.

For example, the base vehicle, it's an EV.

The EV vehicle itself becomes more and more mature and the price on the EV side, it's also getting down every year.

Second, for example, the sensors.

In previous year, people talk about how expensive LiDAR can be.

We are still using LiDAR.

For Gen7, we use a total of nine LiDARs, to be honest.

But if you look at the LiDAR cost in China, now it's just a very small fraction of the previous year.

So I have to give credit to the whole China supply chain.

Second is as we are getting into larger volume, definitely our bargaining power to our supplier become more and more, you know, solid.

Because when we started to produce Gen 7, keep in mind in previous generation, we only produce like a few hundreds.

Then started from Gen 7, we talked to them, oh, I need at least a few thousands.

And that's 10 times.

But for these suppliers, they need to believe whether you can really make that promise.