On November 5th, Alibaba’s subsidiary Gaode announced a global ecological cooperation with Xiaopeng Motors, and in the future, both parties will jointly provide Robotaxi services to the world. At the same time, this is also an important step for Gaode’s comprehensive shift towards space intelligence and the cross-border opening of AI capabilities – committed to serving global customers with “technology+ecology” and creating the largest Robotaxi aggregation platform.
According to the cooperation details announced by both parties, Gaode will provide aggregation service capabilities for Xiaopeng, jointly expand the Robotaxi service area, and provide users with efficient and seamless travel experience. At the same time, Gaode will also assist Xiaopeng Motors in going global and promoting China’s leading Robotaxi service to the world.
Prior to this, Robotaxi companies such as Wenyuan Zhixing and Xiaoma Zhixing had already connected to Gaode, and users could call a car with just one click in the service areas provided by the two companies through the Gaode App.
In 2017, Gaode pioneered the aggregated ride hailing model in the ride hailing industry. With its fair and open characteristics, it has developed into the largest aggregated ride hailing platform in China. Now, Gaode has once again brought the aggregation mode to the Robotaxi industry, which is bound to bring significant changes to the Robotaxi industry.
At the critical stage of Robotaxi’s transition from technology validation to large-scale commercial operation, the industry urgently needs a neutral, open, and efficient foundational platform that can simultaneously meet the demands of multiple parties.
For the entire industry, Gaode may be an ideal “greatest common divisor” platform: it does not operate its own transportation capacity, but only serves as a connector and accelerator, providing a massive user portal and real operational scenarios, allowing the Robotaxi industry to focus on technology and product research and development; With a solid foundation in AI technology, it can output quantifiable computing power, enabling Robotaxis from different technological routes, vehicle models, and regions to operate efficiently and collaborate on the same platform, thereby promoting the industry to achieve scale and sustainable implementation.
The situation of Robotaxi has changed
When Robotaxi first appeared, many people only saw it as a technological performance and found it difficult to connect with daily travel.
On the one hand, the high cost of Robotaxi makes it impractical to apply it on a large scale for ordinary people’s travel services. In the early days, a Robotaxi that adopted a modification plan had a cost of about 450000 yuan for the vehicle itself, as well as the cost of installing sensors and labor. The operator also had to pay about 150000 yuan in annual maintenance costs. According to calculations, the cost per kilometer for Robotaxi in 2019 was as high as 23.3 yuan, while the cost per kilometer for traditional taxis was only 1.7 yuan.
On the other hand, as an emerging phenomenon, Robotaxi has many areas that need to be explored and clarified in terms of technological maturity, security, and responsibility allocation. Some cities in China have opened up pilot operations for Robotaxi, but most of them are limited to closed parks or designated areas, making it difficult to meet the flexible and changing travel needs of users.
After several years of development, the cost of Robotaxi’s core components has been significantly reduced, the technological maturity is increasing, and the support for innovative application activities in autonomous driving is also growing in various regions. Robotaxi has no major obstacles in production and market access.
This means that the development focus of the Robotaxi industry has shifted from technology research and development and promoting policy implementation to commercial operation.
In the past two years, both domestic and foreign Robotaxis have been accelerating their commercialization process. Among them, domestic enterprises such as Wenyuan Zhixing and Xiaoma Zhixing have carried out demonstration operations in multiple cities; Waymo’s self driving taxi orders in San Francisco have also reached a considerable scale.
During this process, how to operate the C-end service well has become the biggest challenge faced by various Robotaxi companies. This makes the value of the travel platform increasingly prominent – it is no longer just an ordinary part of technology, vehicles, and operations, but a key link that determines how far Robotaxi company can go.
Robotaxi requires’ greatest common divisor ‘
With the advancement of commercialization, the attitudes of various Robotaxi companies towards travel platforms have also divided into two distinct factions.
Baidu, Didi and other companies have been involved in the operation of Robotaxi since their early years, but they insist on building their own channels. These companies have accumulated hundreds of millions of active users in the C-end Internet market, chose a closed mode in ecological operation, and tried to seize the market with their own Robotaxi vehicles.
The other group of Robotaxi players are mainly autonomous driving and vehicle console manufacturers. These companies saw the commercial value of Robotaxi and rushed in, but they faced difficulties in obtaining traffic and high operating costs when building their own channels. Collaborating with external aggregation platforms has become a better choice, and these companies are also voting with their feet.
Whether it’s Wenyuan Zhixing, Xiaoma Zhixing, or Xiaopeng, they all prove this point. Among them, the cooperation between Gaode and Xiaopeng is the industry’s first “travel platform+front-end mass production” model, which will further promote the accelerated scale implementation of Robotaxi.
In fact, this model of cooperation between Robotaxi companies and travel aggregation platforms has also been validated in foreign markets. This year, several Robotaxis, including Momenta, that plan to operate in global markets, consider Uber as an essential partner.
And Gaode’s aggregation ecology is also globalizing. At present, Gaode APP has covered more than 200 countries and regions worldwide, and overseas taxi services have been implemented in over 50 countries and regions. This means that in the future, China’s leading Robotaxi technology can go global with just one click through Gaode, truly achieving “global usability and ease of use”.
Based on Gaode, Robotaxi’s globalization can ensure efficiency while expanding on a large scale. As a platform, Gaode can help Robotaxi efficiently integrate all elements such as users, technology, cross regional culture, policies, etc., which will greatly benefit Robotaxi’s accelerated expansion into overseas markets.
As more and more players join Robotaxi, industry competition is bound to become fierce, which puts higher demands on the operational efficiency of Robotaxi companies. In this market environment, they need a ‘greatest common divisor platform’, and Gaode has undoubtedly become their first choice.
Gaode Space Intelligence may become standard equipment for Robotaxi
When the large-scale application of Robotaxi is truly launched, the importance of Gaode in the Robotaxi industry will be further enhanced.
At the operational level, the fair and open nature of Gaode Aggregation Platform makes it easier to gain the trust of partners.
In previous ride hailing operations, Gaode and its partner ride hailing platform companies jointly established a “benchmark service quality evaluation system”, including specific indicators such as safety management, operational efficiency, ride experience, customer service guarantee, and industry responsibility, to promote the healthy development of the industry. This evaluation system will also be introduced into the operation of Robotaxi, establishing a healthy and fair competitive environment for all Robotaxi players.
More importantly, Gaode is one of the few travel service platforms that only aggregates and does not engage in self operation, which helps the platform to provide a fair competitive environment for various Robotaxi players from an objective and neutral perspective.
At the technical level, Gaode’s spatial intelligence technology will also be a standard feature of Robotaxi.
In August of this year, Gaode completed a comprehensive AI transformation, making space intelligence a strategic pivot for the future. Gaode Space Intelligence is the deep perception, inference, and prediction ability of AI on the spatiotemporal structure of the physical world – allowing machines to not only “see” roads, but also “understand” the laws of urban operation – from human flow tides and traffic congestion to low altitude obstacles and indoor routes, constructing a dynamic, multidimensional, and computable real-world digital image.
In the field of Robotaxi, this ability is being translated into three major values:
One is global optimal collaboration, based on a global understanding of urban transportation, to achieve core capabilities such as real-time road conditions, tidal analysis, and supply and demand forecasting; The second is beyond visual range perception, which compensates for the blind spots of single vehicle intelligence through vehicle to road collaboration (V2X) and multi vehicle data fusion; The third is real scene training, which provides a massive, complex and high-value verification environment for the auto drive system.
Prior to this, Gaode had established deep cooperative relationships with over 40 automobile manufacturers and accumulated solid technical capabilities in fields such as intelligent cockpit and advanced assisted driving (ADAS). Nowadays, relying on the underlying technology architecture of “spatial intelligence”, the above capabilities are achieving systematic innovation, providing Robotaxi with more accurate environmental perception, more efficient decision support, and smoother end-to-end travel experience.
The cooperation between Robotaxi and Gaode not only fills the gaps in operational capabilities, but also gains the support of spatial intelligence, enabling it to have beyond line of sight capabilities, more accurate perception of the global scene, and thereby improving the usability and safety of Robotaxi.
According to Goldman Sachs’ forecast, the size of China’s Robotaxi market is expected to rise to $47 billion by 2035, an increase of nearly 700 times compared to 2025. In this rapidly growing emerging field, there will inevitably be more Robotaxi players. With their integration, Gaode is expected to become the largest Robotaxi aggregation platform in China and also the core technology partner of the Robotaxi industry.
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