Residents of Shenzhen will see truly driverless cars on the road starting Thursday. AutoX, a four-year-old startup backed by Alibaba, MediaTek and Shanghai Motors, is deploying a fleet of 25 unmanned vehicles in downtown Shenzhen, marking the first time any autonomous driving car in China tests without safety drivers or remote operators on public roads.
The cars, meant as robotaxis, are not yet open to the public, an AutoX spokesperson told TechCrunch.
The milestone came just five months after AutoX landed a permit from California to start driverless tests, following in the footsteps of Waymo and Nuro.
It also indicates that …
Provizio, a combination hardware and software startup with technology to improve car safety, has closed a seed investment round of $6.2million. Investors include Bobby Hambrick (the founder of Autonomous Stuff); the founders of Movidius; the European Innovation Council (EIC); ACT Venture Capital.
The startup has a “five-dimensional” sensory platform that — it says — perceives, predicts and prevents car accidents in real time and beyond the line-of-sight. Its “Accident Prevention Technology Platform” combines proprietary vision sensors, machine learning and radar with ultra-long range and foresight capabilities to prevent collisions at high speed and in all weather conditions, says the company. The Provizio team is made up of experts in robotics, AI and vision and radar sensor development.
Barry Lunn, CEO of Provizio said: “One point three five road deaths to zero drives everything we do at Provizio. We have put together an incredible team that is growing daily. AI is the future of automotive accident prevention and Provizio 5D radars with AI on-the-edge are the first step towards that goal.”
Also involved in Provizio is Dr. Scott Thayer and Prof. Jeff Mishler, formally of Carnegie Mellon robotics, famous for developing early autonomous technologies for Google / Waymo, Argo, Aurora and Uber.
