Highlights From Our California Robotaxi Pilot

Today, we published our third quarterly service data report, covering the three-month period of 11/1/2019 to 1/31/2020. During this reporting period, we officially launched our autonomous ride-hailing pilot for the general public in Irvine, California following a soft launch in October 2019. We’re excited to share with you some of the operational data from California’s first public-facing autonomous vehicle robotaxi, created in collaboration with partners Hyundai and Via.

Increased fleet utilization

Over the three month period, we saw rides per vehicle per day more than double from 5 rides in November to over 11 rides in January. (see graph below).

Along with an increase in vehicle utilization, we also saw a decrease in average idle time between trips for each vehicle. In our previous report, we noted an average idle time of 2.6 hours between trips, which has decreased to about 0.5 hours in our most recent report, representing a reduction of over 80%.

Healthy rider growth and an expanding user base

Through word-of-mouth and community outreach, we grew our active riders by roughly 20% month-over-month, despite an expected slowdown during the end-of-year holiday season. In total, we completed 5,252 trips over the three month period, roughly 15% of which were shared rides.

We’re encouraged by the reception we’ve had in Irvine and look forward to continuing to provide a unique transportation solution to the community. It motivates us to work even harder to ensure that we deploy our technology safely, reliably, and at scale.

Meanwhile, in Fremont…

In addition to our Irvine operation, we operate an internal employee robotaxi service, named PonyPilot, at our HQ in Fremont, CA. The service offers point-to-point rides within Fremont and surrounding areas, covering over 20 residential and commercial points of interest, and is hailed through the PonyPilot app by Pony.ai employees. Our vehicles have completed 390 trips since launching the service in November 2019.