Geely Says This Is China’s First Purpose-Built Robotaxi. I’m Not So Sure
- Geely says the EVA Cab was designed from the ground up for robotaxi duty.
- The EVA Cab has no steering wheel and supports battery swapping and automatic cleaning.
- Geely’s ride-hailing division, CaoCao, wants 100,000 EVA Cabs in service by 2030, but scaling robotaxis won’t be easy.
There are already robotaxis operating in China, but most are regular vehicles that have been converted to drive themselves. Geely says none of them were designed from the ground up for robotaxi duty, which is where its EVA Cab comes in.
Recently unveiled at the Beijing Auto Show last week, the EVA Cab is a joint effort with autonomous driving tech company Afari Technology and CaoCao Mobility, Geely’s ride-hailing division. Not much is known about the vehicle at the moment, but Geely said it’s set to enter production and active service next year, with plans for large-scale deliveries in 2028.
6
Source: Geely
Geely hasn’t given us a good look inside the vehicle, but it doesn’t appear to have a steering wheel or a front passenger seat. The interior appears arranged around a central passenger space, so it’s more like a lounge than a traditional car interior. You enter the cabin through electric sliding doors that open to a huge aperture, making it very easy to get in and out of the vehicle.
It’s been designed for large ride-hailing fleets, so it supports fully automated battery swapping and automatic cleaning. The doors also don’t have pockets to minimize the risk of passengers forgetting something in the vehicle.
Now, even though Geely says this is China’s first true purpose-built robotaxi, that’s not entirely true. The first is actually Baidu’s Apollo RT6 vehicle, launched in 2022, even though it looks like a fairly conventional people carrier. The same can’t be said of the EVA Cab, which looks like a stretched, futuristic Fiat Multipla complete with that car’s unusually high-set headlights positioned just below the windshield.
Geely seems serious about entering the autonomous robotaxi business and partnering with Afari, which will provide the self-driving tech, and CaoCao, which already has a ride-hailing platform. Reuters notes that CaoCao wants to add 100,000 of these EVA Cabs to its fleet by 2030. It will initially be rolled out in Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong, as well as five major Chinese cities, starting next year.
True, reliable Level 4 autonomous driving remains elusive for most players, and having a fully purpose-built vehicle doesn’t solve all the problems, as Tesla and others have realized. It also needs to make financial sense for all the companies involved to run such vast fleets of driverless vehicles.
Building the robotaxi seems like the easy part; making thousands of them work reliably, safely, and profitably every day is the real challenge.
