While governments may be wary of driverless cars, people want to buy the technology, and companies want to cash in.
It’s a market for a limited version of self-driving tech that assists drivers with tasks like parking and switching lanes on a highway. And McKinsey predicts the market for a basic form of self-driving tech — known as “Level 2” in a classification system for autonomous driving — is worth 40 billion yuan ($6 billion) in China alone.
“L2, improving the safety value for users, its commercial value is very clear,” Bill Peng, Hong Kong-based partner at McKinsey, said Monday in Mandarin translated by CNBC. “Robotaxis certainly is a direction, but it doesn’t [yet] have a commercialization result.”