Autonomous and Connected Driving The Next China Export Has Begun: Intelligent Vehicles Are Coming to Europe

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Stellantis

Wuxi InfiMotion Technology Co., Ltd.

After the electric car, the second wave of disruption from China is now coming – intelligent driving. While other countries are still debating whether and when to switch to electric driving, the People's Republic has already moved a step further. After electric driving, autonomous and connected driving is being introduced very quickly there. And they aim to achieve global success with it.

Chinese companies are starting to bring such technologies to Europe. Beijing-based startup Pony.ai has just entered into a strategic partnership with Stellantis to jointly develop and test autonomous minibuses in Europe. At home in China, Pony.ai already operates driverless robotaxi services in several cities. The autonomous driving specialist recently established a European headquarters in Luxembourg. According to the Reuters news agency, the first road tests for electric minibuses of the "Peugeot e-Traveller" model, equipped with Pony.ai's autonomous driving systems, are set to begin there in the coming months.

As early as next year, additional road tests of this kind are planned in other European cities. Stellantis stated in its press release that it aims to "integrate Pony.ai's advanced autonomous driving software with Stellantis's AV-ready medium-sized transporter platform (K0) in the BEV version." "Starting in 2026, a phased rollout in European cities will follow," it continues. The two partners aim to test the safety, performance, and regulatory compliance of such vehicles under real traffic conditions. Pony.ai and Stellantis are striving to develop "SAE Level 4 autonomous vehicles" in this project. This means that the battery-powered medium-sized commercial vehicles can be driven in "hands-off, eyes-off" mode. A driver must be able to intervene immediately in an emergency but is no longer required to drive constantly.

The Development is Progressing

A few months ago, Pony.ai already began a collaboration with Uber to jointly introduce robotaxis in Europe and the Middle East. In Luxembourg, the Chinese have already been granted an L4 test license.

Several other Chinese startups in the smart driving sector are now increasingly active in Europe. WeRide, AutoX, DeepRoute.ai, Momenta, and Apollo Go by Baidu are expanding their pilot trials in several European cities and forming new partnerships with European companies for this purpose. WeRide already operates an autonomous "Robobus Shuttle" at Zurich Airport, transporting pilots and flight attendants to and from their planes. While a "safety driver" is still on board, the buses operate autonomously.

In the next phase, residents in the Swiss towns of Otelfingen, Boppelsen, Hüttikon, and Dänikon will be able to order an autonomously-driving robotaxi from WeRide via an app, followed by residents in Buchs, Dällikon, and Regensdorf, the Chinese company has announced.

The Chinese startup Momenta, together with Uber, will begin related road tests in Munich, also at Level 4. DeepRoute.ai, another mobility provider from China, recently announced ambitious plans for Europe at the IAA automotive trade show in Munich. "Europe is a huge market," Reuters quotes the company's CEO, Maxwell Zhou. "It is very important for us."

The Chinese manufacturers of intelligent driving systems hope to replicate the success of Chinese automakers like BYD, Li Auto, or Nio, who, as "first movers," are successful with electric and hybrid cars and are currently not only dominating the Chinese market but gradually capturing the global automotive market as well.

First Mover in Automated Driving

Now, in many areas of intelligent driving, the aim is once again to be a "first mover," this time pushing into foreign markets even earlier than with electric vehicles. Automated driving solutions consist of combinations of hardware and software. A typical L4 technology stack includes components such as sensors and LiDAR devices, "localization" based on HD maps or purely visual perception, specialized semiconductors, computing platforms and domain controllers, integrated data systems, software, and the entire associated toolchain.

Bringing all this quickly to Europe is of great importance for the future of the Chinese automotive industry. With each partnership, every test kilometer driven, and every gigabyte of data collected in the process, the next Chinese technology is being established in Europe even before the global automotive industry undergoes a fundamental transformation in the coming years.

While the USA is generally becoming increasingly closed off to China, Europe is perceived by many Chinese companies as more "open." This year, a number of Chinese providers of autonomous driving solutions and corresponding components were present at the IAA in Munich with large booths for the first time, including Liangdao Intelligence, Horizon, Hesai Technology, Black Sesame Technologies, Nobo Automotive, Joyson Electronics, Sense Auto, QCraft, ECARX, Calterah Semiconductor, and Bynav.

Political Guidelines

At home in China, the government has officially designated intelligent and connected driving as the next "strategic direction" in transforming the automotive industry, as Xin Guobin, the Chinese Vice Minister for Industry and Information Technology, stated in September at the "World Intelligent Connected Vehicles" (WICV 2025) trade fair in Beijing.

The Chinese Ministry of Industry is currently working on a new "Action Plan" to accelerate the promotion of intelligent and connected driving solutions during the upcoming 15th Five-Year Plan (2026 to 2030) more quickly than before.

In China, such an initiative is not merely a declaration of intent; experience shows that it is immediately followed by hundreds of new pilot projects, with billions in investments from private and state investors flowing into startups and projects in the field. This creates an entirely new innovative ecosystem that integrates all areas of the new "autonomous and connected supply chains."

Since the beginning of this year, industry and government in China have been working even more actively to bring autonomous and connected solutions to the roads. From January to July 2025, 7.76 million new passenger cars with SAE Level 2 driver assistance functions were sold in China, said MIIT official Guo Shougang at the trade fair. This already accounted for more than 62 percent of all newly sold vehicles in China.

Chinese-European Collaborations

Over 3 million vehicles have already entered the market in the People's Republic within the same timeframe, equipped with 5G and C-V2X technology, according to Guo. The Chinese government is working intensively on formulating safety standards while simultaneously approving more and more pilot projects for the industry. So far, this amounts to 35,000 kilometers (~21,748 miles) in 20 different Chinese cities.

The status quo can be summarized as follows: with support from their government, Chinese manufacturers are currently diving headfirst into the second disruption of the automotive industry on a large scale. In Beijing and Shanghai, the mobility of the future is seen as a combination of electric and intelligent driving. And now they are increasingly pushing into Europe.

For European cities, mobility providers, and automakers, collaboration with Chinese technology leaders like Pony.ai or Momenta offers the opportunity to quickly establish market-ready solutions in their own domestic market. For the Chinese, Europe represents not only a lucrative export market but also a chance to validate their technology in a challenging regulatory environment. The calculation of the Chinese companies is clear: those who succeed in Europe will have no trouble later selling their intelligent driving solutions elsewhere in the global market. (se)