Didi Chuxing (a Udacity partner, ahem) has been in the news on a few fronts this week, and will probably show up a few more times with the upcoming Beijing Motor Show this week.

On the more traditional, human-driven, ride-hailing front, Didi is moving into Mexico, with a new office in Toluca. This seems ever-so-close to the lucrative US market, currently dominated by Uber and Lyft.

In the world of self-driving cars, Didi recently made two big announcements: they are developing “purpose-built” autonomous vehicles, and they are forming the Didi Auto Alliance (“D-Alliance”) to “ develop a full-capacity vehicle operator platform”.

Building a self-driving car from scratch seems like a pretty big deal to me. Tesla is famously struggling with the challenges of manufacturing a car, and even automotive manufacturers like GM/Cruise are basically re-purposing existing vehicles into self-driving cars.

By contrast, Didi believes:

“…current mainstream cars are heavily “overspecced” — packed with equipment most drivers do not need such as engines and other technologies that allow them to go as fast a 150 mph (250 kmph).

Performance levels for ride-hailing and car-sharing service vehicles could be dialled down significantly, meaning they would not have to be so aerodynamic. Cars designed to carry just one or two people at a time to work or the shops could therefore be “boxier”, with fewer seats and more space for luggage.”

I’m excited to see what Didi comes up with for its “purpose-built” self-driving cars. Big risk, big reward.

The first Monday in April, California opened its doors to autonomous vehicles with no safety driver — truly “driverless” cars.

Only one company, that has not been named, expressed interest.

A few weeks later, a second company applied for a driverless permit, Waymo.

Waymo is working with a number of California cities to set up driverless tests, several of which appear quite enthusiastic to be working with the leader in self-driving cars.

“Autonomous vehicle technology “is going to be crucial in helping the Silicon Valley reach its safety and transportation goals,” said Los Altos Councilwoman Jeannie Bruins.

“Waymo has done extensive vehicle testing on our local streets with a good safety record,” Mountain View City Manager Dan Rich, said in a statement. He commended the company for committing to “transparency and information sharing.”

In Sunnyvale, Mayor Glenn Hendricks likewise said he looks forward to working with Waymo.”

One angle I found interesting is how Waymo will handle disengagements:

“If one of the cars encounters something it doesn’t understand, such as complicated road construction, the car will contact Waymo for help recognizing the situation. After human testers give it feedback, the car will then decide how to navigate the situation.”

I wonder what it means for a remote “human tester” to “give feedback” to a Waymo vehicle.

And don’t forget, from my old colleague Oliver Cameron:

China recently released some basic guidelines for self-driving car development. As an American, I don’t always fully comprehend the line in China between private companies and the government. How much guidance to self-driving car developers in China get from published laws and regulations, and how much comes from internal communication with the relevant government agencies?

Here are the public guidelines:

“The rules lay out requirements that vehicles must first be tested in non-public zones, that road tests can only be on designated streets and that a qualified person must always sit in the driver’s position, ready to take over control.”

As best I can tell from English translations, that is the extent of the rules. Presumably there must be more, but I don’t know if the rest is available in Chinese, or if you have to be in the industry there and know the right people to figure it out.

“Even when race car drivers leave the mayhem of the track, their skill doesn’t outweigh their appetite for risk: a study from the 1970s found that racing drivers from the Sports Car Club of America had a higher crash rate on public roads than other drivers from the same state of the same age and sex.”

Compare that to this:

“At the opposite end of the spectrum are those who use cautious driving styles to make up for their weak skills. Some elderly drivers who score poorly on a driving test nevertheless manage to drive crash-free by actively compensating for their deteriorating abilities, according to a Belgian study from 2000. They drive more slowly and avoid tailgating, leaving long safety gaps behind vehicles they’re following; they also plan their trips to avoid complex traffic or other challenging situations.”

Of course, this has implications for self-driving technology:

“Some of the more dramatic estimates have imagined quintupling the volume of traffic flowing down a road. But a short “headway” — the gap between one vehicle and the one just ahead — brings a higher crash risk than a long headway.”

From a thought-provoking essay by Antonio Loro.

Supposedly the reason the Google Self-Driving Car Project kept its vehicles tooling around Mountain View at 25mph for years is that a collision at 25mph results in something like a 20% chance of a human fatality. At 45mph, the likelihood of fatality flips, and becomes something like 80%. A 2015 report hints at this, although it is more vague about the statistics.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is building “self-driving technology”, according to the MIT Technology Review:

Alibaba says it has bigger ambitions than just robotic taxis. In June 2016, the company launched an AI-powered “city brain” system in Hangzhou, where it’s headquartered, to crunch data from mapping apps and increase traffic efficiency. Simon Hu, the president of Alibaba Cloud, says the firm’s ultimate goal is to produce the kind of autonomous driving that uses such data to help integrate transportation into urban infrastructure.

The common analogy is that Baidu is the Google of China, Tencent is the Facebook of China, Didi is the Uber of China, and Alibaba is the Amazon of China.

This announcement puts Baidu, Didi, and Alibaba all in the self-driving car race.

A police officer pulled over a Cruise self-driving car in San Francisco recently, and issued a citation for failing to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Cruise disputes the citation, but since nobody was hurt, the interesting thing to me is that the safety operator got the ticket.

Knowing nothing about the actual interaction, I imagine the police officer writing the citation, caring not a whit about who or what was actually operating the vehicle, and walking off.

Longer-term, how does this work? Specifically, what happens when safety drivers are no longer in the vehicle.

Maybe officers will ticket passengers. That will get the vehicle owners’ attention quickly.

What if nobody is in the vehicle?

Routine traffic stops are one of the most common interactions between citizens and police in the United States. For many people, this is their only interaction with the police. As self-driving cars progress, we’re going to need to rethink interactions between police and the public.