China’s self-driving car companies are racing to export their robotaxis globally, riding high on decades of EV supply chain dominance. The logic is clean: master battery production, nail autonomous driving, repeat worldwide. What could possibly go wrong?
Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: a car that drives itself perfectly is still just a car. It solves the problem of “my commute is boring and I might crash” while leaving untouched the actual problems—housing costs that force people into brutal commutes, urban design that treats cars as the default solution, infrastructure that crumbles while we wait for the next innovation to bail us out.
China’s robotaxis will probably work. They’ll be cheap, reliable, and ubiquitous. They’ll also become the world’s most efficient delivery system for pretending we fixed something. Traffic jams will shrink. Congestion pricing will disappear from political conversations. And in ten years, we’ll have twice as many vehicles on the road because the friction of driving yourself is gone, the cost per trip dropped, and suddenly everyone commutes from further away.
The real absurdity isn’t that China cracked autonomous driving first. It’s that we’re treating it as a solution to systemic problems it was never designed to solve. A robotaxi can’t fix zoning laws, can’t build transit, can’t make housing affordable. It can only make the broken system slightly more convenient to live in.
But sure, let’s celebrate the engineering. At least someone’s solving something.