I find it surprisingly hard to get some insight on how Chinese companies are doing on that front. The only thing I find is a few videos of western journalists who do a single ride somewhere in China.
Does anyone know about sources to get a better insight on how Chinese companies are doing in terms of self-driving software development?
This sort of transformative shift rarely happens from within. At least not easily.
Volkswagen basically bet the farm on electric vehicles. They were late to the party, but went all in, so you cannot blame them for trying to block EVs. I rather suspect that making cheap EVs is just extremely difficult if you intend to make a profit. I bet they lost a good sum of money on every eUp! they produced (here in Germany you could get them for 15,000€ at the right time, which is a steal), so they decided to quit producing it, which IMO is a real shame, because it is such a cool car for inner city commuting.
Amusingly, the Ford Transit commercial van is cheaper in electric than in gas-powered. But on the consumer product side, there's still a big price premium for electric, and you usually have to get an excessive 'trim level'.
Stellantis screwed up so badly that sales dropped about 40% and the CEO was fired, after collecting the biggest bonus in automotive history for "cutting costs". Betting on "mild hybrids" and extra post-sale fees was a disaster.
Nobody in US automotive is investing in solid state batteries the way BYD and CATL are. There's technical risk, but if those things work, IC cars are over. 9 minute charge and a few hundred miles of range.
This, even if you embargo the new tech, if the new tech is a lot better, it will create a more broad economic disadvantage in not adopting it.
Gas stations are all about location.
There will probably be a business in doing a turnkey conversion. Prepare to bring in heavy power, shut down gas station, remove pumps, remove tanks, clean up and repair convenience store, put in chargers on the islands, replace signage, power up.
In the future, a car without self-driving software will be as useless as a computer without an operating system. Hardware companies will be at the mercy of software companies. All the margins will be made in software. Hardware already has super thin margins nowadays.
Nokia didn't fail because of the way they made phone hardware.
I don't think Tesla or any other manufacturers have anything to worry about in the US, Canada, and some EU countries since it will be impossible for BYD to sell cars into those markets profitably.
The best user experience is:
You tap a button on your phone
Immediately a car arrives
You enter it
It drives you directly to your destination
You exitIf both are available to you, then no matter how crowded the roads will be, a car that drives you directly from A to B will be the better UX than a bus that drives you from somewhere near A to somewhere near B via C, D, E and F.
So the car could only be the worse experience if it is hard to get one (Because all the cars near you are occupied by other people) while a bus is easy to get into (Because there is one near you and you still fit in).
The vast majority of worldwide rides will continue to be done in individual cars. The extremely crowded situation that would make a bus the better experience is extremely rare. Most rides worldwide are definitely not done in that kind of environment. And the removal of parking spaces and the better routing self-driving cars allow will move even those environments more towards the individual car.