# Pony.ai's CEO Says Robotaxi Tech Is Solved, Only Regulators Stand in the Way > Source: > Published: 2026-09-08 21:15:33+00:00 *Pony.ai CEO James Peng says the hard part of building robotaxis is already done, and the numbers behind that claim are starting to look hard to ignore.* Speaking at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on September 8, James Peng, founder and CEO of the Nasdaq-listed autonomous driving company Pony.ai, said robotaxis will be a common sight on streets worldwide within five years. "I think the technology problem is pretty much already solved," Peng told Fortune. "You'll be able to hail a robotaxi just like a normal taxi." What's left, in his telling, isn't engineering. It's paperwork. ## The Receipts That's a bold thing to say out loud while Waymo dominates every headline about self-driving cars in the US. But Pony.ai's second-quarter numbers give Peng something most executives making five-year predictions don't have: receipts. Start with the money. Robotaxi revenue hit $12.1 million in the quarter, up 691% year over year, according to the company's earnings report. Total revenue climbed 68.8% to $36.2 million. Passenger fare revenue alone jumped 849.3%. Gross margin improved to 17.5% from 16.1% a year earlier. The net loss narrowed too: $45.4 million, down from $53.3 million. The fleet tells the same story of acceleration. Pony.ai ran 1,975 robotaxis as of June 30, and it's targeting more than 3,500 by the end of the year across more than 20 cities. Its commercial service already covers Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Shanghai, where the company says vehicles now average about 25 rides a day. Peng credits China's regulatory posture directly. He told Fortune he looks for expansion markets with an expensive taxi market and a government willing to move fast on approvals, and he's said elsewhere that Chinese regulators have been far more supportive of driverless deployment than their counterparts in the West. The Uber deal is the clearest sign of that: Pony.ai has no interest in fighting Waymo on Waymo's turf. Look at the numbers. The company has secured commitments for more than 2,000 robotaxis across five European cities through its Uber partnership, part of a broader pipeline of over 4,000 vehicle commitments including partners beyond Uber. Waymo built its own app, its own brand, its own rider trust from scratch, city by city, over the better part of a decade. Pony.ai is skipping that entirely and renting Uber's existing demand instead. [Uber Turns to China's Pony.ai to Put 2,000 Robotaxis on European Streets](https://startupfortune.com/uber-turns-to-chinas-ponyai-to-put-2000-robotaxis-on-european-streets/) Uber and China's Pony.ai are expanding their robotaxi partnership from a single Croatian pilot to more than 2,000 autonomous vehicles across five European cities and the Middle East. The deal makes a Guangzhou-based company the backbone of Europe's robotaxi rollout, just as EU governments grow wary of Chinese vehicle technology. - [chinese autonomous vehicles in europe](https://startupfortune.com/uber-turns-to-chinas-ponyai-to-put-2000-robotaxis-on-european-streets/) - [uber robotaxi expansion croatia 2026](https://startupfortune.com/uber-turns-to-chinas-ponyai-to-put-2000-robotaxis-on-european-streets/) It's a shortcut, but a rational one. Getting a city government to approve driverless vehicles comes down to trust, not just a technical review: Peng has pointed to partnerships with established ride-hailing brands as a way to build that trust faster than a foreign robotaxi operator could on its own. Uber already has the riders, the local licenses in many of these markets, and the relationships with city officials that a Chinese autonomous vehicle company would otherwise need years to build from a standing start. ## The Catch None of this comes cheap, and Pony.ai knows it. The company burned $44 million in operating cash and spent $32.2 million on capital expenditures in the quarter, mostly on fleet vehicles, autonomous-driving hardware and data center capacity. Its cash position, including short-term investments and other liquid holdings, stood at $1.39 billion as of June 30, down from $1.44 billion three months earlier. That's a real number, not an unlimited one. Five years of global scaling at this burn rate isn't automatic: it depends on continued access to capital markets, and on the Uber and European commitments actually converting into deployed, revenue-generating fleets rather than sitting on a term sheet. Here's the thing about Peng's claim that only regulation stands in the way: it cuts both directions for investors. If he's right, the AV investment thesis stops being a bet on some future breakthrough in perception or planning software. It becomes a bet on which governments move fastest to write the rules. That favors companies already embedded with regulators in permissive markets, which is exactly the position Pony.ai has built in China. But it also means the five-year timeline isn't really Pony.ai's to control. A slow regulator in Germany, or a stalled approval in a target US city, doesn't get fixed with better code. Waymo has spent years learning that lesson the hard way, one city permit at a time, even with the technology it already has on the road today. **Also read:** [AI Data Centers Have Doubled Hard Drive and SSD Prices in a Year](https://startupfortune.com/ai-data-centers-have-doubled-hard-drive-and-ssd-prices-in-a-year/) • [Meta launches Muse AI agent after it leaked a child's private photos in tests](https://startupfortune.com/meta-launches-muse-ai-agent-after-it-leaked-a-childs-private-photos-in-tests/) • [China Slaps Japan With a 99.2% Deposit on a Key Chipmaking Gas](https://startupfortune.com/china-slaps-japan-with-a-992-deposit-on-a-key-chipmaking-gas/) *This article is filed under [AI News](https://startupfortune.com/category/ai/). Check it for more stories.* ## Join the discussion [Open in the community →](/community/) Almost there. Sign in and your reply posts straight away.