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James Peng

Cofounder, Pony.ai

Search every verified James Peng interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. James Peng, cofounder and CEO of Pony.ai, discussed the company's expansion and commercialization of autonomous driving at two events in late 2026. At Wave by Vento in Turin, Italy, on October 8, he said the industry has reached a critical point in transitioning from technical breakthroughs to real-world deployment. He noted that regulation remains a cautious factor due to safety concerns, and outlined criteria for market entry, including market size, average taxi fares, regulatory support, and local partners. He mentioned Pony.ai's existing operations in Zagreb, Croatia, and Luxembourg, and announced a partnership with Wubert to enter London. At MOVE 2026 on September 10, Peng spoke with Bloomberg Intelligence's Michael Dean about scaling robotaxis profitably. He said Pony.ai launched its generation 7 autonomous vehicles with Beijing Auto, Guangzhou Auto, and Toyota, and operates fully driverless commercial services in four tier-one Chinese cities. He stated that the company's fleet size is slightly smaller than Waymo's but predicted it would catch up in one to two years, citing cost advantages and claiming Pony.ai is several times more efficient than Waymo on cost. He also projected that autonomous driving could provide 20–30% or more of rides in most cities within ten years, citing higher vehicle utilization and reduced parking needs.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“I think the portion of fully driverless autonomous driving will be getting bigger and bigger in 10 years. Probably most of the cities they will large portion I don't know maybe 20 30% or even even more than half of the rides will be provided by autonomous driving because autonomous driving the utilization is so much higher than the personally owned the vehicles. I think the roads will be freer. There will be less par”

“I think the cost side certainly has a lot with the supply chain and the ecosystem, right? Think about if you need to use autonomous driving as an example, we need sensors, LAR and everything, right? And this the scale because all the price of any sensor is directly related with scale, right? The more you make the cheaper it can get. So within the proximity of where we are there's several light and camera manufacturer”

“I think we we have definitely have the proven technology. We we have the our fleet size is still a little bit smaller than Waymo's, but not too much. I I think in a year or two we'll catch up. Mainly because of the cost advantage. I think in terms of the cost, we we're several times more efficient than Waymo's. Even with Tesla, Tesla say, "Oh, we only vision only." But, our cost is actually even lower than the the uh”

“Robotaxi is such a complex systems, all right? Technology is just one thing, right? We I think over the last 10 years we really get the technology right. We have close to 100 million kilometers of autonomous driving running on the road with impeccable safety track record. So that proves that the technology itself is right. And then on the cost side, we really really really I think this is probably where the best in t”

“from a technical point of view China's player is certainly on par with the US players. But from the total cost or the economical sense of a vehicle, for example our vehicles is four five times cheaper than Waymo vehicle. So in the global market such as Europe such as Middle East I think we will play a huge edge compared with the US players. Certainly the whole landscape is still evolving but especially in the global ”

“I think Europe in general is a great market to be in. It's a 500 million plus population, economy is booming. So definitely we'll find a way to gradually—it's not going to happen overnight—gradually launch into more markets in Europe. Although which one to tackle first, there's a lot of factors that we need to consider, but gradually we want to definitely treat the European market as a strategic focus.”

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