🚗🤝 Big news in autonomous driving: Momenta and Uber have officially signed a strategic partnership to launch autonomous vehicles on the Uber platform — covering international markets outside China and the U.S.

The first commercial rollout will land in Europe in early 2026, with vehicles equipped with safety drivers onboard.

But there’s a lot more under the hood:

🔧 Two tech bets. One bold standard.

At the Shanghai Auto Show earlier this year, Momenta previewed its roadmap for scaled Robotaxi deployment. The strategy?

1. A first-of-its-kind front-loaded Robotaxi solution using mass-produced sensors and compute units — cutting per-vehicle costs dramatically.

2. A map-free tech stack, enabling rapid localization across different cities and countries.

Together, these moves sidestep the ultra-expensive, lidar-heavy approaches from players like Waymo — and bring Musk’s "L2-for-L4" idea to life, ahead of Tesla itself.

📉 Why it matters: Lower hardware costs = higher commercial feasibility.

🗺️ Flexible ODD = faster expansion.

🛡️ And then there’s safety — the make-or-break factor.

👮‍♂️ The safety bar keeps rising:

As Momenta CEO Cao Xudong put it, matching human-level safety is only the starting line. To operate fleets of 10,000 or even 1 million vehicles, Robotaxis must surpass human safety by orders of magnitude.

Momenta has been building toward this moment for years — with a vision anchored in a “flywheel” model: using L2 data at scale to power L4 autonomy. At the time, many doubted it could work. But now, the flywheel is spinning — and the Uber partnership is a major acceleration.

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