Honestly, I thought the only self-driving thing in Dubai was the average Lamborghini owner’s ego…but here we are: Pony AI just said “Bet” and did a Tokyo Drift off the charts, surging 15% today as they’ve just signed a deal with Dubai’s transit kings to flood the city with its latest, greatest, seventh-gen self-driving cars.
(Source: Giphy)
In short, Pony AI is now officially Dubai’s new best friend. The ink’s barely dry on the “memorandum of understanding” (read: corporate foreplay) with Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority, which means the company’s self-driving robotaxis will be haunting the city’s streets with a pilot rollout starting in 2025. This will include actual humans supervising the vehicles, but by next year? It’ll be fully driverless… a.k.a. Just in time for my iRobot nightmares to come to fruition.
RTA CEO Ahmed Bahrozyan’s love letter to the future, is promising that 25% of all trips in Dubai will be autonomous by 2030. (Presumably, the other 75% will still involve Bentleys with TikTok influencers hanging out the window.) This partnership is supposed to cement Dubai’s status as the cool kid of global urban mobility. And let’s be honest: if you’re going to teach a city to trust robots with the wheel, you might as well start where supercars outnumber school buses.
(Source: Middle East Economy)
So why are investors suddenly all bricked up on Pony? Well, it’s not just this Dubai thing… Pony’s seventh-gen robo-brains debuted at the Shanghai Auto Show and investors have been foaming at the mouth since. Earlier this year, the company also announced a partnership with Uber, because apparently the only thing more unstoppable than the gig economy is the robot economy. Oh, and Pony’s new platform slashed its hardware costs by 70%, which also means they can churn out robotaxis faster than Elon makes babies.
Of course, this all sounds great until you start peeking under the hood. More specifically, Pony AI is still burning cash left, right, and twice on Sunday, and rocking a $6.9 billion market cap while still not making actual money. Sure, they’ve got about 300 robotaxis zipping around China… serving everywhere from Guangzhou’s chaos to Beijing’s relentless gridlock… but scaling that to “thousands of vehicles worldwide” is a different beast. Especially when your business model requires convincing humans that being chauffeured around by a Roomba is more efficient than whatever passes for local transit in Dubai.
(Source: Giphy)
The good news though, is that investors seem to trust Pony AI’s development deadlines (unlike someone else we know). The company swears it’ll start pumping out these new robotaxis “at scale” in late 2025, with global expansion plans that will reshape the autonomous vehicle industry. That is, assuming regulators, random power outages, and whatever passes for “AI ethics” in various countries don’t throw a wrench in the works.
In the end, Pony AI is ripping faces off, but it’s still early days in the robotaxi Thunderdome. Meaning, nothing is set and stone… and nothing is for certain, yet. So while the hype is mooning Pony AI shares today, remember that even the hottest AI stocks can end up in the graveyard within the same week. For now, keep your eyes on this story and place your bets accordingly. Until next time, friends…
Stocks.News holes positions in Uber as mentioned in the article.
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