Didi Chuxing plans to use this one advantage to crush its rivals in race for self-driving cars

Didi Chuxing is gearing up to absorb more public transportation data into its platform as the Chinese ride-sharing giant sees itself beating rival Uber Technologies in the race to commercialise self-driving cars.

“Didi is the best platform to commercialise self-driving cars because we have a lot of data generated by a huge number of ride-hailing users. Our platform can provide 20 million trips per day, which is much more than Uber provides,” said Zhang Wensong, senior vice president of Beijing-based Didi.

According to Zhang, self-driving cars can be quite expensive to use in the early stage. But Didi, which offers a full range of mobility options, including taxi hailing, private car hailing, social ride-sharing, can lower costs by enabling people to carpool via its app.

Didi as well as other Chinese tech companies and carmakers are competing in autonomous driving with the likes of Google and Uber in the United States, Daimler in Germany and Nissan in Japan as automakers gear up to mass produce self-driving cars around 2020.

Enabled by artificial intelligence, industrial planners envision that cars will be able to learn how to drive, and can even drive more safely and efficiently than human beings.