Tony Han, founder and CEO of autonomous driving technology company WeRide, likened the development of self-driving cars to the Wright brothers’ successful first flight of a powered aircraft. This four-year development process culminated in 12 seconds of being airborne.
The iterative invention process made headlines for crashes, not unlike the ones autonomous vehicles are making now, with 3,979 incidents involving autonomous vehicles from 2019 to 2024, 10% of which resulted in injuries. While the accident rate for traditional cars was 4.1 accidents per million miles driven in 2021, the rate for autonomous vehicles was more than twice that at 9.1 per million miles, according to the National Law Review. Han said it is all part of what it takes to make technology better for future generations.
“If you just dig into the old news, old papers, one airplane just invented by the Wright brothers—a crash of an airplane will make it to the headline anytime, even [if] nobody got injured,” Han said at the Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh on Sunday. “It’s just like that. It’s our human civilization, history.
“As entrepreneurs, as inventors, we should be really fearless enough,” he continued. “We should be brave enough to push forward for innovation, because we live in the AI era. Think about our offspring, our kids. If we can make this a reality, they will appreciate us.”
About 1,500 autonomous vehicles operate commercially in the U.S., a figure projected to skyrocket to 35,000 in 2023, according to Goldman Sachs data. McKinsey predicts the industry will generate $300 billion to $400 billion in revenue in the next decade globally. WeRide, a Chinese company giving Alphabet’s Waymo a run for its money, announced last week it will begin offering its robotaxi services in Riyadh through Uber. It holds driving permits in Saudi Arabia, China, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, France, and the U.S.
Despite the risks, Han said autonomous driving today is still safer than a human driver. While accident rates for autonomous vehicles have been higher than those for traditional vehicles, injury and fatality rates for automated driving remain lower than for traditional cars.
“This is a new thing, and there’s no perfect new thing, but now it’s getting into a certain level of maturity that can be deployed on a large scale,” Han said. “I’m not saying we can supply a kind of transportation tool that is 100% safe, but we can provide something that may be 10 times safer than a human driver.”
Evolution of self-driving technology
Early evidence suggests autonomous driving technology may help improve road safety and reduce crashes. A December 2024 report by insurance company Swiss Re, commissioned by Waymo, found in a liability claims analysis that driverless cars had 92% fewer bodily injury claims and 88% fewer property damage claims than human-driven counterparts.
Goldman Sachs analysts suggested that fewer autonomous-car crashes could reduce insurance costs by more than 50% over the next 15 years, from about $0.50 per mile in 2025 to $0.23 per mile in 2040. The analysts noted it would be unlikely to see autonomous vehicles as personal cars in the near future.
Han said governments, including in Saudi Arabia and other parts of the U.S., have been eager to work with WeRide and generate a regulatory framework to accommodate the vehicles on the road. He predicted that over the next five years, the robotaxi industry is poised to grow, with every major city willing to adopt autonomous driving, as seen in San Francisco, where there were 800 Waymos on the road as of August 2025, nearly three times as many as the company reported in March of this year.
The real transformation with the technology will happen within the decade, with the development of L5 vehicles, Han said. Autonomous vehicles operate on a five-point scale of automation, with L1 requiring some driver assistance, and L5 requiring no assistance. WeRide currently produces vehicles operating in the L2 to L4 range, denoting partial to significant automation. Han called the development of effective L5 vehicles the industry’s “ChatGPT moment,” capable of revolutionizing the future of road travel.
“I think L5, within 10 years, you will see the driving capabilities on par with the best human drivers,” Han said.
