Lotus Robotics, the self-driving technology division of Lotus Cars, has today announced a new partnership with CaoCao Mobility, a ride-hailing unit that counts Geely among its investors, aimed at accelerating the global deployment of its autonomous driving solutions.
The partnership revolves around the launch of a jointly developed autonomous driving system powered by Lotus Robotics, featuring a customised car it says is capable of unmanned autonomous driving and fully automated operations. Together, the companies completed a pilot programme with the new vehicle across the cities of Suzhou and Hangzhou in China, travelling 8,416 miles (13,545 km) in test areas without human intervention.
Following the launch of its autonomous technology, Lotus and CaoCao Mobility will continue operating across both cities, with a focus on refining the vehicle-road-cloud integration model and blending vehicle intelligence with infrastructure to address persistent challenges, including unexpected pedestrian crossings. For Lotus Robotics, the announcement marks a key milestone as it continues to scale globally, while working towards its goal of delivering a full stack of autonomous software, and services, to help businesses deploy self-driving technology safely, securely, and efficiently.
The stack itself, referred to by the Lotus subsidiary as ROBO Soul, can be integrated into a broad range of vehicles operating in many environments. An end-to-end solution, ROBO Soul is capable of carrying up to Level 4 automated driving functions, allowing it to perform tasks such as parking and highway driving under specific circumstances. At the same time, these functions all offer a ‘human override’ function if intervention from the driver is necessary at any time during their use. Lotus Robotics more broadly collects data from multiple sources such as sensors, road information and algorithms, allowing the platform to continuously learn and improve its self-driving capabilities throughout its testing and development phases.
Supporting ROBO Soul is ROBO Galaxy, a series of cloud-based tools through which Lotus Robotics is aiming to help businesses manage and analyse data to increase both the efficiency and accessibility of their autonomous fleets. Further support comes from ROBO Matrix, which utilizes real-time monitoring to provide drivers with improved remote safety, including guidance, control, and parallel driving solutions, by analysing real-time data. It also deploys AI to continually learn from its environment and improve the safety and accuracy of its self-driving.
Lotus Robotics confirmed that its self-driving technology is currently being deployed in China today, and is already mapping its global rollout which it expects to commence in Q4 2025. Although, the company stressed that the level of autonomy offered in each region will be subject to market-specific regulation.
