The future of two autonomous vehicles was always sold as something safe, clean, efficient and perfectly calculated, that in the laboratory, but when that technology leaves the laboratory and finds the real world, the crash is inevitable, literal, and in China these crashes are being recorded on video from all possible angles.

In recent weeks, an avalanche of videos began to go viral on Chinese social networks, showing fully autonomous delivery vans circulating through cities. The problem is that far from scenarios with good infrastructure, those machines are struggling to get the job done.

And in one of the most popular videos, a Neolix The vehicle charges two large lithium batteries positioned at the bottom of the chassis, which further compromises the suspension on uneven terrain.

The result is a futuristic machine trying to survive on streets that were not made for it, a comment that accompanied the video summarizes the situation well, "the roads are still from the Ting dynasty, but the cars are from the next century."

And the examples do not stop there, other records show autonomous vans becoming confused when crossing roads covered in corn cobs, vehicles becoming trapped after crossing fresh cement and even a Shesen neighbor trying unsuccessfully to prevent a delivery robbery from running over organic products that she was already leaving drying on the side of the street.

Those videos, while they seem funny at first glance, reveal something much bigger, the scale of this technology. Neolix claims to have already put more than 10,000 autonomous vehicles into operation in 300 Chinese cities, in the city of Qingdao alone there are more than 10,000 vehicles circulating on the streets, accumulating tens of millions of kilometers traveled and thousands of real deliveries.

All of this was only possible because China granted official licenses for autonomous AI deliveries in 2021, allowing those vehicles to operate on select public roads. The Chinese autonomous vans are at the same time an alert and a dress rehearsal for the future, they show that the technology has already arrived, but the world is not yet ready for it, perhaps that is why some companies are trying to escape from the streets and completely reinvent the way of moving.