Tag: Mercedes Benz

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Momenta Plans Thousands of Robotaxis for Dubai, Europe

The robotaxi race just got a serious third contender.

Momenta Global, the Chinese autonomous driving company backed by Mercedes-Benz, plans to have thousands of robotaxis on the road next year as it pushes into Dubai and more European cities. Shuo Xie, the head of Momenta’s robotaxi business, laid out the plan in an interview with Reuters on September 30: hundreds of vehicles by the end of this year, then several thousand by the end of next year.

Those numbers would put Momenta in genuinely global company. Alphabet’s Waymo operates around 4,000 robotaxis across 15 US cities. China’s Pony.ai is scaling too. Momenta, founded by a former Microsoft researcher and partnered with Toyota and BYD, has been the quieter name in the field. It doesn’t plan to stay quiet.

Dubai, Europe, and Japan: the expansion map

The geography of the announcement is the story. Momenta is already testing robotaxis in five Chinese cities, plus Munich and Abu Dhabi. Now it’s in talks with a “few” European cities for further expansion, plans to deploy vehicles in Dubai next year, and has named Japan a priority market.

That’s a deliberately international playbook, and it looks different from the American one. Waymo is still overwhelmingly a US story, expanding city by city at home. The Chinese players — Momenta, Pony.ai, WeRide — are building across the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia, where regulators in places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi have been actively courting autonomous vehicle companies with permits and pilot zones.

Dubai’s interest is no secret. The emirate has set a public target of making a quarter of all journeys autonomous by 2030, and it has been signing up robotaxi operators as the path to get there. A company that can arrive with a proven vehicle and a fleet plan gets a red carpet. Momenta wants to be that company.

The chip play nobody is watching

Buried in the Reuters interview was the detail that might matter most. Momenta has been working with a chip company called XHeart to produce processors designed specifically for its autonomous driving software. Xie said the cost of those chips should be “significantly lower” than equivalent computing power from Nvidia, and that XHeart is now building a next-generation chip, the X9.

“In a couple of years the robotaxis that I am going to deploy around the world, hopefully a lot of them will be hosted on that X9 chip,” Xie said.

This is the unglamorous economics that decides the robotaxi business. Every robotaxi carries a small data center’s worth of compute, and that compute is one of the biggest line items in the vehicle cost. If Momenta can field capable autonomy on cheaper custom silicon while rivals pay Nvidia prices, the per-vehicle economics tilt in its favor. At hundreds of vehicles the difference is a rounding error. At thousands, it’s the business model.

Two businesses, one bet

Momenta runs two operations. The first sells advanced driver-assistance software to automakers — the revenue engine that funds the second. The robotaxi division is still early stage, with just over 100 vehicles deployed across three countries. The company raised around $751 million in a Hong Kong IPO in July to fuel the push, though its shares have since fallen about 45 percent as investors turned cautious on Hong Kong-listed AI stocks, and the company remains unprofitable while it spends heavily on research.

None of that is unusual for this industry. Every robotaxi company is burning cash to buy scale; the question is always whether the scale arrives before the money runs out. Momenta’s answer is a bet that international expansion — Dubai, Europe, Japan — plus cheaper custom chips gets it to unit economics faster than the competition.

What it means

For travelers, the robotaxi map is about to get a lot bigger than American suburbs. If Momenta’s timeline holds, Dubai visitors could be hailing driverless rides next year, and European cities are in active talks. The Middle East is shaping up as the proving ground where robotaxi companies compete head-to-head for the first time, and that competition should mean better service and lower prices.

For cities, Momenta’s pitch is a template worth studying. The company goes where regulators make room. Dubai and Abu Dhabi didn’t win robotaxi pilots by accident; they built the permitting frameworks and invited the industry in. European cities now in talks with Momenta are clearly paying attention. The jurisdictions that move first get the fleets, the data, and the jobs.

For investors, the thousands-by-next-year target is the number to watch. Hundreds of robotaxis is a pilot program. Thousands is a business. The XHeart chip partnership is the other number to watch — if custom silicon delivers the promised cost advantage, Momenta’s path to profitability looks different from everyone else’s. The fleet count at the end of 2027 will tell you whether this was a plan or a press release.

For more on the autonomous mobility race, see our Breaking News coverage, including Waymo’s robotaxi fleet surging 49 percent in Texas and Germany’s first cab-less driverless truck on public roads.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Los Angeles Fashion Weeks Radar: Sanctuary Fashion Week And Their Founders.

Sanctuary Is Fashion. Sanctuary Fashion Week makes its mark on the fashion week game yet again with its latest epic installment of what has been called the most unique and theatrical fashion week going these days. This must be due to the Sanctuary mission of creating such creatively encompassing platform for all types of creators such as the visual arts, music, dance, and, of course, fashion. Their inspiring and inclusive fashion week events are set against a backdrop of historic gothic cathedrals and cater to both a high end, as well as an emerging talent crisis of attendees.
Tough Competition. Boasting such a lineup of talent is now incredibly rare, but what certainly is different from most fashion week productions is their penchant for creating an almost theatrically inspired series of shows and performances that typically leave the onlookers in awe. Since the last Mercedes Benz fashion week in Bryant Park in NYC, the fashion week production industry has splintered off into countless entities, each having their own distinct way of presenting each seasons fashion trends in numerous markets. Sanctuary Fashion Week, however, seems to have taken the historically unchanged template and breathed a new light, a sincerity and an intimacy into it. A welcome addition to such a vibrant industry and a fantastic model that some other fashion week production companies are already emulating.
A Royal Host. During fashion week in Los Angeles in October, dynamic duo and founders of Sanctuary Fashion Week, Sir Kenn and Sir Korrie Gray Hayes, produced 16 high end designer fashion shows and had 8 musical and dance performances by well known artists. Hollywoods Celebrity Anchor His Highness Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe was the host of the prestigious event.
Top Designers. By all accounts, the series of shows was memorable and left front row celebs and other attendees wanting more and inspired by the fashion forward collections presented.  Some of the designers included; Ritual, Dell Scott, Dur Doux, Lindie Sayman Couture, & Love Baby J.
Disney and Lifetime Celebrities. Hip Celebrities even come in scores to be a part of both Sanctuary Fashion Week and their newly launched Sanctuary Magazine such as Aaron Spellings Melrose Place Star Jamie Luner (she received standing ovations after Prince Mario-Max welcomed her), Larry Namer the E! Television Founder, Disney notables Ava and Alexa Kolker, Txunamy, Solage Ortiz, Julia Garcia, Joelle Better, Kyra Lyn, Madison Freidman, as well as stars like Aaron Paul, Gustavo Gomez, Amanda Holley, MotoeHaus, Sangeeta Kaur, and many others.