"As an American reporter living in Beijing, I’ve watched both China and the rest of the world flirt with cutting-edge technologies involving robots, drones and self-driving vehicles.

But China has now raced far beyond the flirtation stage. It’s rolling out fleets of autonomous delivery trucks, experimenting with flying cars and installing parking lot robots that can swap out your E.V.’s dying battery in just minutes. There are drones that deliver lunch by lowering it from the sky on a cable.

If all that sounds futuristic and perhaps bizarre, it also shows China’s ambition to dominate clean energy technologies of all kinds, not just solar panels or battery-powered cars, then sell them to the rest of the world. China has incurred huge debts to put trillions of dollars into efforts like these, along with the full force of its state-planned economy.

These ideas, while ambitious, don’t always work smoothly, as I learned after taking a bullet train to Hefei, a city the size of Chicago, to see what it’s like to live in this vision of tomorrow. Hefei is one of many cities where technologies like these are getting prototyped in real time.

I checked them all out. The battery-swapping robots, the self-driving delivery trucks, the lunches from the sky. Starting with flying taxis, no pilot on board.

Hefei is one of the first Chinese cities to issue permits for what are basically flying cars. So I booked a ride."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/17/climate/china-hefei-clean-energy-drones-evs-robots.html

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