Baidu wins permit to offer fully driverless ride-hailing services in Beijing -...

Baidu wins permit to offer fully driverless ride-hailing services in Beijing

Baidu wins permit to offer fully driverless ride-hailing services in Beijing

March 17, 2023 10:30 pm

China’s leading search engine and artificial intelligence company Baidu, has won permit to provide fully driverless ride-hailing services in Beijing, marks a significant progress for the autonomous driving technology in China from testing autonomous vehicles to allowing public passengers to ride unmanned taxi services.

The permit allows Baidu’s Apollo service to deploy 10 fully autonomous vehicles in a 60-square-kilometre economic development zone.

Previously, Baidu has obtained licenses to operate robotaxis in cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, but it was required to place a safety operator in the passenger seat in case of an emergency.

Baidu wants to roll out a fleet of 100,000 new autonomous taxis starting this year in order to speed up the commercialization of robotaxi. The company then plans to expand its robotaxi service to 65 cities by 2035 and 100 cities by 2030.

The Beijing-based company said it had completed more than 50 million kilometers of testing with level 4 (L4) automated technologies.

In most cases, L4 autonomous driving does not require human intervention, but the driver still has the option to assume control of the vehicle, according to SAE International, a global standardization organization. L5, or full driving automation, denotes a vehicle that never requires human involvement.

Jidu, an EV venture 55 percent controlled by Baidu and 45 percent controlled by Chinese automaker Geely, aims to begin mass-producing its first model this year, joining the fight against Tesla and a number of mainland rivals, including Nio, Xpeng, and Li Auto.

Jidu revealed its first "robot" concept car called ROBO-01 in June last year, the car has no door handles and can be fully controlled via voice recognition. It will be capable of achieving level 4 autonomous driving technology that need no human intervention.

Meanwhile, Baidu made the public debut of Ernie Bot, a highly anticipated ChatGPT alternative, which won praise from reviewers for its Chinese-language capabilities.

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