The taxi stops a half-car-length away. “So sorry,” a recorded voice tells passengers. The steering wheel turns on its own as the taxi makes its way around the cart. A Baidu technician watches from the front passenger seat.
Baidu is China’s highest-profile competitor in a multibillion-dollar race with rival autonomous vehicle developers including Alphabet Inc.‘s
Baidu and a rival, Pony.ai, received China’s first licenses in April to operate taxis with no one in the driver's seat but with a safety supervisor on board. That came 18 months after
Founded in 2000 as a search engine operator, Baidu has expanded into artificial intelligence, processor chips and other technology. It says its autonomous vehicles could, if successful, make driving cheaper, easier and safer.
“We believe the top goal of autonomous driving is to reduce human-caused traffic accidents,” said Wei Dong, vice president of Baidu's
Autonomous driving is one of an array of emerging technologies from artificial intelligence to renewable energy that
Baidu's Apollo autonomous driving platform was launched in 2017 and the Apollo Go self-driving taxi service three years later.
Taxi service with a driver at the wheel to take over in an emergency started in 2020 and has expanded to
For rides with no driver and a supervisor in the passenger seat,
“It’s very convenient,” said
“It might feel a little safer” than a human driver, Zhao said. “Sometime there are small objects, maybe some that people don’t notice. They can spot them and stop.”
Other developers include Deeproute.ai and
Industry plans are "very aggressive to deliver the robo-taxi to the consumer,” said
Automaker
The ruling party is promoting automation to shore up economic growth by making its shrinking, aging workforce more productive.
“People are very expensive,” said Wei. “Once this public service no longer needs people, the cost can drop rapidly.”
As for whether
“But they could easily do this, because of the way decisions are made and deployments happen in China,” Kelly said.
The earliest products are unlikely to earn back their development costs but might be “loss leaders” to sell other services, said Kelly.
Baidu says it already is selling navigation and other technology to automakers. It projects total sales of
The company says it spent a total of
Baidu and its most advanced rivals have reached the industry's Level 4 out of five possible levels of technology. That means their systems can operate without a driver but must be pre-loaded with a detailed map. That limits the area where they can operate.
Lower levels of technology range from cruise control, a feature available for decades, up to Level 3, which allows hands-free highway driving. Self-driving robot carts already are widely used in factories, warehouses and other tightly controlled settings.
Once self-driving taxis are on the road, operators must gather information about pedestrians and local conditions based on daily driving, a time-intensive process that will slow the technology's rollout.
For a maneuver such as a U-turn, the Apollo system tracks as many as 200 vehicles, pedestrians and other potential obstacles as much as 100 meters (110 yards) away, according to Baidu.
Wei said Baidu would be happy to have foreign partners adapt its technology to their markets but has no export plans yet while it focuses on Chinese cities.
Intersections still are a challenge, Wei said. Pedestrians in
“Our car always will yield to people and might wind up not getting through the light,” Wei said.
Baidu has launched its own self-driving car brand, JIDU, which unveiled a concept car this month and says it is aiming for a sticker price of
The company also has deals with three Chinese electric vehicle brands to produce cars with computers, radar and light-based sensors built in instead of bolted onto the roof.
To encourage others to use Apollo, Baidu has made the platform open-source and says it has signed up 210 industry partners and 80,000 developers who might create products based on it.
Compared with a human driver, "the difference isn’t big,” said
AP video producers
Apollo (in Chinese): https://www.apollo.auto/robotaxi
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