Chinese artificial intelligence company Baidu Inc has received China’s first license to provide a fully unmanned robotic taxi service to paying customers on public roads.
Apollo Go, Baidu’s autonomous driving service, has received approval to collect fares for autonomous robot cars in Chongqing and Wuhan. Baidu was licensed by government agencies in Wuhan and Yongchuan County in Chongqing. Both cities have developed new approaches to smart transportation in recent years, from infrastructure development to new regulatory upgrades for AV. Baidu will now provide unmanned robot taxi services in certain areas of Wuhan from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm and from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm in Chongqing, with five fifth-generation Apollo robot taxis in each city. The service area covers 13 square kilometers in the economy of Wuhan.
All these? Without human presence. So the next time you in Chongqing China, you’ll be greeted with an autonomous taxi with 100% human-less operation. Welcome to the future.
In order to get approval, the Baidu robot went through several stages of testing and approval, from testing with a security worker in the driver’s seat to testing with a security worker in the front passenger seat, and finally allowed the vehicle to operate without a driver or operator.
Baidu Robotaxi is equipped with multi-level security mechanisms, including autonomous driving system, scheduled monitoring, remote driving function and a robust safety operation system, and the total test mileage driven by Baidu AV is more than 32 million kilometers (~20 million miles), not bad. In comparison, Tesla FSD has run more than 32 million miles.
If you must know, China is leading the EV race. They have the biggest number of EV cars on the road and the government of China have been pouring millions for their infrastructure to go green. In fact, SouthEast from Chongqing, the city of Guangzhou has full electric buses on the roads since 2020. I’ll be covering more of China’s green initiative soon, and their insane EV strategy. Stay tuned.