Chinese ride-hailing platform Didi Chuxing announced today that its self-driving company has completed its first round of funding of more than $500 million.
The funds will be used to increase investment in research and development and testing to promote self-driving manned applications in specific regions at home and abroad.
In 2016, Didi began testing autopilot R&D, and in August 2019, Didi upgraded its autopilot division to a company. This is Didi Autopilot's first external financing since its inception. The round was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
With funding support, Didi will increase investment in autonomous driving, roadside collaboration and related AI technologies to explore regional landings.
At the same time, Didi will further deepen its cooperation with the automotive upstream and downstream industries, accelerate the mass production of self-driving cars, and promote changes in the global automotive and transportation industries.
In addition to building its own test fleet, the self-driving unit uses the massive amount of real-world travel data accumulated by the Didi platform for simulation testing, thus breaking the bottleneck of field test data volume, improving R&D efficiency and accelerating algorithm iteration. At the same time, the company is exploring the application of Didi's experience in safe operation and offline management capabilities to future automated driving test operations.
Didi has been qualified for road testing in Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou and California, USA, and has obtained the first license for the "Smart Networked Vehicle Demonstration Application" in Shanghai to conduct manned testing.
Did's self-driving arm is working with Didi's Xiaoju Car Service and Didi Financial to explore future mobility solutions, including smart charging piles, fleet maintenance, insurance and other projects.
