Autonomous Driving

Baidu is the sixth company to receive a permit to test without a safety officer in California, which allows it to test three fully autonomous vehicles on designated streets within the city of Sunnyvale in Santa Clara County.

It is expected to speed up the large-scale application of Robotaxi and accelerate high-level autonomous driving technology towards commercialization.

China will encourage research on the traffic characteristics and impact mechanisms in the case of mixed autonomous driving and manual driving and support the establishment of a reliable and efficient operation monitoring system.

Unlike industry solutions that only support high speed and urban ring roads, ANP can also be used on urban roads.

The move is the latest development that will accelerate Baidu’s push to commercialize autonomous driving. 

Alibaba-backed AutoX officially unveiled its RoboTaxis on December 3, the first Chinese company to begin such testing with no safety officer in the car and no remote control.

NIO was an early EV maker in China that began automated driving development in 2015, but the automated driving team was most affected by layoffs in North America in 2019 due to financial constraints.

Beijing has issued temporary number plates to 87 vehicles from 14 companies, including NIO, BAIC New Energy, Baidu and Daimler, for self-driving road tests, according to Xinhua.

Chinese self-driving startup Pony.ai announced on November 6 that it has raised a total of $267 million in Series C funding. With this round of funding, Pony.ai has raised more than $1 billion in total funding and is valued at more than $5.3 billion, making it the most highly valued company in China's automated driving space.

NIO and XPeng, two of the leading companies in the new Chinese car manufacturing industry, have a skill set previously reserved for Tesla.