On June 27, Didi officially launched a demonstration project for autonomous driving passenger cars in Shanghai.
After passing the audit and signing the informed consent form, users can call for an autonomous driving car within the testing area in Jiaxing, Shanghai via the Didi app.
However, the project is still in the testing phase and safety officers will be equipped in each car, and passengers will be required to sign an informed consent form.
This morning, CCTV News live-streamed the whole process of using Didi’s autonomous driving ride-hailing service. Even in heavy rain, Didi’s autonomous driving ride-hailing service was still operating safely and normally.
Currently, the free service for autonomous driving cars is only available in certain areas of Jiaxing, Shanghai, and safety officers are still present in the cars to respond to emergencies.
Didi has also established China’s first autonomous driving safety escort center, which can monitor vehicles and road conditions in real time and provide assistance when vehicles encounter complex situations, thereby solving the problem of remote assistance in future autonomous driving operations.
In some test area intersections, Didi has deployed a vehicle-road collaborative solution developed in-house that can share real-time road information with the autonomous driving test cars of different companies in the area and eliminate blind spots in driving.
Didi’s autonomous driving technology is advancing at a fast pace. Waymo launched this service a year ago, and travel companies are accelerating the development speed of Level 4 autonomous driving.
Didi officially began R&D testing of autonomous driving in 2016. In August 2019, Didi upgraded its autonomous driving department to a company.
In May of this year, Didi announced that its autonomous driving company had completed the first round of financing, raising over $500 million USD to increase research and development testing. This is the largest financing received by a domestic autonomous driving company to date. The investment was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
This month, Didi’s autonomous driving company also reached a strategic cooperation with BAIC Group to jointly develop high-level autonomous driving cars. According to the cooperation agreement signed by the two parties, the focus of their cooperation is on L4 and higher-level autonomous driving, intelligent travel and other fields.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.