On April 28th, Beijing issued a notification for unmanned manned manned-application, and Baidu became the first approved enterprise. Its self-driving travel service platform, Apollo Go, officially launched unmanned autonomous driving travel services, marking the first release of “no one behind the wheel” autonomous driving services in China’s super-large cities.
The “Implementation Measures for the Management of Testing and Demonstration Applications of Unmanned Passenger Vehicles on Roads in the Beijing Intelligent Networked Vehicle Policy Pilot Zone” (hereinafter referred to as the “Implementation Measures”), formulated and released by the Beijing Intelligent Networked Vehicle Policy Pilot Zone, stipulated that the demonstration application subjects who obtain notification letters can conduct unmanned autonomous driving passenger demonstration applications on public roads within the 60 square kilometers of the high-level self-driving demonstration area in Beijing. Building on the foundation of unmanned road testing, the “Implementation Measures” raised higher requirements for safety management, network and data security, and risk response of the testing subjects.
Baidu carried out unmanned passenger demonstration applications in accordance with the requirements of the “Implementation Measures,” deploying 10 unmanned vehicles in the first batch and planning to add another 30 unmanned vehicles later. Baidu now has the largest self-driving fleet in China. Baidu stated that it will actively welcome the technical challenges of complex road scenarios in Beijing, and under the three-layer safety system of single-bicycle intelligence, monitoring redundancy, and parallel driving, as well as the complete travel service system, it will comprehensively ensure passenger travel safety and riding experience.
Baidu has accumulated experience from 27 million kilometers of road testing over 9 years. Baidu Apollo Go has already implemented autonomous driving passenger travel services in super-large cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. In the fourth quarter of 2021 alone, the number of passenger orders carried by Apollo Go reached 213,000, and this number is still growing rapidly in 2022.
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.