China has granted Chinese Internet services company Baidu Inc (百度) and a rival autonomous car company, Pony.ai Inc (小馬智行), permits to provide driverless ride-hailing services to the public in Beijing, a significant regulatory step in the nation’s pursuit of driverless technology.
The permits allow Baidu and Pony.ai to offer rides without a safety driver behind the wheel to take over in cases of an emergency. The new permits still require a safety supervisor to be seated in the front passenger seat.
Baidu said that 10 such autonomous cars yesterday started offering rides to passengers within a 60km2 area in suburban Beijing.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Baidu already operates an autonomous fleet of taxis in Beijing under its Apollo Go ride-hailing services, but they must have a safety driver behind the wheel.
China has ambitions to lead autonomous driving technology globally, but lags the US in introducing such services. Alphabet Inc’s Waymo began offering driverless taxi services in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2020.
In 2020, Beijing set a goal for 70 percent of vehicles sold in 2030 to have Level 2 and Level 3 self-driving technology.
Level 2 is partial driving automation, which means the vehicle can control steering and speed.
Level 3 automation means that the vehicle can detect what is going on around it and drive itself.
Baidu — best known for its search engine and online advertising services — has in the past few years invested heavily in autonomous driving and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, including automated personal assistants and AI chips.
The company said in a statement that it has accumulated more than 27 million kilometers of road testing over the past nine years with no traffic accidents.
Baidu’s Apollo Go autonomous taxi services operate in nine cities across China, including Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
This time was supposed to be different. The memorychip sector, famous for its boom-and-bust cycles, had changed its ways. A combination of more disciplined management and new markets for its products — including 5G technology and cloud services — would ensure that companies delivered more predictable earnings. Yet, less than a year after memory companies made such pronouncements, the US$160 billion industry is suffering one of its worst routs ever. There is a glut of the chips sitting in warehouses, customers are cutting orders and product prices have plunged. “The chip industry thought that suppliers were going to have better control,” said
Enimmune Corp (安特羅生技) has obtained marketing approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its EnVAX-A71 vaccine for enterovirus 71 (EV-71), becoming the nation’s first enterovirus vaccine completely made in Taiwan, it said yesterday. After spending 13 years and NT$1.5 billion (US$49.77 million) on the research and development of the vaccine, Enimmune plans to start manufacturing and marketing it by the end of March, the company said in a statement, without disclosing customer order figures. “It is possible that the vaccine would not be included in a national vaccination program initially, and consumers would need to pay for it themselves,” parent
Vaccine skeptics blocking transfusions for life-saving surgeries, Facebook groups inciting violence against doctors and a global search for unvaccinated donors — COVID-19 misinformation has bred a so-called “pure blood” movement. The movement spins anti-vaccine narratives focused on unfounded claims that receiving blood from people inoculated against COVID-19 “contaminates” the body. Some have advocated for blood banks that draw from “pure” unvaccinated people, while medics in North America say they have fielded requests from people demanding transfusions from donors who have not received a vaccine. In closed social media groups, vaccine skeptics — who brand themselves as “pure bloods” — promote violence against doctors
Asteroid mining start-up AstroForge Inc is planning to launch its first two missions to space this year as it seeks to extract and refine metals from deep space. The first launch, scheduled for April, is to test AstroForge’s technique for refining platinum from a sample of asteroid-like material. The second, planned for October, would scout for an asteroid near Earth to mine. The missions are part of AstroForge’s goal of refining platinum-group metals from asteroids, with the aim of bringing down the cost of mining these metals. It also hopes to reduce the massive amount of carbon emissions that stem from mining