Baidu Inc (百度) has won approval to deploy the first fully autonomous self-driving taxis on China’s roads, giving it an edge over rivals such as Pony.ai Inc (小馬智行) and XPeng Inc (小鵬汽車).
The tech giant has secured permits to operate robotaxis in Wuhan and Chongqing, it said in a statement yesterday.
The move marks a relaxation of Chinese rules, which previously mandated someone must be in the vehicle to take control in case of an emergency.
Photo: Reuters
Baidu is to begin to provide fully driverless robotaxi services in designated areas in Wuhan between 9am to 5pm, and Chongqing from 9:30am to 4:30pm, with five Apollo fifth-generation robotaxis operating in each city. The service area covers 13km2 in the Wuhan Economic & Technological Development Zone, and 30km2 in Chongqing’s Yongchuan District.
Baidu is working with regulators in Beijing and Guangzhou to obtain similar permits, Baidu Intelligence Driving Group vice president Wei Dong (魏東) said.
“It’s as if we’ve landed on the moon and built a base there,” he said in a video interview. “It’s just a matter of time for us to go to Mars or even beyond our solar system.”
In the US, Cruise LLC in June won a license to charge for fully driverless rides in selected areas in San Francisco, but the General Motors Co-backed start-up is now facing regulatory scrutiny after two on-road incidents, including an accident that left two people with minor injuries.
In China, Baidu and self-driving start-up Pony.ai earlier this year received approval from local regulators to deploy vehicles without someone in the driver’s seat in part of Beijing.
Baidu, which operated China’s largest search engine, is transitioning to artificial intelligence and self-driving vehicles after its core advertising revenue shrank in the mobile era.
Its smart-driving business provides software to automakers such as Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd (吉利汽車) and runs a ride-hailing app powered by a fleet of self-driving vehicles in major cities, including Beijing and Shanghai.
Baidu last month unveiled a new version of its robotaxi, called the Apollo RT6, that it sad costs nearly 50 percent less to make than its previous model.
The company plans to double the number of robotaxis it has on Chinese roads to 600 by the end of this year, Wei said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy