Baidu Inc (ADR) (NASDAQ:BIDU) has announced that it plans to roll out a fully autonomous bus onto Chinese roads come next year.
The Chinese search giant’s CEO Robin Li made the recent announcement revealing that the company plans to launch the self-driving bus in 2018. The company has for a long time been working on autonomous vehicle technology and it plans to show the world what it has been working on by introducing the autonomous bus on to China’s roads. Li revealed that Baidu has been working together with another Chinese firm AIC Motor Corp to make the project a reality and that the bus will pass through specific routes.
Baidu announced a week ago that it plans to start producing vehicles with Level 3 autonomy in 2019 and Level 4 in 2021. L3 autonomy refers to autonomy that still requires conditional human intervention while L4 autonomy is where vehicles are fully autonomous. The vehicles will be fitted with the Apollo opensource self-driving vehicle software which Baidu developed in partnership with NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA).
"We only touch the software part. We don't manufacture the cars. We provide the technology,” stated Li.
The CEO also expressed confidence in the ambitious endeavor, especially considering the company’s open-source approach with the autonomous vehicle software. He believes that the open-source approach will have better momentum based on historical data and the company expects this approach to make it more appealing to vehicle manufacturers. The Baidu CEO also believes that autonomous vehicles in the future focus heavily on entertainment and thus they will have big screens that will eliminate the need for passengers to use their phones once they are in the vehicles.
The Chinese search giant has also invested heavily in artificial intelligence not only for self-driving vehicle technology but also in its search engine. Li revealed that the company pumped roughly $1.5 billion into research and development and most of the money went into AI.
The self-driving bus will mark the official launch of Baidu’s self-driving technology into the mainstream. Most companies that have been working on autonomous technology have not yet released it to the public.
Baidu stock closed the latest trading session on Thursday at $264.52.
