Baidu Apollo given another 20 licenses by Beijing for autonomous car road tests

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Baidu's Apollo autonomous driving platform has obtained another twenty licenses for autonomous vehicle road tests from Beijing's authority on December 25. Just a day ago, Tianjin's first ICV road test license was issued to the Internet giant.

Baidu's legitimate autonomous driving road tests started with five T3 level provisional licenses that were issued to the company on March 22 and allowed it to execute road tests in areas like Haidian and Yizhuang. Around a week later, Fujian Province saw its autonomous vehicle road test be officially initiated as Pingtan, a county under the administration of Fuzhou (the capital of Fujian Province), released its first set of license plates to the Internet company.

Then in April, Baidu Apollo received such formal licenses from authorities of Chongqing and Baoding, Hebei Province. Especially, the road tests in Chongqing help the company collect more valuable data to cope with emergencies and fit special road conditions due to the city’s extreme complex geographical environment.

Baidu hasn't slowed the pace down on pursuing breakthroughs. In October, it was given go-ahead from Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, along with another three firms.

To date, the 20-month-old Apollo has built partnerships with over 130 companies and institutions globally and domestically and produced more than 300,000 lines of open source code which have been adopted by 12,000 developers.