Baidu aims to build world’s largest driverless ride-hailing service area in 2023

Beijing (Gasgoo)- China’s tech giant Baidu announced its plans to build the world’s largest driverless ride-hailing service area in 2023 at the company’s Apollo Day event on November 29.

Photo credit: Baidu

As one of the biggest operators of autonomous driving ride-hailing service (Robotaxi) in China, Baidu has rolled out its fully unmanned Robotaxis in Chongqing and Wuhan, with access to hundreds of square kilometers of operation area since August 2022. The company aims to expand its unmanned operation coverage to build the largest driverless Robotaxi service area worldwide. 

According to Chen Jingkai, Baidu's autonomous driving technology expert, with the generalization ability of Baidu’s autonomous driving technology progressing at a faster than expected pace, it only takes the company 20 days to deploy its autonomous driving technology in a new city. 

Aside from autonomous driving, Baidu is also actively exploring the interdependence of L4 and L2+ intelligent driving technologies. At the technology stack level, the company’s L4 and L2+ intelligent driving products have realized the unification of visual perception scheme, technical architecture, map, data connection, and infrastructure sharing. 

Notably, from the hardware perspective, Baidu’s second-generation Kunlun AI chip has completed an end-to-end performance adaptation for autonomous driving, which signifies Baidu’s advantages in both autonomous driving software and hardware.