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| Baidu is testing commercially self-driving taxis in China |
After Baidu began testing self-driving cars last summer in Cangzhou, China, Baidu has now secured the necessary licenses to test how these cars are monetized.
Beijing is located about 150 km south of Beijing. The city has granted the company a license to the Apollo Go self-driving taxi service, which can run commercial tests on 35 cars and licenses to run 10 tests for fully autonomous vehicles.
Baidu said the license makes it the first in China to charge a fee for self-driving taxi testing.
With this experience, Apollo Go will be able to make commercial offers for intelligent transportation services and examine the mechanism by which any self-driving company in China can bill customers for the first time, for example B. Discounts and discounts. Test tickets.
In August 2020, Baidu launched the Apollo Go service in downtown Cangzhou, which allows people to drive these cars for free with a smartphone.
Taxis in Baidu not only provide more convenience and safety for Cangzhou residents, they are also smart electric cars that help protect the environment by reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
So far, these trips have been offered to people for free, which is a milestone for them to achieve their goal of marketing services.
Baidu is also the first company in Cangzhou to be licensed to conduct large-scale tests of self-driving vehicles on urban roads. His city tests previously included drivers for vehicle safety.
To obtain a license, Baidu must complete a 50,000 km test on domestic roads with a safety driver without any safety incidents.
In early March, the company announced that its Cangzhou fleet had accumulated more than 525,000 kilometers of test kilometers with an average number of test miles of 17,490 kilometers per vehicle, demonstrating the safety and reliability of autonomous vehicles.
Baidu is testing self-driving cars in Beijing and Changsha, the capital of China's Hunan Province, and hopes to expand its service coverage to 30 cities within the next three years.
Investing in autonomous leadership since 2013, Baidu is the world's first open autonomous driving platform with more than 210 partners, 55,000 global developers, and 700,000 lines of open source code.
The Apollo fleet grew to 500 vehicles, conducted highway tests in nearly 30 cities around the world, and completed more than 7 million km testing.