Baidu announced that it has brought down the production cost of its Apollo RT6 self-driving vehicle to CNY250,000, marking a significant step towards making autonomous driving more accessible in China. Speaking at a trade event in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, Baidu Co-founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Robin Li said the RT6 is now the world’s only mass-produced Level-4 autonomous driving vehicle, highlighting the company’s advantages over its competitors. “Tesla represents another technology road map. It wanted to go from L2 to L4, and is still working on it,” Li said at the event.
Global standards body SAE International has defined six levels of autonomous driving, starting from Level 0 with no automation at all. Level 4 represents self-driving where human intervention is not required in most circumstances. Baidu’s Apollo vehicles made a splash in Wuhan earlier this year when its robotaxis attracted local consumer interest with cheap fares, although taxi drivers in the city complained they feared the new technology might make their jobs redundant, the South China Morning Post reports.
Meanwhile, to achieve integration of vehicle-road-cloud systems for smart cars, China Unicom has released the integrated solution 3.0 for intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs) at the “Integrated Development of Vehicle-Road-Cloud” forum, a side event at the 2024 China 5G+ Industrial Internet Conference in Wuhan. “The latest solution integrates roadside sensing, edge computing, cloud-based data fusion, and other cutting-edge communication technologies, and can enable efficient collaboration among vehicles, infrastructure and cloud systems,” said Zhou Guangtao, Director of the Intelligent Connection Research Institute of China Unicom Smart Connection Technology, the China Daily adds.
