Baidu launches public road tests of autonomous cars in China
Group exploits legal grey area to start trials as Beijing works to roll out national regulations
Baidu self-driving cars in tell-tale blue and white, doing road testing in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, China © Reuters
November 23, 2017 12:35 pm by Charles Clover , Emily Feng and Sherry Fei Ju in Beijing
Tell-tale white and blue self-driving cars belonging to Baidu, China’s largest search engine, have been spotted on public roads in northern Beijing, in what appear to be the first public road tests of fully autonomous cars in China.
China’s government has announced it will develop national regulations for testing on public roads in China, which a Baidu executive said could be ready by the end of the year. But already the company appears to be testing fully autonomous cars in what is a legal grey area — the cars have drivers in them but they appear not to be driving. A Baidu representative declined to comment.
A senior executive at Baidu confirmed it was working with local governments to start legally testing autonomously-driven cars on some public roads in China by February 2018, which would be a milestone for the industry.
People in the industry say the permissiveness of regulations will set the pace of this technology.
“I think [it] will not be technology that will set that pace, it will be regulations and liability rules,” said Martin Lundstedt, chief executive of Volvo Group, which last week unveiled a self-driving truck prototype in Beijing.
Currently at least five Chinese or Chinese-invested companies, including Baidu, have licences to test driverless cars on public roads in Silicon Valley, given out by the California Department of Motor Vehicles as part of an experimental programme.
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Testing on Chinese public roads would help keep Chinese companies competitive in the data-intensive technology of autonomous driving, where logging miles on roads is essential to perfecting the technology.
Google’s autonomous car division, Waymo, for example, announced in May that its autonomous cars had racked up 3m miles since 2009 in four US states, and the last million were in just seven months.
Analysts view Baidu, with its open source Apollo software, as the leader in driverless car technology in China. Baidu tests driverless cars on a 3km stretch of road in the city of Wuzhen and did a public road test in Beijing in 2015.
The company’s flamboyant chairman, Robin Li, also drove an autonomous car in July of last year on a Beijing ring road as a publicity stunt, though Beijing police were less than amused, and announced they would investigate.
The senior executive added that China’s chaotic traffic were an obstacle to driverless cars in China, compared with the orderly roads of Silicon Valley. Without some improvement in either technology or in traffic enforcement, “it will take two extra hours just to drive across Beijing”, he said.
“The problem with an algorithm is that it follows rules,” he joked.
Baidu executives cite the chaotic traffic as a serious obstacle to staying competitive in autonomous driving. “China faces unique obstacles in its efforts to achieve autonomous driving. There are many, many more challenges here,” said Li Zhenyu, general manager of Baidu’s Intelligent Driving Group, citing the prevalence of electric scooters and pedestrians as a unique challenge in China at a Baidu event last week.
“Normally, we react to problems that we encounter on the road. But we hope that through AI technology, we can put any traffic problem outside of the realm of reaction and into [the] realm of prediction only.”