Baidu’s Apollo Launching Driverless Ride-Hailing Service In China
Baidu’s Apollo is one of the pioneers of autonomous self driving carsBaidu’s Apollo has joined the likes of Alibaba owned AutoX and Alphabet-owned Waymo to deploy a driverless ride-hailing service. Last week, the Baidu subsidiary launched its autonomous driverless ride-sharing service in China’s capital Beijing. It is the first to operate at scale in China which shouldn’t be surprising. Baidu has a long tradition of following Google’s path and after the mountain view-based company developed self deriving car technology, Baidu was soon to follow its muse. Baidu calls the service Apollo Go Robotaxi and it opens in Shougang Park which is one of the venues for the 2022 Winter Olympics and will be transporting visitors to the games.
“Introducing unmanned services is an indispensable stage for the commercialization of autonomous driving. Today, we are opening the fully driverless robotaxi services in Beijing for the public, which we achieved only after conducting countless scalable driverless tests in many cities over a long period of time,” said Yunpeng Wang, vice president and general manager of autonomous driving technology at Baidu.
“In the future, Baidu Apollo will launch driverless robotaxis in more cities, enabling the public to access a greener, low-carbon, and convenient travel services, while continuing to improve the unmanned service process and user experience,” he said. “The commercialization of autonomous driving can alleviate congestion effectively and help to reach the peak carbon dioxide emissions and achieve carbon neutrality in China,” he added.
