The Chinese Internet giant Baidu, which became popular thanks to its search engine, is also making progress in autonomous driving. Techcrunch reports that the company’s driverless taxis will now serve customers from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. in Wuhan, while previously operating only from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
The updated schedule is expected to reach an additional million customers in certain areas of Wuhan, a city of more than 10 million people.
Like most self-driving vehicle startups, Baidu uses third-party cameras, radars and leaders to help its cars navigate better in low-visibility conditions.
In August, Baidu offered a fully autonomous transportation service at the rates of regular taxis. In the third quarter of 2022, Apollo Go registered more than 474,000 trips, which is 311% more than last year. (This potentially looks like a significant revenue stream for Baidu, but the report doesn’t specify how many of those trips were subsidized by discounts and invitations for new users.)
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The Baidu Apollo Go robotax service was launched in 2020 and has since been expanded to 10 cities in China, where it has made more than 1.4 million trips as of the third quarter of 2022. Baidu plans to expand the geography of the service to 65 cities by 2025 and to 100 cities by 2030.
Autonomous driving is now gaining support from local authorities across the country. For example, Wuhan, an industrial hub in China, became one of the first cities to allow robot taxis to transport people without security operators in the vehicle.
Baidu has really put a lot of effort into making the future of unmanned driving come early. The company emphasizes its visual-language model for object identification in long-haul scenarios. The AI is powered by Wenxin, the largest language model behind the image text generator, a separate platform from Baidu.
“This model will allow autonomous vehicles to quickly recognize objects, for example, a special vehicle (fire truck, ambulance), a plastic bag, etc. In addition, Baidu’s autonomous driving AI – a sub-model of WenXin – uses more than 1 billion parameters and is able to significantly improve the overall perception potential of autonomous driving,” Baidu previously explained.
In the summer, Baidu introduced a fully autonomous electric car Apollo RT6, which is designed to work as part of the company’s Apollo Go self-driving taxi service. The first copies will arrive in the car fleet of the Chinese service as early as 2023, while the cost of one such taxi is about $37,000.
In terms of format, the Apollo RT6 is a single-volume car with a length of 4760 mm (wheelbase 2830 mm) with sliding doors that facilitate entry into the cabin. The steering wheel can be quickly removed, increasing the useful space. The electric car is based on Xinghe’s own platform.
