Similar to the pilot test of General Motor’s Cruise and Alphabet’s Waymo in San Francisco and Pheonix within the U.S., China now allowing domestic companies to test driverless taxis. Recently, China approved an initial 20 pilot cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangzhou, and Wuhan, for self-driving tests. These cities have already allowed driverless taxi operators to test vehicles in suburban areas.
Starting in March, Apollo Go, one of China’s largest autonomous taxi companies under Baidu, began offering 24-hour driverless car services in some areas of Wuhan City, Hubei Province. It has more than 500 autonomous taxis in operation, which will increase to 1,000 by the end of the year. In fact, this test started in 2022.
Baidu CEO Robin Li told investors in May that over 70 percent of Apollo Go’s driverless taxi rides in April were fully autonomous. According to netizen’s posting, Baidu has human drivers in a service center. Using high-bandwidth, low-latency 5G networks, these “remote safety drivers” observe the 360-degree conditions around the cars from a screen array and can manually drive the unmanned vehicles using controllers such as steering wheels, gear sticks, and pedals. China allows the ratio of remote safety drivers to vehicles to be 1:3.
Sources:
1. VOA, July 11, 2024
https://www.voachinese.com/a/china-s-robotaxi-push-sparks-concerns-about-job-security-for-drivers–20240711/7693880.html
2. Guancha.cn, July 13, 2024
https://www.guancha.cn/economy/2024_07_13_741368.shtml