Chinese technology company Baidu has announced plans to establish the world’s largest fully-autonomous ride-hailing service area in 2023 by expanding its operations in China.
Baidu most recently began offering driverless services in the cities of Chongqing and Wuhan through its Apollo Go platform in August 2022. The company now plans to further expand these areas to provide autonomous ride-hailing services to more people and create the world’s largest service area for fully driverless ride-hailing operations.
Jingkai Chen, Baidu's autonomous driving technology expert said;Backed by its solid AI technology, Baidu Apollo has created a safe, intelligent and efficient autonomous driving technology system, bringing robotaxi services from designated zones to open roads at scale. The general ability of Baidu's autonomous driving technology has progressed at a more advanced pace than expected. Now, the lead time to deploy autonomous driving technology in a new city is only 20 days.
Apollo Go currently covers more than 10 cities in China and has provided over 1.4 million rides this year.
In cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, each autonomous robotaxi can provide 15 rides a day on average, which is slightly below the daily ride average of standard ride-hailing service.
