Baidu, the Chinese Internet giant, announced on Monday that it will soon operate fully driverless taxis in Chongqing and Wuhan cities through its autonomous ride-hailing unit called Apollo Go, making it the country’s first company to herald autonomous driving.
The search engine company recently unveiled a new generation of self-driving cars.
According to TechCrunch, Baidu has now obtained permits to provide a fully driverless commercial robotaxi service with no human driver present.
Baidu has also obtained permission to operate driverless cars on public roads in Beijing, but this permission still requires a human operator in the front passenger seat.
However, it will be the first time in China that an autonomous vehicle company will be able to provide a fully driverless ride-hailing service in the cities of Wuhan and Chongqing.
“This is a tremendous qualitative change. We believe these permits are a key milestone on the path to the inflection point when the industry can finally roll out fully autonomous driving services at scale,” said Wei Dong, vice president and chief safety operation officer of Baidu’s Intelligent Driving Group.
Baidu’s service will be available in Wuhan from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and will cover an area of 13 square kilometres.
To begin, the service will be available in Chongqing from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in a 30 square km area.
Baidu revealed designs for its sixth generation electric robotaxi, the Apollo RT6 EV, which costs around $37,000, last month.
According to the report, Baidu intends to expand its ride-hailing service to 65 cities by 2025 and 100 cities by 2030.
Autonomous vehicle service Cruise recently launched driverless commercial service in San Francisco, and Waymo has been providing such services in Arizona since 2020.
