On May 15, Xu Baoqiang, general manager of Baidu’s autonomous driving vehicle department, said in an interview that Baidu is considering potential collaboration opportunities with Tesla for the latter’s upcoming Robotaxi service. The decision will be based on Tesla’s specific application models and the timing of their entry into the Chinese market.
For those that say Tesla FSD is not as good as Waymo, why would a company with Waymo-level robotaxi technology want to use Tesla FSD?
The Baidu, Waymo and other Lidar and hypermapped systems are brittle. If there is construction and changes and unexpected dynamic obstacles then the Lidar systems fail.
Apollo Go currently offers robotaxi services in over 10 cities in China, standing out as the first company to provide fully driverless robotaxi service in cities including Beijing, Wuhan, Shenzhen, and Chongqing.
Baidu has its Apollo robotaxi service operating in China and has about as many robotaxi vehicles and mileage as Google’s Waymo service. Baidu is operating in more cities than Waymo or any other robotaxi service. Baidu will have more robotaxi vehicles than Waymo by the end of this year. Baidu Apollo is using the same Lidar technology as Waymo.
Baidu is a leading AI company with strong internet foundation, proudly announced a significant operation upgrade for Apollo Go, its autonomous ride-hailing service platform. Apollo Go is now offering 24/7 autonomous driving service in selected areas of Wuhan, becoming China’s first provider to offer such service.
On February 27, 2024, Apollo Go launched fully driverless rides across the challenging landscape of the Yangtze River, covering both the north and south banks across the Yangsigang Yangtze River Bridge and Wuhan Baishazhou Bridge. Previously, in August 2023, Baidu introduced driverless airport transportation services in Wuhan, establishing itself as China’s pioneer in providing autonomous rides to and from airports, seamlessly connecting urban roads and highways. On February 23, 2024, Apollo Go unveiled a similar service in Beijing, as Baidu was approved for robotaxi pilot operation on highways to Beijing Daxing Airport.
Wuhan is one of the world’s leading cities in implementing intelligent transportation. By the end of 2023, the total test mileage run by autonomous vehicles in the city has exceeded 3,378.73 kilometers, covering an area of about 3,000 square kilometers and a population of over 7.7 million. Apollo Go currently operates a total of 300 fully driverless vehicles in Wuhan.
Apollo Go has provided over 5 million cumulative rides as of January 2024. Today, Baidu and Apollo Go are actively working to bring fully autonomous ride hailing services to an even wider range of locations and users. Apollo Go currently offers robotaxi services in over 10 cities in China, standing out as the first company to provide fully driverless robotaxi service in cities including Beijing, Wuhan, Shenzhen, and Chongqing.
Baidu, announced its new 6th generation robotaxi, with plans to deploy 1,000 of them in Wuhan in 2024. They also forecast they will be profitable in 2025 (on a “unit economy” basis, a type of gross margin.) The new vehicle, which costs them 200,000 RMB to build (around $27,500 USD) is half the cost of their previous generation vehicle.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Before Baidu or China allows Tesla to offer FSD in China, they might want to watch this 60 Minutes segment from their trading partner, Australia: https://youtu.be/DcHtagqxPkI?si=JAX9mt0hTuTpYibt
It’s pretty damning and very visual about Tesla’s cars slamming into everything, seemingly at random, without slowing down and sometimes fatally.
Apparently, most Tesla owners agree and are not willing to entrust their lives to FSD, which isn’t what it’s advertised to be.
Or perhaps companies like Tesla that demanded China change it’s rules before they would operate there and successfully operated there for many years after China made concessions know more about the risks and realities than US typically MAGA Republican critics (themselves in bed with Putin) who often know nothing at all about China they didn’t learn from US Right Wing media.
So this might the company Musk was talking about licensing FSD to perhaps?
But how would that work, with a car that is LIDAR only with almost no cameras? Convert LIDAR data to video input for FSD perhaps?
We’ve seen video visualizations of LIDAR data before, which be enough…
As with licensing to OEMs, FSD only runs on Tesla HW and sensors. Baidu would have to either use Teslas or build dedicated vehicles with Tesla hardware to Tesla specs. Baidu as an operator of Robotaxi fleets is a different sort of tech license than OEMs that just license Tesla HW to build into their cars but it overlaps because they also build their vehicles.
Western companies and countries have such a naive view about China. They are convinced it’s just a perfectly normal country which wants mutual economic growth and peace between nation of the world and has a promising and healthy economy.
It would be funny if so many pension funds weren’t hitched to this nonsense. It’s like watching companies in the thirties bragging about partnerships with Germany as if it was a perfectly good idea.