Self-driving vehicles: now China gets in on the act
In a move that parallels Google’s Waymo, Chinese technology giant Baidu has announced it is developing a new platform called Apollo, that will be available open and free to car manufacturers to help develop their autonomous vehicle offerings.
Baidu, which introduced its stand-alone vehicle on the streets of Shanghai last November and obtained a permit in September to test its technology in California, wants to have autonomous vehicles in the market by 2018, and to have cars in mass production already operating completely autonomously on the roads and highways by 2020.
China’s interest in autonomous driving should come as no surprise: on March 30th, BigML, a company for which I am a strategic advisor, announced that SAIC Capital, the venture capital company of China’s largest automobile manufacturer, SAIC Motor, was making a strategic investment in the company that would allow the giant, valued at $110 billion dollars that produces more than 6.4 million vehicles per year, and is the 64th company in the Fortune 500, to nominate a member on its board. BigML will work on the development of machine learning algorithms for SAIC vehicles. This will entail new areas of application of the platform, which will be applied to similar uses (sensors that collect a lot of data and require real-time decisions in complex situations) with a company that has a huge influence on the entire supply chain, giving it an entry into a market that seems most committed to intelligent automation.
As things stand, 2020 looks to be the year we will see the appearance en masse of autonomous vehicles, with predictions pointing to more than ten million on the roads by that time, with more and more important companies involved. The involvement of China, which many increasingly see as the emerging leader in technology now that technophobe and climate-change denier Donald Trump is running things in the United States, is a step further in the confirmation of increasingly ambitious plans that aim to scale up to level 5 autonomy in the less than three years that remain until a 2020 that is now just around the corner.
This week I am test driving a Tesla Model X with Autopilot 2.0, considered autonomy level 2, thanks to Móviles.com. The sensation is very much “the future is already here” and I keep having to remind myself: “do not trust technology to the limit and keep your hands on the steering wheel”. I do not want to think about what level 5 must be like, which is supposed to be with us within three years, significantly less than the lifecycle of most vehicles. And then there is the impact on the motor industry and the insurance sector in a world where we will no longer bother to own cars…
(En español, aquí)
