Baidu, BAIC adding autopilot to electric cars in 2018, L3 self driving in 2019 and L4 in 2021

Beiqi, Baidu and Beiqi Automobile announced a strategic cooperation to make Level 4 self driving cars by 2021.

They will create a comprehensive “AI + car” ecosystem in areas such as autonomous driving, car networking and cloud services .

They will explore intelligence upgrades for the auto industry.

Beiqi Group (aka BAIC) is sells the most popular electric car model in China with over 11,000 sold in the month of October.

BAIC has five lines of electric cars and some cars can go up to 400 km on a charge.

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China is subsidizing plug-in hybrid and all-electric cars with up to 100,000 RMB (15,000 US dollars) per car.

Baidu as an artificial intelligence technology company, with leading automatic driving technology. In September of this year, Apollo 1.5 autopilot driving system was released. The system has obstacle awareness, decision planning, cloud simulation, high-precision map services, end-to-end learning Core openness and support for day and night lane automatic driving.

Smart car mass production within two years

In terms of automatic driving, based on the Baidu Apollo open platform and BAIC Group’s vehicle platform, with Baidu’s core technology of artificial intelligence, mass production of L3 level autonomous vehicles will be realized around 2019 and mass production of L4-level autonomous vehicles will be implemented around 2021 .

The systems will have:

* In-car networking
* vehicle information security
* image recognition

It is estimated that by the end of 2018, BAIC Group’s own brands will be fully equipped with Baidu Apollo car networking products. By 2019, BAIC vehicles with Baidu car networking products will exceed 1 million.

They will also create a new cloud ecosystem, to explore intelligent transportation, mobile travel and other big data value-added services.