If anyone needs a clue towards what the future of mobility will look like, then perhaps more so than Silicon Valley one should be looking towards China where a multitude of companies are making huge strides with robotaxis. The biggest player in China is Baidu which has been often called the Google of China. The search giant has Apollo Go which is a robotaxi service that leverages its own next generation autonomous EV called the Apollo RT6 and now its service has crossed over a million rides.
In fact, most of the Apollo Go rides are based on its autonomous cars which are based on cars by Ford, Toyota and Geely adapted with its innovative self-driving hardware and software. But the Apollo RT6 will be something more advanced. It has also partnered with Geely for a new self-driving EV start up called JIDU for the ROBO-01 which uses Nvidia’s Drive Orin chipsets.
JIDU has also ambitions of delivering 800,000 self-driving electric cars by 2028 which is an impressive figure. While overall, Baidu has been forced to be a little conservative as it cut R&D expenditure by 5 per cent but has not stopped fuelling the development for Apollo.
The Apollo Go program hit multiple milestones in the Q2 of 2022. On July 20, it crossed the 1 million rides mark which speaks towards the reliability of the project is and now on August 8 it began fully driverless rides publicly making it the first service of its kind in China. It started monetising the service on July 20 after it got the permit. Apollo Go is available in 10 Chinese cities that include Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
