Baidu’s Apollo Go Robotaxi, First In China To Obtain Operational Permits

Baidu Inc., China’s biggest search engine and artificial intelligence (AI) firm, has been given the green light to launch its unmanned taxi services.

The company’s Apollo Go autonomous ride-hailing service, is now the first in China with the permit to offer commercial fully driverless robotaxi services to the public on open roads. 

As such, it is now authorized to collect fares for robotaxi rides, completely without human drivers in the vehicle, in Chongqing and Wuhan, two of China's largest megacities.

According to the company, this marks a key turning point for the future of mobility in China, leading to an eventual expansion of driverless ride-hailing services to paying users across the country.

Baidu Intelligent Driving Group’s vice president and chief safety operation officer, Wei Dong, expressed, "This is a tremendous qualitative change. Fully driverless cars providing rides on open roads to paying customers mean we have finally come to the moment that the industry has been longing for. 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."

Deploying five Apollo 5th gen robotaxis for each city, the fully driverless taxi services will be active in selected areas in Wuhan from 9 AM to 5 PM, and Chongqing from 9:30 AM to 4:30 PM.

Areas of service will cover 13 km in the Wuhan Economic & Technological Development Zone, and 30 km in Chongqing's Yongchuan District.

Remarkably, to receive the permits for its operation, Baidu's robotaxis have undergone multiple steps of testing and licensing.

It started from testing with a safety operator in the driving seat, to testing with a safety operator in the passenger seat, before finally getting approval to operate with no human driver in the vehicle.

Being the only company granted such permits from two Chinese megacities, Baidu's robotaxis come with multi-layer mechanisms to ensure ultimate safety.

Said mechanisms include the autonomous driving system, monitoring redundancy, remote driving capability and a robust safety operation system.

All of which are backed by a massive collection of real-world data with a total test mileage of over 32 million km driven by Baidu's autonomous vehicles (AV) to date.

Elsewhere, by the end of March 2022, Baidu has ranked No.1 in the cumulative number of autonomous driving patent applications in China, totalling up to 4,000.

Among them, the number of global patent families for high-level autonomous driving has exceeded 1,500, ranking first worldwide. 

Of which, Baidu’s Apollo Go has already expanded to all first-tier cities in China, covering Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

Now, with this new development, it has surfaced to become the world's largest robotaxi service provider, recently reaching the milestone of more than one million orders.