Source: Xinhua.
Order a car with a phone app and an autonomous taxi shows up. Beijing recently launched the country’s first commercial pilot for autonomous mobility services, and industry observers see it as the moment when autonomous driving in China moved from test and demonstration into commercial exploration.
A first-hand ride
The Beijing office for the high-level autonomous driving demonstration zone announced that Baidu and Pony.ai had become the first companies licensed for commercial trials, deploying no more than 100 autonomous vehicles across 60 square kilometres of Beijing E-Town.
A reporter hailed a vehicle through Baidu’s Apollo Go app for a trip of about 2.6 kilometres. The interface resembles a normal ride-hailing app, except that passengers board and alight at fixed stops roughly 500 metres apart. A vehicle arrived three minutes after the order was placed. A trained safety operator sat in the driver’s seat but did not intervene; the car handled traffic lights, overtaking and lane changes on its own and completed the trip smoothly in about seven minutes. With the pilot subsidy, the fare was 1.42 yuan.
Under Beijing’s management rules, every pilot vehicle must carry a licensed safety operator who takes over only in emergencies. Baidu adds a second layer of protection through vehicle-road coordination and 5G remote assistance, in which human operators can back up the autonomous system at any time.
The area already has about 3,000 conventional taxis and ride-hailing cars in daily operation, so the 100 autonomous vehicles act as a supplement rather than a replacement. According to Baidu, in the two weeks since charging began ridership kept growing instead of falling: since November, overall user satisfaction scored 4.9 out of 5, with more than 94 percent positive reviews. The most common tags were “full of a sense of technology”, “willing to recommend” and “willing to ride again”.
Autonomous driving is advancing quickly
Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Changsha and Cangzhou already allow regular autonomous operations, but paid service is a first. The foundation was laid in April, when Beijing set up the country’s first intelligent connected vehicle policy pilot zone, using a regulatory sandbox to advance road testing, demonstration and commercial services. It has since issued policies on unmanned delivery vehicles, expressway testing and driverless testing, with nearly 3 million kilometres of safe testing accumulated.
Officials said policy innovation is working well and commercial trials are now feasible. Baidu reported that its total test mileage has exceeded 16 million kilometres, Apollo Go operates regularly in five cities, and it provided 115,000 rides in the third quarter alone. In Shanghai, four test districts have opened 253 autonomous test roads with more than 5,000 scenarios; Wuxi in Jiangsu is running three 5G autonomous shuttle bus lines.
Ouyang Rihui, deputy dean of the Internet Economy Research Institute at the Central University of Finance and Economics, said that with data accumulating fast and policy strongly encouraging innovation, autonomous driving is entering a period of rapid development. “Most people probably underestimate how fast it is moving,” he said.
How far to mass commercial use
Baidu’s autonomous service has registered more than 100,000 users in E-Town over a year of testing, with 29,000 monthly active users, more than 40 percent of whom order every week. Whether to add vehicles will depend on demand.
In the short term, experts say, autonomous mobility remains a supplement to conventional transport, but as more road networks open to testing, connected zones will gradually expand. Pony.ai co-founder and CEO Peng Jun said policy, technology and public acceptance are the three keys to faster commercialisation, and the technology has moved past the stage of handling routine scenarios into validating safety at larger scale and in extreme conditions.
Safety is also under scrutiny. Statistics from a research department of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology show hacker attacks on smart cars grew twentyfold in five years, with 27.6 percent involving vehicle control. Zhou Hongyi, founder of 360 Group, has warned that connected-car and automaker networks can be attacked and that security capability assessments will become mandatory for automakers.
Notably, Beijing’s supporting policy requires that passenger data, app logs, location data, vehicle and system data and traffic data collected in the pilot be stored and used within China and not sent abroad without approval, and that companies maintain a complete cybersecurity protection system. Officials said the pilot zone will put safety first, expand trial roads and areas step by step, and support companies moving from unmanned road testing to unmanned commercial services.
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