Source: Xinhua.
Soon after Xiaomi officially announced its carmaking plans in Beijing, another cross-industry tech giant made headlines: Baidu chairman and CEO Robin Li published a book, Intelligent Transportation, a major transformation affecting the next 10 to 40 years of humanity. Baidu’s ambitions clearly go beyond building cars to the far larger intelligent transportation system. With the internet of things, AI and big data flourishing, the century-old automobile industry has changed profoundly, and the world is wondering what impact the emerging China model of intelligent transport will bring.
The turning point has arrived
Since Tesla opened the era of cross-industry carmaking, China has become the most active hotbed of new vehicle ventures, from NIO, Li Auto and Xpeng to the newly arrived Xiaomi and Baidu. The deeper driver is the consensus that “new four modernisations” (electrified, connected, autonomous, shared) define the industry’s future. A car is no longer just a means of transport but a scene of intelligent mobility and living, and as that scene expands in China, the China model of intelligent transportation has begun.
Retail sales of new energy passenger vehicles reached 378,000 units in November, up 122.3 percent year on year, and 2.514 million in the first eleven months, up 178.3 percent, according to the China Passenger Car Association, displacing combustion models and accelerating the industry’s electrification. As the world’s largest NEV producer and consumer market, China has become a global hub for new energy and intelligent vehicle technology. Policy support is strong: the 2019 national outline on building China’s strength in transportation called for R&D in intelligent connected vehicles, autonomous driving and vehicle-road coordination, with a complete and controllable industrial chain by 2035. In March, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Transport and the Standardization Administration jointly issued a standards guide for the connected vehicle industry, calling for staged release of key intelligent transportation standards.
“The turning point of the intelligent transportation era has arrived,” Robin Li wrote, laying out six innovation concepts including the intelligent transportation operator model, vehicle-road coordinated autonomous driving, adaptive intelligent traffic control and Level 4+ autonomous driving breakthroughs. Experts note that intelligent transportation is a deep and broad intelligent system, and that deep learning and intelligent robots are reconstructing the future of vehicles, transport and cities. Li added that with its talent dividend, rich AI scenarios and supportive policy environment, China’s intelligent transportation will lead the world.
Pilots accelerating
Beijing has opened the country’s first commercial pilot for autonomous mobility services, with Baidu’s Apollo among the first licensed companies, deploying no more than 100 autonomous vehicles across 60 square kilometres of the economic-technological development area, with market-based pricing under fair-competition rules. On launch day, an E-Town resident completed the city’s first paid autonomous ride through Apollo Go.
Baidu was among the earliest Chinese companies to invest in autonomous driving, with total test mileage now beyond 16 million kilometres and 115,000 rides provided in the third quarter, operating regularly in five cities. It plans to expand to 65 cities by 2025 and 100 by 2030, and has formed the Deepway joint venture with trucking firm Shiqiao, launching a first-generation electric truck for automated road freight.
Driven by policy, China’s intelligent transportation industry is showing trends of cross-industry technology fusion, multi-modal smart coordination and high-quality mobility services. Vehicle-road coordination and vehicle-network interconnection have become key development directions, and the industry is moving from early road-focused intelligent management to all-round innovation and scaled application across a modern comprehensive transport system.
Enormous potential
CAE academician Huang Wei said at the 16th China Intelligent Transportation Annual Conference that new technologies will break up the traditional industrial, technology and value chains of transportation, drive continuous innovation in vehicles and transport, promote deep cross-sector integration and form a brand-new industrial ecosystem worth trillions of yuan.
The concept has spread across every corner of the transport field. Traditional automakers are accelerating transformation, making cars smarter and repositioning themselves from manufacturers to intelligent mobility service providers. China’s autonomous driving industry is already at the global leading level, with deep accumulation in sensors, navigation positioning, computing platforms and vehicle-road coordination. McKinsey predicts China’s total autonomous vehicle sales will reach USD 230 billion by 2030, and with policy and demand pushing together, China will become the world’s largest autonomous driving market. Robin Li believes that over the next decade, key AI technologies from autonomous driving and digital city operations to machine translation, biological computing and deep learning frameworks will achieve qualitative leaps, opening fresh space for intelligent transportation.
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