Baidu's driverless car hits the streets in Beijing

The car is a modified BMW 3 Series Gran Turismo that Baidu is now testing on public roads, reports Tech in Asia

Baidu, China’s top search engine company, said last year that it had started working on driverless car technology – and today its autonomous car hit the streets.

The car is a modified BMW 3 Series Gran Turismo that Baidu is now testing on public roads, using a 30-kilometer test drive route that begins and loops back to Baidu’s Beijing HQ. It includes one of the Chinese capital’s notoriously busy ring roads. The route was mapped out by “highly automated driving (HAD) maps” in readiness for the tests.
 

“The car demonstrated full autonomy on the entirety of the route and successfully executed driving actions including making right turns, left turns and U-turns, decelerating when detecting vehicles ahead, changing lanes, passing other cars, and merging into traffic from on-ramps and exiting from off-ramps. The car speed peaked at 100 kph during the test runs,” said Baidu in a statement.
 

Baidu says its autonomous car “is the first in China to have demonstrated full autonomy under mixed road conditions,” marking a major milestone for both the company and China’s evolution towards the driverless vehicle future.
 

While Google built its own cutesy car for its self-driving program, Baidu instead renewed its friendship with BMW, which was first revealed in September last year when the Chinese tech giant said that it will work with the Munich-based automaker to develop an autonomous car specifically for the Chinese market. But that won’t see the light of day for a while.
 

But this autonomous car is entirely Baidu’s work, dubbed the Baidu AutoBrain project. It stems from the firm’s augmented reality-focused Institute of Deep Learning.

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.