Baidu unveils new self-driving taxi in China

Image source, Qian Jin/Baidu

The next vehicle in the Apollo Go self-driving taxi service has been unveiled.

The ApolloRT6 has the road skills of a driver with 20 years of experience, according to the company.

Chinese regulation still requires a safety driver to be in the car.

One day, the RT6 could be replaced by extra seats, vending machines, desks or games consoles.

Image source, Qian Jin/Baidu

The ApolloRT6 would cost less than previous models.

Robin Li told the company's annual technology conference that the cost reduction would allow them to deploy tens of thousands of automated vehicles.

Taking arobo-taxi will be half the cost of a taxi in a few years.

The company plans to have 100,000 of them on the roads by the end of the century.

The vehicle is packed with a lot of things.

• eight light-detection and ranging (Lidar) sensors
• one 6mm (0.2in) wave radar
• 12 ultrasonic sensors
• 12 cameras

More than one million rides have been given by therobo-taxis in 10 cities in China since it was launched in 2020.

There was a discussion on the country's social network about the impact on jobs if they became official.

"While pilot schemes have been rolled out, there have been misperceptions online that they are still hard to find or that appointments are difficult to make, in order to try one out," she said.

There are other companies in therobo-taxi space.

• AutoX, backed by Chinese technology giant Alibaba.
• Pony.ai, founded by former Google and Baidu engineers and backed by Toyota