Not Far Behind
Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are focusing on the self-driving car industry to catch up with Tesla and Google. The three Chinese companies are concentrating on artificial intelligence, map databases and wireless infrastructure in particular, all of which form the core of self-driving vehicles. In addition, they are collaborating with car sharing companies such as Uber and Didi Chuxing for sharing of self-driving cars. This is quite contrary to what South Korean car sharing service providers, automakers and Internet and software firms are doing, that is, trying to find a way of survival alone.
Baidu is currently conducting tests in order to come up with commercial self-driving vehicles within two years. The company succeeded in a test in November last year with a BMW 3 Series. At the time, Baidu provided maps, voice recognition and cloud computing environments. Two months ago, Baidu opened the Autonomous Driving Unit U.S., an autonomous car research lab, in the Silicon Valley to deepen its research on deep learning-based AI.
Alibaba releases its first connected car in September this year with Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation. Earlier in April, the corporation unveiled the Roewe RX5 SUV, a connected car, at this year’s Beijing Motor Show. Tencent set up Future Mobility in March with Foxconn and Harmony Auto, which is a Chinese electric vehicle developer. The joint venture’s personnel include those who developed electric cars at BMW.
At the same time, Alibaba and Tencent are continuing to invest in Didi Chuxing, the largest car sharing firm in China, while Baidu is helping Uber in the Chinese market. Alibaba’s payment service Alipay can be used in Uber cars.