By Michael Elkins
Leading AI company, Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) introduced its new automated driving assistance system, Apollo City Driving Max, Sunday at the company’s automotive intelligence conference.
The Chinese tech giant claims that the system will enable vehicles to complete point-to-point navigation by themselves, covering major driving scenarios from Chinese highways to urban roads.
The flagship intelligent driving solution is equipped with dual Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) Orin X with 508 TOPS arithmetic power. This is the only solution in China that offers users a coherent experience on urban roads using pure vision perception. The current product definition also includes LIDAR to achieve "pure vision + LIDAR" true perception redundancy. The product uses a "lightweight high HD map" that is nearly 80% "lighter" than the traditional HD maps, enabling rapid urban generalization at a more reasonable cost.
"In 2026, when intelligent cars become more prevalent, new customers will be less likely to consider cars without intelligent driving capabilities," said Zhenyu Li, Senior Corporate Vice President of Baidu and president of the Intelligent Driving Business Group. Rob Chu, Baidu Corporate Vice President and GM of Apollo Self Driving explained, "Whoever can take the lead in providing consumers with a safe and secure intelligent driving experience will likely have a head start in the second half of the intelligent car competition."
The company also announced that Voyah, the electric vehicle unit of Chinese automaker Dongfeng, will use Baidu’s Apollo Highway Driving Pro system for automated highway driving for its vehicles. The revamped version of the brand’s large-sized crossover Free is scheduled for launch in Shanghai on Tuesday.
Shares of BIDU are up 3% in pre-market trading on Monday.