driving tech fueled by innovation

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By Yan Dongjie (Chinadaily.com.cn) 09:28, August 28, 2024

An engineer monitors a self-driving vehicle's performance via a laptop in Beijing in June. (JU HUANZONG/XINHUA)

As China strives for technological innovation represented by intelligent connected vehicles and autonomous driving, it has created a distinctive Chinese innovation model, with government departments, enterprises, and research institutions collaborating closely and policies being drafted to support the nation's technological growth, said experts, entrepreneurs, and officials.

Zhao Xiangmo, vice-chairman of the China Society of Automotive Engineers, said that with the development of new energy vehicles and self-driving tech, the automotive industry is undergoing a qualitative change.

As self-driving vehicles become more prominent, China's solution is vehicle-road-cloud integration, which is a technology more complex than the single-vehicle intelligence explored by the United States 30 years ago, said Zhao, who is also president of the Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology in Shaanxi province.

Vehicle-road-cloud integration uses artificial intelligence and technologies such as cellular vehicle-to-everything, or C-V2X, and 5G to enable seamless collaboration between humans, vehicles, roads, and cloud systems.

Zhao attributes China's success in the field of intelligent driving to its unique path of independent innovation, which has mobilized various forces from government departments, automotive companies, cloud computing enterprises, and research institutions to achieve collaborative development under a top-level framework.

"This is a vast technological system involving vehicle, road, internet, and cloud computing, in which each segment can drive an industry. It's impossible to proceed without teamwork. This is also a typical area where new quality productive forces are concentrated," he said.

The third plenary session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China held last month emphasized the need to coordinate the construction of various scientific and technological innovation platforms, encourage and regulate the development of new research and development institutions, leverage the leading role of China's huge market, strengthen the coordination of innovative resources and organizational strength, and promote the integration of technological innovation and industrial innovation.

In September 2020, the Beijing municipal government decided to establish the world's first high-level autonomous driving demonstration zone, featuring vehicle-road-cloud integration, in the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area.

Beijing Connected and Autonomous Vehicles Technology Co was set up as the operating platform, in conjunction with the National Innovation Center of Intelligent and Connected Vehicles and other research and development institutions, forming a structure involving government departments, academia, industries, and investors among other entities.

Pony.ai, an autonomous driving research and development company that started operating in Silicon Valley in 2016, established its first domestic research center in the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area in 2017, becoming one of the first companies to have a presence in the demonstration zone.

"The construction of the demonstration zone has accelerated Pony.ai's research and testing," said Zhang Ning, vice-president of the company and head of its Beijing research center. "On average, there is a technological breakthrough or policy move every three months — a pace that is exhilarating."

One of Pony.ai's main businesses involves Robotaxi, an autonomous taxi service. In 2018, the company obtained a testing license and began conducting trial runs with a safety officer in the driver's seat. In April 2021, the officer moved to the passenger seat; in July 2022, to the back seat; and by the end of that year, "fully driverless" tests were successfully conducted.

"After accumulating enough testing data, following evaluation by the demonstration zone's management committee, Pony.ai started providing Robotaxi services for a fee since last year. Now, anyone in the demonstration zone can hail a ride in these taxis using their mobile phone," Zhang said.

Currently, only China and the US have achieved commercial operation of self-driving taxis, he noted. While Google's Waymo has undergone 15 years of development, China has made rapid progress in the past five years, thanks to the close cooperation between government departments, enterprises, and research institutions.

"The resonance between policy and technological innovation is crucial. The government acts as a guiding beacon, boosting the confidence of enterprises and promoting technological development through funding and policies. This is how the Robotaxi has achieved such rapid development in such a short time," Zhang said.

"The testing data accumulated by enterprises serves as a reference for government policymaking, with the government overseeing and making decisions to share the risks with enterprises," he added.