Baidu’s Apollo Go self-driving ride-hailing platform has clocked up more than seven million autonomous rides since its inception, according to a recent Baidu earnings call.
The achievement was reached thanks to almost 900,000 rides in Q2 alone, an increase of 26% year-on-year, a number no doubt supported by the recent launch of autonomous services in Wuhan.
At Baidu’s Apollo Day in May this year, the company announced that their service will break even in Wuhan by the end of the year and achieve profitable status in 2025, and this is only likely to improve as the firm’s self-made, 6th-generation robotaxi, known as RT6, starts operation in the fourth quarter of this year.
We actually covered the reveal of the RT6 on the YouTube channel back in 2022, the first Baidu robotaxi made entirely by Baidu and not a modified model from another brand, and it’s only now heading into production, but the revised lower cost of 204,600 RMB, around $28,350, is less than half that of the 5th-generation robotaxi which cost 480,000, around $67,200.
One thousand units of the RT6 will go into 24/7 service in Wuhan before the end of the year, with the in-vehicle safety monitor no longer necessary and remote monitoring taking over. It will feature four lidar units from giant Hesai, with detection range of up to 200 metres.
History and Future
The Baidu driverless vehicle story started back in 2013 with the establishment of an intelligent driving business group and the later launch of the Apollo Project.
They then launched the Apollo Open platform in 2017, an open-source self-driving vehicle tech platform, and over the course of the last seven years they have gradually developed their technology on a variety of donor cars such as the Arcfox Alpha T.
Then head of Baidu’s autonomous car business, Wang Jin, stated at the time: “Three years to realise commercial application, five years to achieve mass production, and ten years to change the way we travel.”
We’re now eight years into that promise and with fully autonomous cars making waves in Wuhan, the future looks promising.
A Chinese investment bank and brokerage firm, Pacific Securities, forecasts the size of China’s robotaxi market to exceed $165.2 billion in 2025 and $410.2 billion in 2030, and Baidu look well placed to take a hefty slice of that lucrative pie.
