Baidu Founder Robin Li Shares Insights on Intelligent Transportation in New Audio Course

On February 24th, Baidu founder, chairman, and CEO Robin Li launched his audio course "7 Lectures on Intelligent Transportation" on the Dedao app. The course, recorded by Li himself, covers topics including autonomous driving, vehicle-road collaboration, automobiles, traffic control, maps, parking, and highways - addressing public concerns across various travel scenarios. This marks Li's first public sharing this year, discussing his views on the future development of intelligent transportation.

Li believes that "autonomous driving is just the beginning, with the ultimate goal being intelligent transportation, intelligent cities, and even intelligent society."

Regarding intelligent transportation, Li identifies four key participants: people, vehicles, roads, and environment, with automobiles being a crucial participant. Industry reports predict that by 2030, China's autonomous driving vehicle sales will reach $230 billion (approximately 1.5 trillion RMB). With dual support from policy and social demand, China is poised to become the world's largest autonomous driving market.

In the field of autonomous driving technology, there has been an ongoing debate between two major approaches: vehicle-centric intelligence and vehicle-road collaboration. Li stated that using vehicle-road collaboration for autonomous driving is the technical route that Baidu has chosen and believes in. According to Baidu's analysis, vehicle-road collaboration can reduce autonomous driving accident rates by 99%; transferring some autonomous driving functions to the road side can significantly reduce costs, thereby accelerating the commercialization of autonomous driving. Li believes that China has the potential to become the first country to achieve large-scale commercialization of L4-L5 level autonomous driving.

Currently, Baidu Apollo has accumulated over 21 million kilometers of testing mileage and its autonomous driving ride-hailing platform "Luobo Kuaipao" has opened passenger-carrying test operations in seven cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Changsha, and Cangzhou.

Baidu's intelligent transportation solutions have been deployed in over 50 cities nationwide. These solutions include intelligent networking, smart traffic management, smart highways, and smart parking. In 2019, the "Outline for Building a Transportation Powerhouse" proposed that by 2035, a transportation powerhouse will be basically built, with intelligent, safe, green, and shared transportation development levels significantly improved; by the middle of this century, a comprehensive transportation powerhouse will be built with intelligence and green development levels among the world's best.

Li believes that "autonomous driving is just the beginning, with the ultimate goal being intelligent transportation, intelligent cities, and even intelligent society." Baidu's intelligent transportation, based on the concept of "smart vehicles plus wise roads," deeply integrates AI, 5G communication, cloud computing, and other technologies with the transportation industry, exploring the "Chinese model" for high-quality development of a transportation powerhouse.