On Automotive Electronics

While Google dominates the global internet search engine market, Baidu is the leading search engine company in China. Having invested 15 billion US dollars in artificial intelligence over the last ten years, Baidu now views AI as the “differentiating foundational technology that powers all of its businesses.” One of those AI-powered businesses is Apollo Go, an autonomous ride-hailing service like Google's self-driving car project, Waymo. Baidu has been working on autonomous driving since 2013 and started its robotaxi business in 2017. By mid-year 2023, Apollo Go had already provided 3.3 million rides. While a large majority of those autonomous rides were backed by safety drivers, earlier this year the firm was granted permission to provide fully driverless ride-hailing services in four cities: Beijing, Shenzhen, Wuhan, and Chongqing, with more cities coming onboard in 2024. The percentage of driverless rides has been increasing. In July 2023, 55 % of Apollo Go's robotaxi rides were driverless, compared with 10 % in August 2022. Customers can hail Apollo Go robotaxis from the Baidu app on their mobile phones. …