Chinese giant Baidu associates with Geely and Toyota

(This July 4th story corrects to remove the reference to the autonomous thrust in the title)

BEIJING (Reuters) – China's leading search engine operator, Baidu Inc., has partnered with Zhejiang Geely Holding Group and Japan's Toyota Motor Corp. to cooperate in areas related to artificial intelligence. as part of a campaign for autonomous cars.

As part of their partnership, Geely [GEELY.UL] and Toyota have joined Apollo, a Baidu autonomous driving platform.

Baidu will supply the future Apollo Minibus, a software for autonomous bus vehicles, to future vehicles of the Toyota e-Palette, and will work with the automaker to explore more uses of autonomous driving technologies, said Li Zhenyu. , vice president of Baidu. charge of his intelligent driving unit.

With Geely, Baidu will cooperate in artificial intelligence applications such as smart connectivity and smart mobility, said Robin Li, president of Baidu, and Li Shufu, president of Geely, at the annual meeting of Baidu Create 2019 during which the company shows its progress in the field of AI.

Global automakers, big tech companies and startups are all engaged in self-driving efforts, but experts say it will be years before the systems are ready to be deployed.

China, the largest automotive market in the world, is at the forefront of this trend towards automation and wants to have its own players to compete with global leaders such as Tesla and Waymo, the autonomous arm of Alphabet, the company mother of Google.

Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, have already announced local guidelines for self-driving tests.

Baidu has already been authorized to test autonomous vehicles in some streets of the city.