China’s Baidu opens $1.5 billion fund for financing development of autonomous transport

Almaty. September 22. Silkroadnews – China’s Baidu launches $1.5 bln autonomous driving fund, the Nasdaq news portal reported.
“Chinese search engine Baidu Inc announced a 10 billion yuan ($1.52 billion) autonomous driving fund as part of a wider plan to speed up its technical development and compete with U.S. rivals,” the report said.
The “Apollo Fund”, as reported, will invest in 100 projects related to autonomous vehicles within the next three years.
The opening of the fund coincides with the release of Apollo 1.5, the second generation of open source software for autonomous vehicles. As Baidu says, with the latest update of the software product, its customers will be able to get new obstacle perception technology and high-definition maps and other features.
According to the publication, all this happens amid changes in the corporate strategy of Baidu, which is looking for new sources of income outside its core search business, having lost a significant part of advertising revenue after in 2016 the government tightened the rules for advertising medical products.
The Baidu Apollo project, named after the U.S. landing on the Moon, aims to create technologies for completely autonomous vehicles expected to put into service in China by 2020.
It is reported that Baidu currently has 70 partners in several branches of the automobile industry, compared with 50 in July, among them, producer of microprocessors Nvidia Corp and mapping service TomTom NV.
Despite the rapid growth of the partner network, Baidu encountered difficulties in negotiations with Chinese local authorities that prohibited testing of autonomous vehicles on highways, the report reads.
In July, Beijing’s local police reported that it was investigating to determine whether the company violated the city traffic rules by testing a driverless car on the public road as part of a demonstration at a press event.