Baidu readying autonomous revolution by 2020

The world's biggest new car market, China, could be one of the first countries to get a bona-fide autonomous car.

With a little help from car-maker Chery Automotive, automotive supplier ZF and microprocessor company Nvidia, Baidu says it'll have mass-produced autonomous cars on Chinese roads before most established brand, in 2020.

Better yet, Baidu says its platform could save 3000 lives per day when fully implemented.

As the self-driving race continues to intensify, with trillions of dollars at stake, Chinese search engine and tech giant Baidu – the 'Chinese Google' for want of a better term – has developed an Android-like autonomous car software system, Apollo 2.0.

Unlike almost every other autonomous software system being developed to date, the Apollo 2.0 self-driving software is open-source, a la Android for smartphones.

That means it's also free and all the data collected is available to anyone, whereas the likes of Mercedes-Benz, Google, Nissan, Uber and Volvo keep their self-driving research – and lucrative data collection and driver behaviour – to themselves.

Baidu used the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to announce Apollo 2.0, which can now drive at night, and has teamed up with two industry leaders to create a plug-and-play system for car-makers.

Baidu's Apollo 2.0 provides the autonomous car software, while German auto supplier ZF delivers the sensors and car hardware, and American microprocessor maker Nvidia provides the new Xavier GPU to create a one-stop autonomous car shop.

The company showcased this ready-to-roll autonomous rig in a luxury car from Lincoln, which is owned by Ford. The idea is that any car company can fit the system and voila – a self-driving car is born.

Baidu already has 90 partners signed on using its Apollo self-driving software, including Ford, and says it will have Level 3 (no feet, hands or eyes required) autonomous vehicles on sale in China – built by Chery Automotive – by 2020.

If the predictions prove correct, these will be the world's first mass-produced autonomous vehicles, and they will be preceded by autonomous public transport from bus maker King Long.

The autonomous car space is no longer about the cars or the sensors, but data collection, AI and the computing software and hardware capable of calculating hundreds of extremely complex equations simultaneously. Like a human brain, really.

If Baidu delivers on its promise, it will have out-googled Google and could become the default AI software for autonomous cars across the globe – including Australia – in the future.