How China and the US are steering self-driving cars

Alibaba joins Baidu, Google and Uber in race to replace humans in the driver’s seat

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A self-driving vehicle on a road in Beijing (Picture: Xinhua)

Karen Chiu

Published: 8:24pm, 17 Apr 2018Updated: 8:23am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Driving in China is no joke. Look at this traffic jam during one holiday in 2015:

Vehicles in Beijing trying to merge as families return home during the end of Golden Week in 2015, a holiday around National Day in China. (Picture: China Daily)

Imagine if you were behind the wheel of one of those cars.

Now China’s three biggest tech giants are racing to let machines take over the driver’s seat. Just this week, Alibaba confirmed it’s road-testing autonomous cars and is looking to hire dozens more researchers for the project. (Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba.)

This comes after Chinese media reported that a Tencent driverless car was seen running on a Beijing highway -- and Baidu was granted a permit to test self-driving vehicles on 30 designated roads in Beijing’s suburbs.

Chinese companies are relatively late to autonomous driving: Google kicked off its Waymo project back in 2009, while Baidu -- largely considered a self-driving pioneer in China -- only began its efforts about five years ago.

The delay could be one reason why Western companies still dominate the scene. No firms from China made the top ten in Navigant Research’s latest autonomous driving scorecard. The top three were General Motors, Waymo, and a joint venture between Mercedes owner Daimler and engineering giant Bosch.