China’s first report on self-driving cars won’t tell you how safe they are

Report covers driverless cars from 8 companies: Baidu, Pony.ai, Nio, Daimler, Tencent, Beijing New Energy Automobile, Audi and Didi

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

Published: 10:04pm, 2 Apr 2019Updated: 9:00am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

While a couple of fatal crashes in 2018 have made the more US cautious about self-driving cars, China is still plowing ahead. The government expects that by 2030, 10% of all cars sold in China will be fully autonomous vehicles.

Now Beijing’s transportation department has issued its first report, one year after authorities laid out national guidelines for self-driving road tests. But it doesn’t say much.

The report gives stats on 54 self-driving vehicles from 8 companies: Baidu, Pony.ai, Nio, Daimler, Tencent, Beijing New Energy Automobile, Audi and Didi. Together they drove more than 153,565 kilometers (95,420 miles) in Beijing in 2018 without a single accident, according to the report.

Most of these miles were contributed by Baidu alone. The company’s 45 vehicles ran 139,887 kilometers (86,921 miles), much more than the 13,288 miles its vehicles traveled in California.

Meet Baidu, China’s homegrown search engine

Baidu’s push in autonomous vehicles isn’t surprising. After an Uber self-driving car struck and killed a woman in the US in March of 2018, CEO Robin Li said publicly defended driverless cars, saying they’re still much safer than human-driven ones.