New | Fleet of driverless Baidu cars takes to the road in Wuzhen

Baidu Inc, the Chinese internet search giant, has been showing off its new driverless cars, during a trial run in Wuzhen in Zhejiang province, the eastern river township which is hosting this week’s World Internet Conference.

Without drivers, a fleet of 18 autonomous vehicles drove along the city’s Ziye Road, as a demonstration for the technology gurus arriving from around the globe for the three-day event, which started on Wednesday. The cars will be available for delegates to try out throughout the week.

The first passengers were taken on a 10-minute, 3-kilometre test run in the blue-striped driverless cars.

Baidu has co-produced the vehicles based on three existing car models: BYD’s plug-in hybrid compact sedan Qin, Chery Automobile’s minicar model EQ and BAIC’s compact sedan EU260. The company is partnering with German car maker BMW in building the cars.

It hopes to have a small number of the vehicles being used for commercial purposes within three years and for it to be in large-scale production within five.

During the test rides on a preset route, the cars stopped and started at traffic lights, reacted by stopping when they sensed barriers or pedestrians, accelerated to 50 kilometres per hour, and did U-turns.