Baidu Inc has made itself a contender in the race to build and deliver new technologies for the auto industry.
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January, China's leading search-engine company unveiled plans to cooperate this year with some of the world's leading automakers, including Audi, General Motors Co and FAW-Volkswagen, to make their China-made models smarter.
Baidu CarLife, a smartphone integration app, was demonstrated at the CES for the first time and will be available on future models, including the Audi A3, A4, Q5 and Q7, and Cadillac's XTS and SRX series.
CarLife can be connected to an in-car system (Linux, QNX or Android) by Wi-Fi or USB. Baidu CarLife has been working with BMW, Mercedes Benz, Ford and China's BYD. A new Hyundai Tucson, the first car on the market to integrate with CarLife, was launched in September 2015.
In December 2015, Baidu's two prototypes of autonomous cars — BMW 3 Series Gran Turismo — completed a 30-kilometer (18.6-mile) test drive.
Google started developing autonomous cars in 2009 and has tested self-driving vehicles for more than 2 million miles.
Tesla has announced that its electric car will be able to drive autonomously from Los Angeles to New York within two years.
Other big automakers like General Motors and Ford have set up labs in Silicon Valley and invested heavily to pursue the emerging market.
Though Baidu is a latecomer, its car is considered a major milestone for both the company and China.
Local knowledge of road conditions gives Baidu a competitive advantage over Google and others, according to Wang Jing, senior vice-president of Baidu in charge of commercial products and technology.
The core technology of electric cars and smart cars shifts from the engine and gearbox to artificial intelligence (AI), an area where China is close to the US, he said.
Robin Li, Baidu's co-founder and CEO, has been investing in AI. In 2013, Baidu set up a research lab in Silicon Valley dedicated to "deep learning" — a subfield of AI that aims to improve search results and computing tasks by training computers to work more like the human brain. A year later, the company invested $300 million to establish another research lab devoted to AI.
Baidu started developing telematics systems in 2013, and has the potential to shape the future of the industry, said Raymond Zhang, head of Baidu CarLife with Baidu Telematics.
Integral to Baidu's plans in telematics, HD (high-definition) Maps-as-a-Service (HaaS) enables online updates that transmit information on traffic conditions, so that the HD maps will "learn" as more HaaS-enabled vehicles travel the roads, he explained.
Baidu has been working on HD maps since 2013, and its Baidu Maps has more than a 70 percent market share in China, receiving more than 23 billion positioning requests a day.
In the next few years, HD maps will become the mainstream in mapping services and serve as the basis for Baidu's telematics efforts with part of the HD data for autonomous driving and for general maps and navigation, according to Xing Yuan, a senior engineer of Baidu's geographic information science department.
Baidu has been working on other solutions within HaaS, including MyCar, a data analysis and auto cloud service; CoDriver, a voice-enabled digital assistant; and CarGuard, a telematics security system.
Baidu's speech and telematics teams are working with Tesla, providing its speech recognition API (application program interface) to power Tesla's China models.
Baidu Research scientists made breakthroughs in speech recognition with deep learning algorithms and massive neural networks, and their effort in speech recognition was named a top-10 breakthrough technology in 2016 by MIT Technology Review.
