The mobility service will deploy artificial intelligence company Baidu’s Apollo Go RT6 vehicles from next year, if regulators approve.
Germany will also be used as a testbed for the European offering, which marks a signifiant step in the ongoing expansion of Baidu, which aims to scale its fleet up to thousands across the continent in the coming years.
‘Our partnership with Lyft to deploy Apollo Go in Europe, starting with Germany and the United Kingdom, is a significant milestone in our global journey,’ said Robin Li, Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO at Baidu. ‘It’s part of our hybrid network approach, where AVs and human drivers work together to provide customer-obsessed options for riders.’
Apollo Go RT6 has been designed specifically for rideshare services such as Lyft, and has now undergone six generations of real-world testing. To date, these vehicles have already completed more than 11million rides. In 2018, the cars covered 140,000km in Beijing alone, accounting for 91% of the total self-driving distance travelled by the city’s eight licensed firms at the time.
‘Our partnership with Baidu is all about creating a great customer experience. Their extensive track record operating the world’s largest autonomous ride-hailing service means we can bring all the benefits of AVs – safety, reliability, and privacy – to millions of Europeans,’ said David Risher, Lyft CEO.
‘It’s part of our hybrid network approach, where AVs and human drivers work together to provide customer-obsessed options for riders,’ he continued. ‘And importantly, we’re committed to working hand-in-hand with local regulators to ensure we deploy these vehicles in their communities in a smart, thoughtful way that benefits everyone.’
Lyft is Baidu’s first European mobility partner, and the rideshare firm’s recent buy-out of taxi app Freenow is likely to bolster the chances of success. The latter is well established in Germany and the UK and has extensive experience dealing with respective regulators.
Whether this will be enough remains a question, though, given concerns across the Western about reliance on Chinese tech firms. Baidu is best known as the largest search platform in its homeland, where the Internet is closely monitored and tightly censored by the government. Firms operating in this space are forced to comply with strict regulation. Last year, Baidu denied its own AI-driven chatbot, Ernie, had links to the armed forces and could be part of an emerging branch of the military.
In 2020, the UK decided to ban the use of 5G equipment manufactured by Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, and remove any existing kit within the network by 2027, due to fears how how this could be used. As of 2019, US trade restrictions had led to Google restricting the company’s access to various Android platform updates for a similar reason, blocking products form using Google Mobile Services including Play Store, Gmail, and Google Maps. Earlier this year, access was reintroduced to any device sold outside China itself.
Image: Austin Distel / Unsplash
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