Source: Hubei Provincial People’s Government Information Office
On February 28, Baidu’s self-driving travel service platform “Carrot Run” announced that its fully unmanned fleet in Wuhan has exceeded 100 vehicles, and can operate more than 750 kilometers of roads, cover an area of 530 square kilometers in Wuhan and provide fully unmanned autonomous driving travel services for nearly 1.5 million people in the operating area.
At the same time, according to the 2022 financial report data released by Baidu a few days ago, as of the end of January 2023, the cumulative order volume of Carrot Run exceeded 2 million orders, firmly ranking as the world’s largest autonomous driving travel service provider.
It is understood that with the operation of hundreds of unmanned vehicles, the number of unmanned orders for Carrot Run in Wuhan has also ushered in explosive growth. The peak value of single-day per-vehicle exceeds 20 orders. It has become a new choice for the daily travel of Wuhan citizens. At the same time, users are highly satisfied with travel services in fully driverless vehicles. According to data, the user satisfaction rating of the Carrot Run app is 4.9 points, of which 94.19% are positive with a full score of 5 points.
As one of the six major automobile industry clusters in China, Wuhan actively promotes the development of industrial agglomeration, enriches the application demonstration scenarios, and enhances the comprehensive competitiveness of the new energy and intelligent networked automobile industries.
Within half a year, Baidu Apollo’s unmanned driving operation service in Wuhan has achieved a three-level leap. In August 2022, Carrot Run opened China’s first batch of fully unmanned autonomous driving commercial travel services in Wuhan; In December, Carrot Run expanded the commercial operation of fully unmanned autonomous driving on a large scale in Wuhan, achieving triple breakthroughs in area expansion, capacity increase, and time increase, and officially realized cross-regional traffic and fully unmanned driving at night; At present, 100 fully unmanned self-driving vehicles of Carrot Run have achieved full coverage of core business districts, residential areas, industrial parks and universities in an operating area of 530 square kilometers, which can meet the high-frequency travel needs of users.
The survey report “Development and Evaluation of the Driverless Vehicle Industry” released recently also shows that through the analysis of netizens’ comments that mention “driverless driving” related policies, it is found that positive comments account for about 83%, and the overall evaluation is positive. On the whole, the evaluation believes that a sound policy system is the prerequisite for the development of unmanned driving, and local governments actively play a “combined punch” of policies, which is conducive to promoting the rapid development of unmanned driving.
Baidu began to lay out the field of autonomous driving in 2013. For ten years, it has insisted on intensive and marathon R&D investment, and has driven long-term development with technological innovation. Baidu’s Apollo L4 autonomous driving operating test mileage has exceeded 50 million kilometers, and it has more than 4,600 autonomous driving patent families, ranking first in the world for four consecutive years. Today, Baidu Apollo is fully promoting the large-scale application of fully unmanned autonomous driving.
Carrot Run has launched autonomous driving travel services in more than 10 cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Wuhan, and Chongqing. It is also the first company to realize the commercial operation and testing of fully unmanned autonomous driving in Beijing, Chongqing, and Wuhan. In 2023, Baidu Apollo will continue to expand its business scale and strive to build the world’s largest unmanned driving operation service area.