By Gabby Chen

(JW Insights) Apr 20 -- Chinese tech company Baidu unveiled a range of new products focused on intelligent driving, cabin technology and maps on April 16, reported Pandaily. Black Sesame is also announced as Baidu’s latest chip partner.

Rob Chu, corporate VP of Baidu and GM of Apollo Self Driving, and Shan Jizhang, Founder and CEO of Chinese self-driving chip startup Black Sesame, jointly announced that Black Sesame will become the latest chip partner to Baidu Apollo Smart Driving. Additionally, Apollo Highway Driving Pro will be deployed on Black Sesame’s Huashan II A1000 chip computing platform, which will be officially released in Q3 this year.

Baidu presented four key capabilities for car manufacturers in its recently published “Baidu Apollo Self-Driving Openness White Paper,” including open experience definition, independent experience evolution, full-cycle OTA services, and co-create with car manufacturing partners.

The automobile industry is now in a moment of radical change. Baidu predicts that by 2026, the market penetration rate of models equipped with the L2+ advanced intelligent driving solution, valet parking highway navigation pilot and city navigation pilot will exceed 15%, ushering in a transition period in the intelligent vehicle industry.

Li Zhenyu, senior corporate VP of Baidu and president of the intelligent driving business group, noted that new customers will be less likely to consider cars without intelligent driving capabilities when intelligent cars become more prevalent in 2026.

Baidu Apollo launched its flagship intelligent driving solution, Apollo City Driving Max, featuring dual Nvidia Orin X with 508 TOPS arithmetic power. This is the only solution in China that offers users a coherent experience on urban roads using pure vision perception, said the company.

Baidu’s integrated auto-navigation plus valet parking solution Apollo Highway Driving Pro has also completed an algorithm platform upgrade. With the latest single TDA4-VH platform, the AI and CPU computing power usage is 50% less compared to the previous TDA4-VH platform.

Baidu Apollo and Voyah, an EV manufacturer backed by Dongfeng Motor, announced the Voyah Free, an all-electric and plug-in-hybrid 5-seater SUV, will be equipped with Apollo Highway Driving Pro, which includes assisted driving functions such as highway navigation pilot, city autopilot and efficient parking in all scenarios.

In addition, Baidu Apollo upgraded its autonomous parking solution Apollo Parking, which has a success rate of over 99% in the top 5 most commonly faced parking scenarios and takes only 28 seconds to complete perpendicular parking.

Baidu Apollo currently provides two flagship Intelligent Cabin solutions: the DuerOS for Apollo and Duer assistant for Apollo. At the same time, Baidu is actively exploring the use of its ChatGPT-type ERNIE Big Model’s capabilities to reshape the relationship between the user and the smart cabin when traveling, and to create new experiences for the AI smart cabin.

In terms of smart maps, Baidu Apollo has upgraded its in-vehicle navigation maps with different levels of quality, performance and real-time data. The newly released shared autonomy maps provide a new human-vehicle interface and enhance users’ trust in smart driving solutions, said the Pandaily report.