Toyota in Apollo, Baidu's self-driving may usher in the first year of business?

According to foreign media "Nihon Keizai Shimbun" reported that Toyota will join Baidu's self-driving development alliance "Apollo program" (Apollo). According to Baidu's official website and public reports, counting Toyota, there are currently nearly 150 automotive-related companies to join the Apollo program, including Dellums Group, Volkswagen, BMW, Grab, Nvidia, Intel and other global giants.

The Apollo program is one of the steps in Baidu's artificial intelligence (AI) layout, and this open autonomous driving platform launched in 2017 adopts an "open source code" approach to disclose to participating enterprises the Apollo platform's large-scale autonomous driving dataset ApolloScape, as well as the latest software and hardware technology information on the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), autonomous driving, etc., and allow each enterprise to promote specific development. The latest software and hardware technology information is disclosed to the participating enterprises, and each enterprise promotes the specific development respectively.

At the same time, the Apollo platform also needs to extract desensitized data from participating manufacturers during the R&D process to optimize and iterate on its own technology.

For Baidu's Apollo program (Apollo), partnering with Toyota, the world's No. 1 influencer, is undoubtedly an important step in expanding its autonomous driving ecosystem.

Baidu Vice President Li Zhenyu also said at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January that "this year will be the first year of Apollo commercialization."

At that time, Baidu released Apollo 3.5, an autonomous driving solution that supports complex urban roads, as well as Apollo Enterprise, a commercialization solution for intelligent driving.The release of the latter means that Baidu Apollo intends to formally launch its commercialization in 2019 - moving from a source code-only underlying platform, gradually moving towards providing To B customized products for enterprises.

Toyota's entry at this time is a recognition of Apollo 3.5.

However, the road to creating a self-driving ecosystem isn't easy.

At the 2017 Baidu AI conference, Lu Qi, then president of Baidu Group, chief operating officer and general manager of Baidu Intelligent Driving Business Group, said that he wanted to make Apollo an "Android" system in the field of automotive autonomous driving. Now, nearly 150 car companies and suppliers have reached cooperation with Apollo platform, which seems to let people see the possibility of rapid output of self-driving cars based on Apollo software technology.

However, for self-driving cars, self-driving technology is just like batteries and electric cars, which is the core "parts" of the whole car. Although car companies have reached cooperation with Baidu Apollo platform, it does not mean that these cautious automakers will really be "deeply bound" to the Apollo system.

Analogous to Tesla and Panasonic, which have been cooperating on electric vehicles for five years, there has been frequent news of a breakdown in their relationship recently.

Since April this year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk (Elon Musk) on Twitter publicly expressed dissatisfaction with Panasonic's capacity supply ability, in June, the U.S. financial website CNBC has revealed the news, Tesla is secretly research and development of power batteries, so as to reduce the dependence on the battery manufacturer Panasonic, as of now the two sides have not yet responded to this.

Then look at the automatic driving industry, according to the financial report, in May this year, had founded Baidu's automatic driving division of Wang Jin said in a media conference, the domestic automatic driving company and automobile manufacturers to cooperate with a big obstacle, that is, who is in the cooperation of the initiative of the problem.

"No driverless company in China so far has been able to realize a deep binding with automakers." Wang Jin said.

The implication is that most of the car makers cooperating with Baidu's Apollo program don't seem to like it. Although Baidu is still enthusiastically "recruiting" more car companies into the Bureau, but after all, the core technology in their own hands, in order to grasp more initiative in the future autonomous driving market.