Arcfox, the BAIC-owned EV brand wowed a lot of people with the release of the Arcfox α-S model with Huawei's autonomous driving technology two months ago. Now the company is teaming up with Baidu's autonomous driving division Apollo.
Apollo and Arcfox will announce their partnership on June 17 to "usher in a new era of shared self-driving," according to the former's Weibo.
Apollo didn't reveal any more information, but the poster it released suggests the partnership may be related to Robotaxis.
The move comes at a time when Apollo is accelerating its commercialization.
On April 19, Apollo announced during the Shanghai auto show that a new car with its autonomous driving would be available every month for the second half of the year.
On May 10, Baidu announced that Wei Dong, former CEO of Shouqi Limousine & Chauffeur, joined Baidu as vice president of the Intelligent Driving Business Group and chief safety operations officer of Baidu's Intelligent Driving Business Group. Wei will lead the commercial operations of Baidu's Apollo shared unmanned vehicles, the company said.
As an industry veteran with years of commercialization experience in shared mobility, Wei will substantially drive the acceleration of Apollo shared unmanned vehicle deployment and commercial operations in China, Baidu said.
Baidu began its involvement in autonomous driving technology eight years ago and was one of the first companies to enter the field in China.
Currently, Baidu's Apollo test fleet has reached 500 vehicles and 2,900 smart driving patents. A total of 221 test licenses have been granted to Apollo, including 179 manned test licenses.
As of April 2021, Apollo's L4 level autonomous driving road test mileage has exceeded 10 million kilometers, making it the first Chinese company to reach this threshold.
Starting May 2, Apollo driverless Robotaxi officially opened for regular commercial operation, and the public can begin to experience the world's first fully driverless cab service.
This makes Baidu the first Chinese company to openly operate driverless Robotaxi, signifying a new stage in the commercialization of driverless vehicles.
As for Arcfox, on April 17 it unveiled the Arcfox α-S model with a starting price of RMB 251,900 ($38,600).
The most interesting version is the one equipped with Huawei's full-stack smart car solution "Huawei Inside", which is also the first time Huawei's technology appears on a mass-production model.
The starting price for this version is RMB 388,900 and the premium version is priced at RMB 429,900. They are expected to be delivered in November and December this year.
The model is equipped with an intelligent advanced autonomous driving system with 400TOPs of computing power.
The body is equipped with 3 LIDAR, 6 millimeter-wave radars, 12 ultrasonic radars, 9 ADS cameras, and 4 surround-view cameras.
The lower-priced version enables highway autonomous driving, while the highest-spec version has urban high-grade autonomous driving and valet parking capabilities.
