2022 Baidu World Congress: Officials say tens of thousands of steering wheel-free cars will be deployed

On the morning of July 21, Baidu held the "2022 Baidu World Congress" online in conjunction with CCTV News.

At the conference, Li Zhenyu, senior vice president of Baidu Group and general manager of the Intelligent Driving Business Group, officially announced the sixth generation of mass-production unmanned vehicle Apollo RT6, which is expected to be put into trial operation in the second half of 2023 in small batches for the Radish Express.

According to the introduction, Apollo RT6 is Baidu for future travel independent research and development, positive design of mass production vehicles, the whole vehicle for passenger demand and driverless travel scenarios for in-depth design, support with a steering wheel, steering wheel-free two modes.

In the future, Apollo RT6 can achieve steering wheel-free autonomous driving as allowed by relevant policies and regulations.

The car costs as little as 250,000 yuan, and the mass production cost is significantly reduced to 1/10 of the industry.

Baidu founder, chairman and CEO Robin Li said, "In the future, hitting an unmanned car will be half as cheap as taking a taxi now."

As planned, Baidu will use RT6 on the Radish Express platform next year and can deploy tens of thousands of vehicles nationwide in the future.

In addition to being driverless, the Apollo RT6 is also equipped with humanized features such as a rhinoceros interactive light language with recognition and prompting functions, intelligent electric side sliding doors, a hundred different intelligent spaces, independent seats and intelligent interaction system setback design.

Would you try a driverless car with no steering wheel at all?