BEIJING, Oct. 31 (Xinhua) -- Baidu and Changsha city have reached a comprehensive cooperation agreement to transform the capital city of Central China's Hunan Province into an automatic driving demonstration city, based on the tech giant's autonomous driving platform Apollo.
According to the agreement, a batch of autonomous driving taxis will be put into trial operation in the city of Changsha, which has never been carried out in any cities throughout China, and the number of the autonomous taxis is expected to reach 100 in 2019.
In addition, Apollo will also create a smart bus demonstration route to promote the intelligent upgrade of public transportation.
Apollo was launched by Baidu in 2017 to provide an open software platform for its partners to develop their own autonomous driving systems, and it aims to provide fully autonomous driving solutions for highway and city roads by 2021. (Edited by Li Wenxin, Yang Qi, liwenxin@xinhua.org)