Results of Beijing Autonomous Vehicle Road Test Report released, Baidu Apollo Ranked Top

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Beijing Intelligent Vehicle Industry Innovation Center recently released its official Beijing Autonomous Vehicle Road Test Report for 2019. The report reviews the autonomous driving test and overall industry development in the city of Beijing last year in terms of policy innovation, standard improvement, test environment construction, issuance of road test license and drive test development, and application demonstration. 

Beijing is among the cities that have encouraged companies to conduct automatic driving tests.   The national government has devoted considerable resources to the cities that support and assist enterprises in conducting testing work in terms of policies of venues.  Baidu, Pony.ai, NIO, Daimler, Tencent, Audi, and Toyota were among the 13 companies recognized in the Beijing report.

Last December 2019, the Beijing Autonomous Driving Test Management Joint Working Group has released the third edition of Beijing Autonomous Vehicle Road Testing Management Implementation Rules (Trial).  The optimization contents include the following:  optimizing the license renewal process and increasing the number of renewals to three times; allowing companies with a test mileage of more than 10,000 kilometers to apply for more than five test vehicle licenses at one time; enriching the test content and increasing the load, formation, driving test; allowing enterprises to use real car test, or a combination of real car and simulation.

Regarding to standard improvement, the report stated that a total of eight group standards have been issued and one item established for release since the creation of the Zhongguancun Zhitong Intelligent Transportation Industry Alliance.   Beijing identified three of the eight as autonomous driving-related evaluation standards.  The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology selected one as one of the 100 group standards while three were identified as “Zhogguancun Standards”.   The standards are related to the contents and methods of road test capability assessment, definition of simulation test scene sets, and specifications for road car market safety management.

Test environment As of the end of last year, Beijing has built three closed test sites in Haidian, Yizhuang, and Shunyi.   The Yizhuang Base was identified by the National Intelligent Vehicle and Intelligent Transportation as the first closed test site of T1-T5 level, the highest and suitable for higher-level testing requirements.  

The city has opened at total of 151 test roads by year-end 2019 totaling 503.68 kilometers.   The first 40 sq m test area in China was opened by the Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone, also in Yizhuang, a suitable testing environment for business models like autonomous taxis, time-shared leasing, and formation driving. Test area supporting V2X test roads jumped from 12 kilometers and 7 intersections to 40 kilometers and 36 intersections from 2017 to 2019. 

Issuance and testing of test licenses   A total of 13 companies have obtained Beijing’s autonomous driving test license as of the end of last year.  77 test vehicles from six Internet companies, six OEMs and one mapmaker completed over 1 million kilometers of testing from 2018 to 2019.  Baidu Apollo had 52 test vehicles, completing 839,900 kilometers of road tests. Among the OEMs, Toyota had four, the largest in total, tallying 11,100 kms in test mileage.

Autonomous driving demonstrations :   The report also mentioned that Beijing planned autonomous driving and connected vehicle application demonstrations in multi-regional conditional parks or autonomous driving open test areas.  These are mainly in Yizhuang, Haidian Shunyi, Fangshan and other places.   The Shougang Winter Olympics Demonstration Zone and Zhongguancun Automated Driving Innovation Demonstration Zone Environmental Park built 5G networks and connected cars, as well as unmanned areas of operations including connection, logistics, cleaning, distribution and other commercial scenarios.

Multi-scenario demonstration operation of autonomous vehicles:  At present, the only open test area for autonomous driving, the Intelligent Connected Car Industry Innovation Demonstration Zone of the Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone will focus on open roads of connected cars and autonomous driving map application pilots this 2020.

Domestic models are increasingly employed:   The report noted the growing trend of autonomous driving tests using domestic models with most based on existing production cars.   With the addition of Hongqi, Dongfeng, WEY and BYD last year, the use of Chinese models for testing grew by 133%.