However, government forces play an irreplaceable role in the perfection of self-driving facilities in the era of self-driving cars. On July 5th, Baidu has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Baoding city government, agreeing to jointly build an intelligent transportation city. Besides Baoding, five other regional government, including Wuhu, Baoding, Beijing Yizhuang District, Chongqing Liangjiang New District, Shanghai Automotive City, are also included in the first batch of Apollo ecosystem’s alliance.

The only open technology platform till now

Currently, the self-driving industry is facing various problems, including industrial structure change, technology itself and supporting laws and regulations, etc. As an open technology platform, Apollo is a starting point of prosperity built together by developers and partners. The ultimate goal is to promote the development of intelligent driving, and provide high-efficiency, secure solutions for each partner.

According to Baidu, Baidu will also promote the industry-chain development of Apollo ecosystem’s partners in the future, gather relevant players in every phase, open up the entire industry chain and explore updated cooperation mode.

While the automobile industry chain itself is very complex, related technologies and phases to achieve automatic driving are also very complex. At present, many alliances have already been established among R&D parties, suppliers and tech companies, such as the alliance built by Intel, mobileye , BMW and Delphi. However, all relevant players are basically still buried in themselves, and there is still no real open technology platform before Apollo project.

From this aspect, the emergence of the Baidu Apollo project to breaks the deadlock. Perhaps, this project is still insufficient in the early stage. However, it already attracted a fair number of partners to make it happen. In fact, such cooperation could grow into a vital way to accelerate the popularization and commercialization of self-driving technology.

However, it is worth noting that among the 50 partners of Apollo 1.0, many of them are actually competitors. Perhaps, whether Baidu can coordinate their interests, allow car makers, suppliers and tech companies to work together and achieve prosperity within the framework of the Apollo project, will determine whether it could grow into a preferred tech platform in the driverless technology sector.

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[The article is published and edited with authorization from the author @Ti Geekplease note source and hyperlink when reproduce.]

Translated by Levin Feng (Senior Translator at PAGE TO PAGE), working for TMTpost.