Baidu in the soup for live testing on Beijing roads

BEIJIN G: Baidu Inc, China’s biggest search engine provider, is under investigation to determine whether it had broken any laws after its chief executive officer (CEO) tested a driverless car on public roads, here, said traffic police yesterday.

The firm, China’s answer to Alphabet Inc’s Google, is taking a leading role in the development of self-driving cars in China and beyond. It unveiled an alliance for self-driving cars on Wednesday as it aims to get such vehicles on the road in China by 2019.

The alliance includes partnerships with carmakers, suppliers, startups, universities and local governments and was built around Baidu’s Apollo self-driving platform, which was developed at its tech centre in California’s Silicon Valley. Apollo is aimed at Alphabet’s Waymo selfdriving package.

But Baidu may now face sanctions from local authorities after police said in a post on its official microblog it was investigating whether there was any irregularity in using a driverless car on public roads.

Baidu chief executive officer Robin Li conducted a live video chat with participants of the firm’s artificial intelligence conference on Wednesday, projecting him on a huge screen sitting in the passenger seat of a selfdriving car while on the roads, here. Reuters