China wants to integrate four areas for stronger AI. China will use abundant data, hungry entrepreneurs, many AI scientists, and AI-friendly policy. 29 U.S. states have enacted their own laws regulating autonomous vehicles. And governors in 10 states have issued executive orders curbing testing and use.
In 2018, China adopted national self-driving car guidelines that allow any city to perform tests on self-driving cars. China has started engineering multi-tiered roads and entire cities tailored to incorporate driverless vehicles.
Northern Shanghai’s Jiading district has been set up for self-driving car testing. Companies (only domestic companies) allowed to test in Jiading are required to establish a remote monitoring data platform, so their vehicles’ every move is recorded, and to purchase accident insurance of at least 5 million yuan (HK$6.3 million) per car. Test drivers must always be at the wheel and each should have more than 50 hours of experience of automated driving systems.
The test zone was built with an initial budget of 500 million yuan in 2016, in cooperation with numerous companies. Huawei provides communications infrastructure, Beidou – the Chinese GPS – is in charge of navigation systems, and test elements developed by local universities such as Tongji. At the end of 2017, 40,000 tests with 30 companies were performed.
They are hoping to open 100km of roads for this kind of vehicle by 2019 and extend the project to the Hongqiao Transport Hub in 2020. They expect to have 10,000 autonomous vehicles in operation and ninety percent of those will be used for public transport.
In areas where Data is more important than algorithms then China can win. Its internet population surpassed 800 million users this year compared to roughly 290 million internet users in the U.S.
China will also not be pausing the rush to self-driving cars over some initial fatal accidents.
China had about 260,000 car fatalities in 2017. The USA had 35600.
China had 104 fatalities per 100,000 vehicles.
The USA had 12.9 fatalities per 100,000 vehicles.
Human drivers in China are far worse than the human drivers in the USA.