Baidu, Hongqi team up on autonomous cars

Internet giant Baidu Inc on Thursday announced it will launch autonomous cars with Level 4 capabilities next year in a partnership with Hongqi, a homegrown brand under automaker FAW Group.

Powered by Baidu's Apollo autonomous driving platform, a limited number of Hongqi L4 autonomous passenger cars will be produced in 2019 for testing and pilot operations in cities including Beijing and Changchun in Jilin province. Mass production of the cars will begin by 2020.

On the five-step scale of autonomous driving, level 4 is when a car is capable of completing an entire journey without driver intervention. But the vehicle does have some constraints, such as being confined to a certain geographical area.