Auto-First | Liu Tianming
More than a year after its establishment, Geely and Baidu jointly established a smart electric vehicle company Jidu Automobile has a new trend.
On January 26, Jidu Automobile announced the completion of nearly $400 million in Series A financing, which was jointly increased by Baidu and strategic partner Geely. After the financing is completed, Jidu will continue to accelerate the process of research and development and mass production, the first automotive robot concept car will be released at the Beijing Auto Show in April this year, and the mass production model will be launched in 2023.
Xia Yiping, CEO of Jidu, said that just 10 months after the start of Jidu, under the blessing of cutting-edge AI technology and high-quality vehicle platform and manufacturing process, Jidu's efficient automotive robot development process has been successfully verified. The brain, nerves and trunk of the automotive robot developed by Jidu are developing efficiently, and when the product is delivered, it will definitely be a benchmark mass production product. Next, Jidu will continue to focus on product polishing and development, and bring together more entrepreneurial partners to move forward in the era of smart cars to provide users with more revolutionary products that exceed expectations.
It is understood that Jidu adopts the industry's first software integration simulation prototype SIMUCar (Software Integration Mule Car) research and development model to achieve multi-threaded and efficient development of software and hardware parallels. In just 9 months, Jidu has successfully integrated the automatic driving functions of the urban domain and the high-speed domain, and verified its safe and reliable mass production L4 level automatic driving capability in advance. At present, jidu's self-developed electronic and electrical architecture JET1.0, as well as SOA, automatic driving system, core computing power platform, and related sensors are further iterating towards the mass production state. In addition, the interior and exterior trim of Jidu's first automotive robot mass production vehicle, as well as the design of all parts, have gradually entered the stage of mass production mold development.
Thanks to the success of the new round of financing, Jidu will press the accelerator button in the process of automotive robot research and development and mass production. In the future, Jidu will increase the introduction and training of cutting-edge talents in high-level autonomous driving, smart cockpit, intelligent manufacturing and other related fields; accelerate the construction of the system for the development and operation of users in the intelligent car market, and ensure that in 2023, The first automotive robot product of Jidu with excellent user experience, quality and cost advantages, and definition of intelligent car benchmarks will be presented to the market and consumers.