Baidu CEO

BEIJING, July 21 (TMTPost) – Chinese search engine provider and Internet giant Baidu released its sixth generation mass-produced autonomous car Apollo RT6 on Thursday at the Baidu World Conference 2022.

Apollo RT6 is equipped with unmanned autonomous driving capabilities that allow it to operate in complex street networks in cities. The cost for producing one Apollo RT6 is only around 250,000 yuan. The car model will enter into operation in 2023 on Baidu’s autonomous mobility service platform Luobo Kuaipao.

The newly released model was developed on Baidu’s own architecture platform Apollo Galaxy. It is the first car model from Apollo Galaxy, according to Baidu. Apollo RT6 is said to be equipped with a whole car plus autonomous driving system that provides error diagnosis and risk reduction features.

Baidu’s Vice President and Smart Driving Business Unit’s manager Li Zhenyu said that Apollo RT6 runs on Baidu’s new-generation autonomous driving system that allows it to handle complex streets and scenarios in cities. The car model has high-computing power units that can provide computing power up to 1,200 Tops. Apollo RT6 has 38 sensors in total.

Li stressed that Apollo RT6’s autonomous driving capacity is similar to a human driver with 20 years of driving experience.

In addition, Apollo RT6 has two modes that support the use of the steering wheel and without the use of steering wheel. The front seats of the car can be adjusted in accordance with the use scenes, such as passenger seats, vending machines, office desk and even game consoles.

The drastic reduction of car-manufacturing cost is one of the selling features of Apollo RT6. In June 2021, Baidu rolled out its fifth-generation autonomous car Apollo Moon in partnership with ARCFOX. The car model is equipped with a number of sensors, including 13 cameras, 5 millimeter wave radars and two lidars. The car unit is also powered by computing power of 800 Tops. At that time, the cost of a Apollo Moon was 480,000 yuan.