Recently, Baidu Apollo held Apollo Day 2024 at the Baidu Carrot Run Automotive Robot Intelligent Xinggu in Wuhan, showcasing the significant progress of Baidu's decade of deep cultivation in autonomous driving. At the event, Baidu Apollo launched the world's first large-scale model, Apollo ADFM (Autonomous Driving Foundation Model), which supports L4 level autonomous driving. According to Baidu Apollo, ADFM is a new type of auto drive system based on large model technology. The safety performance of this model exceeds that of human drivers by more than 10 times, and it can achieve effective coverage in complex scenes across the city.
It is understood that Baidu is currently accelerating the expansion of its service scope and systematically increasing the number of sites. As a result, it has also brought about a cost reduction and efficiency increase effect to the commercialization of Baidu's autonomous driving. Firstly, in terms of overall vehicle cost, Baidu's sixth generation unmanned vehicles have a 60% reduction in overall vehicle cost compared to the fifth generation, with a price of only 200000 yuan, greatly improving market promotion efficiency and bringing green and beautiful travel to more users.
Secondly, in terms of operating costs, with the completion of the construction of the fully automatic unmanned vehicle operation network for the Carrot Run, its operating costs have been significantly reduced by 30%. Moreover, the world's largest autonomous driving operation network ultimately achieves almost 100% automated operation. According to the commercial progress of autonomous driving released by Baidu on this public day, by the end of 2024, Carrot Run will achieve a balance of income and expenditure in Wuhan, and enter a profitable period in 2025. And Carrot Run will become the world's first platform to achieve commercial profitability in autonomous driving.
In response, Wang Yunpeng, Vice President of Baidu Group and President of the Intelligent Driving Business Group, said, "Our original intention in making autonomous vehicles is to meet the growing desire of the people for better travel. The satisfaction of the people is the driving force for us to move forward. Because of safety, it is beautiful. We are pleased to see that our original intention in investing in autonomous driving - to make cars smarter and travel simpler - is becoming a reality."