Chinese web giant Baidu unveils Level 4 robo-taxi that costs $75k to make

Chinese tech giant Baidu and state-owned BAIC Group's ARCFOX Brand have teamed to build 1000 autonomous electric vehicles (EVs) for use as taxis over the next three years — and claim they’ve cut manufacturing costs to just $75,000 apiece. The announcement claims the reasonable price is due to maturation in technology and mass …

[Pascal Monett]

"the vehicle can communicate with all manner of electronic devices"

And that will absolutely not be a problem in any way whatsoever.

I note that, of all the tech they added to the car, the word "security" is not mentioned once.

What could possibly go wrong ?

[wolfetone]

Re: "the vehicle can communicate with all manner of electronic devices"

Anyone seen John Connor?

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: "the vehicle can communicate with all manner of electronic devices"

Even one of these...?

https://www.theregister.com/2018/02/02/adult_fun_toy_security_fail/

Autonomous Vehicle + Vibratissimo Panty Buster. It won't end well.

[TVC]

Jump in and if it doesn't like your face it locks the doors and takes you to a Uyghur concentration camp.

[PM from Hell]

Jonny Cab

Unless there is a yellow plastic driver programmed to have small talk with me I wont be interested.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Jonny Cab

I had one of them Google Pixels in my cab yesterday, not saying I've got anything against Android phones but the government should send them all back, bloody Samsung coming here taking our bandwidth etc etc

[J27]

If you drive for a living, start looking for another opportunity now.

[That Badger]

I've seen enough videos from China of people getting run over, that they probably didn't bother doing anything about pedestrian avoidance with this thing...

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Apollo Moon

A small dig at Uncle Sam?

One small autonomous taxi ride for man...

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Taxi!

Quick, follow that car!

Have they addressed that use case? Or is it a "nice to have"

[Securitymoose]

And see this other article - poltergeist attacks self-driving cars

https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/18/poltergeist_autonomous_vehicles/

Yet another cunning plan to reduce the world population?

[RLWatkins]

I'll believe this when I see it actually happen.

Yet another press release from a group of people famous for disseminating rainbow-and-unicorn colored vapor whenever they need to deflect attention from something else... and five years later when you ask them, "Well where is {whatever}?" they reply, "Oh, we didn't do that after all."

Seriously, hadn't they already done this, between mastering genetic engineering and creating the first fully successful magnetically contained fusion reactor?