On May 29, didi chuxing announced that its autonomous driving company had completed its first round of financing of more than $500 million, led by softbank vision fund phase 2.This is the first external financing of didi autonomous driving company after its establishment, and it is also the largest single financing among domestic autonomous driving companies.

    After obtaining financial support, didi will increase investment in r&d and testing, as well as in autonomous driving, vehicle-road coordination, and related AI technologies, so as to deepen industrial cooperation, promote the application of autonomous driving in certain regions at home and abroad, and further improve the safety and efficiency of travel.

    Didi has been working on autonomous driving since 2016.Last August, didi upgraded its autonomous driving division to a company.Currently, didi autonomous driving team has more than 200 people, focusing on the research and development of L4 level autonomous driving technology.

    In terms of business model, didi wants to do Robotaxi. Zhang bo, the CTO of didi, said in an interview before that didi will not build its own cars, but want to do the software part of driving technology.In the future, it is likely that the car factory will build the car, and then the car will be able to enter didi's platform with one click, receive the demand, and didi will be able to distribute the profit to the car yard according to each order.

    According to the report, so far, didi has been in Beijing, Shanghai, suzhou, California, the United States to obtain the road side qualification, and in Shanghai obtained the first "intelligent network vehicle demonstration application" license, can carry out manned testing.

    Relatively speaking, drops in automated driving on the road to a late start, which makes its technology is relatively backward, and according to the California vehicle administration issued the automated driving over 2019 report shows that drops between every two human intervention in draw range of 1534 miles, ranked eighth, not only behind baidu, also far behind the enterprises ma chi heng, AutoX.

    However, compared with other self-driving companies, didi has a natural advantage in autonomous driving research and development.On the one hand, the development of autonomous driving technology requires a lot of road testing and traffic data, and the daily data generated by the millions of ride-hailing vehicles on didi's platform can serve as its data source.

Didi CTO zhang bo

    Zhang previously said that Robotaxi will continue to be a ride-hailing service for a long time to come.Currently, didi has a fleet of 40 autonomous vehicles, including 10 in California and 30 in China, with a global road mileage of 300,000 kilometers, it said, adding that didi will soon deploy an additional 30 vehicles in Shanghai.

    It is reported that didi will push forward the manned test of autonomous driving business in jiading, Shanghai as soon as possible, and plan to let ordinary users try to order Robotaxi service on didi chuxing App.

    Of course, in addition to the self-built test fleet, the massive real data accumulated by didi platform is also applied in simulation test, thus breaking through the bottleneck of field test data, improving the research and development efficiency and accelerating algorithm iteration.

    At the same time, the company is also exploring the application of didi's experience in the safe use of online ride-hailing services, as well as its offline management capabilities, into future autonomous driving test operations.