Alibaba is the latest company to test self-driving cars in China. The Chinese tech giant has been conducting regular road tests and is looking to hire 50 people for its autonomous-car development program.
According to the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba,the company is looking to develop Level 4 autonomous technology, meaning that under certain conditions, the car can operate on its own without human involvement.
Alibaba also has some catching up to do. Fellow Chinese tech firm Baidu recently received permission to test self-driving cars on the streets of Beijing, and Tencent reportedly began conducting tests in the city earlier this month.
China has set an aggressive goal for developing “intelligent vehicles,” which it defines as cars that can fully or partially driving themselves—in January it said it wants those cars to make up half of new vehicles on the roads by 2020.
“Our vision is to build an intelligently connected world through transformative [internet of things] technologies,” Simon Hu Xiaoming, the president of Alibaba Cloud, said on the sidelines of a cloud computing conference last month, adding that the plan was to build a network of 10 billion connected devices within the next five years.
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