BEIJING, June 1 (Xinhua) -- Autonomous driving has become a hot industry for investment in China with fund raising up to tens of billions of yuan so far this year, reported Securities Daily Sunday quoting data from Tianyancha, a Chinese corporate data provider.
Tianyancha data show that currently there are hundreds of companies in China engaging in business related to autonomous driving, and 62.6 percent of them are based in Beijing, Guangdong and Shanghai.
Meanwhile, the innovation capabilities of these enterprises are also improving.
According to incomplete statistics, there are more than 12,000 patents related to autonomous driving or unmanned driving in China, and 3,000-odd of them were filed in 2019, Tianyancha data show.
Driven by the new infrastructure construction wave, some companies are seeking to combine autonomous driving technology with 5G concept.
For instance, Sany Automobile Manufacturing Co., Ltd., a company headquartered in Changsha, capital city of Hunan Province in central China, has invented the obstacle avoidance method and system for unmanned road rollers based on 5G network communication which is under censorship now.
China's ride-hailing giant DiDi Chuxing announced last Friday that its autonomous driving company had completed the first round of financing exceeding 500 million U.S. dollars. The raised fund would be invested in autonomous driving, vehicle-road coordination and related artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, supporting the development of new infrastructure.
It's learned that China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) had rolled out the country's own standards on autonomous driving grading on March 9 this year, and they are scheduled to be effective on January 1, 2021.
New grading standards will be conducive to the development of the autonomous driving industry.
The global market for driverless cars is expected to hit 7.03 billion U.S. dollars by 2021, and up to 21 million driverless cars are likely to be sold worldwide by 2035, said a report by Qianzhan Industry Research Institute, a renowned subdivision industry research institution in China. (Edited by Gu Shanshan with Xinhua Silk Road, gushanshan.1987@163.com)
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