Chinese authorities have decided to spend billions of dollars on a network of smart roads

Chinese authorities have decided to develop a plan for the future development of the automobile industry. Industry insiders reported this to Yicai on August 13.

As part of the project, pilot cities will upload data from car and road sensors to the cloud for analysis. It will boost adoption of smart driving but will likely cost around 2.7 trillion yuan ($376 billion), industry experts say.

In January, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced a cloud vehicle integration plan and early last month named 20 cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, as the first pilot cities, signaling the country’s determination to boost the development of intelligent connected vehicles (ICV).

“The country will first have 20 pilot cities to integrate ICV with the traffic cloud, and then these key cities will be connected by 30 smart highways,” Liu Bing, vice president of autonomous driving services company Mogo.ai, said in an interview.

“In the longer term, China aims to equip more than 5.4 million kilometers of roads with smart devices that will coordinate with cloud-based management platforms and communication systems. Installing the necessary smart equipment on roads will cost 1 million to 2 million yuan ($139,000 to $279,000) per kilometer, the analyst said.

Even if this price drops to 500,000 yuan ($69,600) per kilometer in the future, equipping all roads with smart devices will cost 2.7 trillion yuan, which is similar to the investment in a high-speed rail network, the source said.

One of the key issues that needs to be addressed is that the industry has so far focused on the intelligence of individual cars. But as the number of autonomous cars grows, different systems from different brands will need to be integrated, and they will need to be able to perform on par with non-autonomous cars, Liu said.

The United States previously had similar plans, but they were shelved, partly because it does not have mature technology in this area and building the necessary infrastructure has proven to be a challenge in Western countries, Liu noted, adding that China has certain advantages in this regard.

Source: Rossa Primavera