China's intelligent connected vehicle industry, which strives to integrate vehicles with road and cloud computing, has moved to a new stage featuring rapid technological and ecological development, instead of a small-scale testing stage, according to white paper released by the National Innovation Center of Intelligent and Connected Vehicles (CICV).

It added that a technology roadmap for top-level design is needed at the seventh World Intelligence Congress (WIC) held in north China's Tianjin Municipality from Thursday to Saturday.

China is promoting the commercial application of its intelligent connected vehicles. Till now, the country has built seven pilot zones of the Internet of vehicles, 16 pilot cities for coordinated development of smart city infrastructure and smart connected vehicles, and 17 national-level demonstration base to test intelligent connected cars.

Miao Changxing, an official from the Ministry of Industry and Information, said on Tuesday in Beijing that over 2,000 road test and demonstration application licenses have been issued and 10,000 kilometers road opened to test driverless vehicles.

New output value of the intelligent connected vehicle industry will reach 1.06 trillion yuan (about $151 billion) by 2025, and 2.8 trillion yuan (about $398.5 billion) by 2030, said Zheng Jihu, director of the CICV.

Zheng added that developing the industry takes a very complicated process, which requires the integrated and coordinated advance of vehicles, roadside infrastructure, cloud control platforms, telecommunication networks, maps for high-precision positioning and security protection systems.

China is leading the world in telecommunications and new energy vehicles, and the application in the intelligent connected vehicle industry will boost the development of vehicle, transport, communication and cloud computing, said Zheng.

Autonomous driving in China

Bloomberg anticipated in April that Elon Musk wants to test its full self-driving technology in China, as the country's artificial intelligence-powered autonomous-vehicle market is "showing serious promise."

Accelerating the large-scale application of Level 4 autonomous driving – with Level 6 the highest – will be important in leading the development of the automobile industry and build a new competitive advantage of the country, according to a report issued by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology during the WIC.

However, there are still many challenges autonomous driving have to overcome. The report urged to provide safety guarantees for automatic driving and integrate it into transportation system;

It added that the use of unmanned driving should be expanded, and a commercial closed loop of research and development, testing and operation created, it said.

In addition, it advocated that policies and regulations be iterated and innovated to get autonomous driving protected by the law, and a positive and inclusive social environment built to accelerate commercial operation of autonomous driving service.

(Cover via CFP)