Microsoft, Baidu and Self-Driving Cars: Can They Challenge Google and Tesla?

Recently, traditional automakers have been partnering with tech-giants on autonomous driving projects, with Google, Microsoft and Tesla leading the way in this still nascent automotive subindustry. Now, Microsoft has teamed up with Chinese web goliath Baidu to help develop the Apollo self-driving platform, which is named after the space program to reflect the size and complexity of the project.
Apollo was officially launched in April this year, although Baidu performed its first successful test runs of the car at the 3rd World Internet Conference last year in Jiaxing, China. The project has already made a lot of progress, having produced its own software, hardware and vehicle platforms for reference. According to the company, its autonomous driving platform has been built using “tremendous” amounts of actual autonomous driving data, but it now needs a respectable partner to expand outside of China. That’s where Microsoft’s innovative and reliable cloud services are expected to play a major role.
Microsoft is now one of a dozen partners to participate in the development of the Apollo open-source autonomous driving platform by providing cloud services for customers outside of China. For Microsoft, this is an obvious move, as the Redmond-based company has already partnered with several automakers like Ford, BMW, Volvo and Toyota on self-driving projects. "We won't be building our own autonomous vehicle but we would like to enable autonomous vehicles and assisted driving as well," said Microsoft’s Peggy Johnson at a tech conference last year.
The coupling of Microsoft’s cloud architecture with Baidu’s AI expertise is seen as a key development which should have a synergetic effect on Apollo’s success. Baidu expects that Apollo will be fully operational by the end of 2020, which is a bold statement according to experts in the field.
But Microsoft still has to face strong competition from other prominent tech giants such as Google, which is considered a leading player in the self-driving arena thanks to its autonomous driving platform known as Waymo. Google has partnered with ride-hailing company Lyft in order to test Waymo on far more road miles than any other platform, and to collect enormous amounts of data from the 300 US cities in which the Uber rival operates. According to Morgan Stanley, Waymo has the potential to add 12% to the current value of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
Tesla, another major player in the self-driving battle, is also working towards delivering its first completely driverless car. According to Tech Republic, the company wants to test drive a fully-autonomous vehicle from Los Angeles to New York by the end of this year. Tesla’s market valuation surpassed Ford’s in April, despite the fact that Tesla only sold around 75,000 cars, compared with Ford’s 6.6 million. This shows that the industry is facing big changes and that newcomers can overtake established players in short period of time.
It’s still too early to say which tech company will be the first to make a mass market breakthrough, although it seems that Google’s Waymo is miles ahead of its competitors when it comes to real-world testing. One thing is for sure, though: traditional automakers have to acquire new technologies at lightning speed to keep up with the revolution of electric cars and autonomous driving platforms.

24option Review